Agenda

Science and Politics on the Management of Polluting Water Resources

11 March 2025, 4PM CET
Sala Mazzariol (DFBC) and Online 

Abstract:
Planting a Bulrush to Save the Planet. Käthe Seidel and the Emergence of Constructed Wetlands:
Dr. Käthe Seidel is considered the mother of plant-based sewage treatment plants, also known as constructed wetlands. In the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when sewage engineers were primarily focusing on technical solutions, Käthe Seidel recognized the purifying abilities of certain aquatic plants. She discovered that rushes not only thrive in polluted waters, but can also detoxify phenols and cyanides, remove over-fertilization from the water, store heavy metals, kill pathogens through root excretions, bring oxygen to the bottom of the water or turn sludge into soil. To this end, Seidel pursued the vision of using her rushes to create affordable water treatment plants for the whole world and linked her rushes to development aid. Instead of a pangea for a clean-water planet, however, Seidel's constructed wetlands remained a niche-technology. This presentation extrapolates both Seidel's vision and the emergence of constructed wetlands as clean-water technologies and the challenges this vision received.
Prof. Simone M. Müller (Augsburg University)

Contested and chemicalized waterscapes: Gold miners, white farmers and water pollution in Colonial Zimbabwe:
In 1895, the company administration of the colony of Southern Rhodesia enacted the mines and minerals ordinance, a statute that granted gold miners carte blanche rights to prospect and mine within the gold belt. Under the ordinance, miners were granted preferential access to peg claims on agricultural lands and acquired unfettered rights to exploit the colony’s water resources for mining operations. Subsequently, complaints and conflicts often arose between white settler farmers and white miners over the allocation of water and the disposal of toxic tailings and chemicals such as cyanide and arsenic in rivers and streams. Using archival sources, I examine the embedded dynamics in the politics of water resources’ management in the colonial context where white settler interests were divergent and discuss how the colonial state mediated these contestations to navigate between the Scylla of water conservation and preventing water pollution, and on the other hand the Charybdis of declining revenue from the colony’s main export. I unpack the paradoxical and ambivalent trappings of colonial legislation on water and mining and how it evolved to resolve these inherent contestations and water pollution within gold mining landscapes. I also briefly discuss the coloniality of postcolonial mining policy and contemporary waterscapes in gold mining areas to show the legacies of the 1895 ordinance.
Elijah Doro (Humboldt Fellow-Rachel Carson Centre, Munich/Leiden University)

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