Simone M. Müller

In 1979, Austrian publisher, diplomat, and politician Alois G. Engl?nder called together 150 high-profile scientists, among them twelve Noble Laureates, to the first World Congress of Alternatives and Environment taking place at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. As long-standing anti-nuclear activist and avid environmentalist, Engl?nder’s vision for the Congress was to create both a platform of exchange for high-impact scientists working on urgent environmental problems and a highly visible international event that put alternative ways of living, working, and consuming into the focus. Chairman of the Congress was Noble Laureat and Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz, its auspice the Austrian Federal President.

One of the 150 scientists at this World Congress for Alternatives and Environment of 1979 was K?the Seidel (1907-1990). She was a German botanist who for almost forty years worked on the bulrush and wetlands, much of it under the umbrella of the Max-Planck Society of Germany. In the 1920s, Seidel commenced her career as a horticulturalist and landscape gardener. After the war as a displaced person in Preetz, Schleswig Holstein, she founded her own business of ‘weaving sweetgrass’. Soon Seidel’s interest in the bulrush expanded from weaving baskets to understanding the wetland plant scientifically. As she wrote her dissertation, Seidel started working at the nearby hydrological research station of the Max-Planck Institute at Pl?n. There she set up plant gardens to study the bullrush throughout its life cycle. Seidel’s obsession with the bulrush should last a lifetime, withstanding both an involuntary move from the Max Planck Institute at Pl?n to 500 hundred kilometers distant city of Krefeld and continuing as private practitioner after her retirement.
When Seidel commenced working on wetlands and the bulrush, in the mid-twentieth century, there was little western scientific knowledge on a plant that for centuries, if not millennia had been central to many an indigenous culture of living-with the land. Seidel investigated the plant's adaptation to its living environment and observed, among other things, something very peculiar. The bulrush not only thrived even in acidic waters. They had a positive effect on their location. Following this more closely, Seidel soon detected that these wetland plants could detoxify substances, such as phenols and cyanides, remove over-fertilization from water, store heavy metals, kill pathogens through root excretions, promote important bacteria, bring oxygen to the bottom of the water, or turn sludge into soil. By the mid-1950s, K?the Seidel put forward the theory that would be at the center of constructed wetlands worldwide: plants could be put to work to clean-up contaminated water. At the time, this was a revolutionary claim, as scientists still assumed that plants of higher order could only survive in unpolluted waters. In the end, K?the Seidel knew better.
In 1957, Seidel put her first constructed wetland to work building an artificial bulrush marsh near Krefeld to test her hypothesis. She pumped heavily polluted water from the Rhine River into the test marsh and measured the effluent that emerged. After a week or two in the marsh, the water that emerged was substantially lower in phosphorus and nitrogen content and showed increases in oxygen. Refined as the Krefeld System, Seidel developed the first human-constructed wetland where wastewater is led through different basins in which rushes, reeds and water irises absorb the pollutants one after the other. Soon the system was adopted across the world, from the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland to Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela and from Israel, Japan, and Norway to Sudan, South Africa, and the United States. With her work, K?the Seidel was also paving the way for the emergence of wetland science as a growing subfield in hydrology. Some even call her the “mother of constructed wetlands” (Eke 2008, 23).
Yet, despite these research breakthroughs, today’s world is not plastered with constructed wetlands. K?the Seidel was a controversial character facing both the ominous glass ceiling all too familiar to female scientists and, at least in her eyes, the fate of a prophet with no honor in her own country. She received little institutional backing from the Max-Planck-Society and often banged heads with its director of limnology who considered her not a scientist but merely a gardener. Eventually, he had her moved from Pl?n to Krefeld. Seidel’s embrace of learning through close observation from the natural world might have given her the air of alternative science; another point of tension certainly was the missionary character that she bestowed upon her research. When in 1977, Seidel received the medal of honor (the Bundesverdienstkreuz) from Germany, she offered in her acceptance speech her interpretation of a researcher’s obligation. “I believe,” she said, “that passing on research results to people who may need them and that are vital to their survival is not just a ‘duty to deliver,’ but that passing them on, including manual help on the spot, is an ethical obligation” (Seidel 1982, Max-Planck-Society Archives). Artist and activist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who was for decades a close collaborator and friend of Seidel for their joint interest in constructed wetlands, equaled Seidel with a prophet “holding the key to the gate of survival for humankind […] illuminating the right path to a peace pact with nature” (Friedensreich Hundertwasser 1981, Max-Planck Society Archives).
As of now, K?the Seidel holds more questions than answers and begs further research. A prophet for living otherwise on and with the planet for some contemporaries, an epitome of alternative, non-valid science for others. In any case, she is a key figure in restituting wetlands from wasteland to key ecosystems in the age of the Anthropocene who firmly believed that planting a wetland would do nothing short of saving the planet.

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Selected Bibliography
Archives of the Max-Planck Society, K?the Seidel.
Alois G. Engl?nder (ed.), Worldcongress of Alternatives and Environment, Vienna 1979.
Paul E. Eke, Hydrocarbon removal with constructed wetlands. Edinburgh, Scotland: 伟德国际_伟德国际1946$娱乐app游戏 of Edinburgh, 2008.
Helga Happel, Gutes Wasser Lebensquell. Die Natur ist Spender und Retter. R.G. Fischer Verlag, 2001.
Hundertwasser Archive, Vienna.

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