Käthe Seidel was a pioneer in ecological engineering, using plants like reeds and rushes to clean waste water. This is standard now, but mocked when she started doing it in the 1950s.
Here is part of her tale, told by Elisabet Sahtouris in the 1990s - before Käthe Seidel's work caught on:
"Scientists from NASA, from Japan, from many institutes worldwide who have discovered her work have visited her to learn more, yet there is relatively little followup given its scope and importance except for the remarkable installations for which she has been more or less directly responsible.
"Why?" I asked her, as we sat in the huge old mansion that served as headquarters for the Limnology Group, in the midst of a nature preserve near Krefeld in Germany, where she now lives alone until her immanent eviction, due to sale of the property by the Max Planck Institute.
Her answer was telling. "Men always reach for technology, for development. They insist it will bring us to higher levels of progress. They haven't the patience to work with slow-growing plants, nor do they understand natural cycles as women do. They see my work as farming, not engineering, so they go away and return to their machinery."
"Wait till we run out of water," I countered. "They'll all come running to you then."
"It will be too late then," she said matter-of-factly in her rich, low register voice. "Neither these cabinets, nor the research reports in them, nor I, will be around."
[Sadly, yet perhaps predictably, Dr. Seidel passed away a few months after her eviction.]"
Wikipedia article on Käthe Seidel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4the_Seidel
The rest of Sahtouris' story: https://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/rushes.html
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