Event Details

Speaker: Dr Austin Read, University of Oxford Title: Legacy Phosphates: An Anticolonial Genealogy of British River Pollution

Bio: Austin Read is a Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the University of Oxford, where has been based since 2024. His main research interest is in the relationship between colonial histories of the British Empire and contemporary environmental geographies of conservation, pollution, and extraction in the UK.

Summary: Since 2015, the River Wye has experienced extreme nutrient pollution caused by intensifications in British poultry farming. This pollution is normally framed as an unprecedented crisis, but in this paper, I want to think about the longer histories underpinning it. To do so, I perform an ‘anticolonial genealogy’ of nutrient pollution. I focus on phosphate, unravelling connections between the Wye and Pacific Islands that the British mined for phosphorus throughout the 20^th century. I speculate on how these looted minerals endure in the Wye as legacy phosphates, using this as grounds to call for more ethical responses to river pollution.