A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Johannesburg, December 2012 / The study explores the thesis that discursive power played a major role in the pollution and subsequent destruction of Steel Valley to explain why, despite strenuous efforts by local citizens, the right to live in a healthy environment, guaranteed in the new South African constitution, was not upheld. It analyses the struggle in Steel Valley around the definition of pollution, and decision making about its consequences, in terms of discursive resources and their deployment in discursive arenas, focusing on discursive strategies of the polluted, the polluter and the regulator. This exploration is set within the politics of hegemony in a new South Africa after 1994, as well as the 120 year old Minerals Energy Complex at the centre of the South African political economy. It explains the legitimation of pollution in Steel Valley within the global discourses of environmental management, ecological modernisation and sustainable development prominent since the 1990s. Discursive power played a major role in the Steel Valley case. Discursive power led to the material outcomes in Steel Valley: the removal of the community, the physical destruction of their buildings and the transformation of the area into a “conservation” buffer zone, along with decisions not to pay residents compensation and not to establish a medical trust. Discursive power was used by the polluter to escape liability, by maintaining scientific and legal uncertainty about the nature, extent and consequences of the pollution. Discursive power enabled the polluter to frame the problem as one of ecological modernisation from which social justice concerns, like compensation, could be excluded. ISCOR’s discursive power also overwhelmed the regulator, as the regulator remained too cautious to use to the full the instruments available to it in law, and allowed numerous exemptions. The state and the polluter both pushed issues of Environmental Justice – compensation and rehabilitation – outside the dominant frame of decision making. The study shows how a superiority of discursive resources on the side of the polluter, derived from a financial and political superiority, translated into decisive defeats for the 4 Steel Valley community. This superiority derived from a constellation of discursive conditions in scientific, legal and administrative arenas. To describe these conditions, the study constructs a description of a pollution dispositive at work in Steel Valley, which legitimises past and future pollution. It explains the choices of the new government as pollution regulator, by understanding the tax-dependent state as responsive to both legitimacy and accumulation pressures within a hegemonic growth discourse. A grounded theory approach is followed to study discursive power, synthesizing elements of the social and narrative construction of reality, Critical Discourse Analysis, dispositive analysis and the Environmental Justice approach. It develops a variant of Critical Discourse Analysis that can work across a big case study, by treating discursive power plays as part of a pollution dispositive, which is an assembly of heterogeneous elements (practices and knowledges) that can be understood together as a strategic response to an emerging situation. The pollution dispositive was composed of pre-existing resources available in its environment: local discourses producing disposable others, through racism or a view of dispensable fenceline communities; the legitimations and limitations of the politics of hegemony, and the discourses of growth, limited corporate liability, as well as of environmental management, sustainable development and ecological modernisation. The study explores the implications of this analysis for Environmental Justice tactics in the areas of environmental management, citizen science, the politics of ecological modernisation, and the politics of hegemony in the new South Africa. It shows that the conditions of fenceline communities and the nature of discursive struggles around them create a tactical terrain which can be used to advance the cause of Environmental Justice. In the tradition of critical theory, it contributes to the understanding of anti-pollution struggles within the Environmental Justice movement, engaging with a triad of concepts that explain the imposition of environmental injustice: externalisation of the costs of pollution, exclusion from decision making and enclosure of resources. This approach can be applied to the environmental struggles of other communities on the fencelines of the Minerals Energy Complex in South Africa.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-23T14:32:59Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Consideracoes Finais.pdf: 12626 bytes, checksum: 4ff9fc99c6d66dfba678102aa8698f0d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-07-27 / In this research, the spotlights are aimed on the historical years between 1959 and 1967, with the main purpose of showing the scenic arrangements of the installation, organization and performance of a Rotary Club in a geographical scenery that was in mutation phase. That territory, formerly denominated Promised Earth or Canaan of the Industry, was soon substituted by the nomenclature Steel Valley .The partners founders of that first Rotary Club conceived themselves as foreigners from the Canaan of the State of Minas that emanated "milk and honey". Native from another lands, they met each other and they were met in order to form a service club in the Nacional Valley of Redemption, but with intense institutional entails to an international corporation. Organized under the doctrine of the interest well understood, the associated agents, each one, with his composition and capital volume, of economic, cultural, social, symbolic or political nature, they allowed, through the mechanism of capital convertibility, to concentrate, in the regional community, a power, capable to produce real effects without apparent waste of energy. As a voluntary and oligarchical association, this service club was, in a way, a institutional vehicle, in the local sphere, of appropriation, incorporation, reproduction and diffusion of visions of world of the ideological corpus of International Rotary. / Nesta pesquisa, os holofotes estão apontados sobre os anos históricos, compreendidos entre 1959 e 1967, com a finalidade última de mostrar os arranjos cênicos da instalação, organização e atuação de um Rotary Club num cenário geográfico que se encontrava em fase de mutação. Esse território, outrora denominado Terra Prometida ou Canaã da Indústria, foi logo substituído pela nomenclatura Vale do Aço. Os Sócios fundadores desse primeiro Rotary Club conceberam-se como forasteiros da Canaã do Estado de Minas que emanava leite e mel . Originários de outras terras, encontraram-se e foram encontrados para formarem um clube de serviço no Vale da Redenção Nacional, mas com fortes vínculos institucionais a uma corporação internacional. Organizados sob a doutrina do interesse bem compreendido, os agentes associados, cada qual, com sua composição e volume de capital, sejam eles de natureza econômica, cultural, social, simbólico e/ou político, que permitiu, através do mecanismo de convertibilidade de capital, potencializar, na comunidade regional, um poder capaz de produzir efeitos reais sem dispêndio aparente de energia. Como uma associação voluntária e oligárquica, esse clube de serviço foi, em alguma medida, um veículo institucional, na esfera local, de apropriação, incorporação, reprodução e difusão de visões de mundo do corpus ideológico do Rotary Internacional.

Post-remediation soil, ground and surface water monitoring is essential to assess the effectiveness of remediation efforts undertaken to eliminate or minimize the risk of pollution to human health and valuable ecosystems. In that regard, comparison of pollution levels pre- and post-remediation is an effective way of evaluating the effectiveness of the remediation techniques used. Thus, this study sought to measure concentrations of pollutants in the soil, ground and surface water post remediation in Steel Valley, Vanderbijlpark and compare them to concentration levels prior to remediation, as well as compare them to internationally accepted standards with respect to risk to humans and the environment. Water samples were collected from three locations within the study site, in both the dry and rainy seasons and their physio-chemical and organic properties were tested. Soil samples were collected from six different locations within the study site and analysed for metal concentrations. The data was compared against that of the Iron and Steel Corporation (ISCOR) Vanderbijlpark Environmental Master Plan (EMP), water and soil guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) as well as South African water and soil guidelines. The study found that groundwater is generally safe for domestic use but Aluminium (Al), Iron (Fe) and Manganese (Mn) concentrations were above South African water quality guideline levels – with their concentrations ranging from 0.54 to 0.91 mg/L, 1.01 to 1.86 mg/L and 0.24 to 0.53 mg/L respectively. There were no traces of organic pollution in the water samples. Soil samples had levels of Al ranging from 1106 mg/kg to 1 3621 mg/kg, Mn concentrations in the range of 202.8 to 966.4 mg/kg and Fe ranging from 1 1587 to 23 201 mg/kg. Thus, water and soil at the selected sites are safe in terms of physico-chemical and organic quality. Natural attenuation should be able, over time, to further reduce the levels of parameters that are currently above the target range. Thus, there has been considerable reduction in pollutant concentrations, but as this study was limited in scope, additional research is needed to verify the results. / Environmental Sciences / M. Sc. (Environmental Science)