How ditch and drain become a healthy creek: Re-presentations, translations and agency during the re/design of a watershed

Abstract

We describe and theorize how 'grass-roots' environmental activists create a 'healthy stream' in their municipality. We frame this activity as a work of creating the creek in a new series of relations in the community that are more consistent with those articulated by stream ecology. This work, which we follow by tracing the activists' use of scientific register and inscriptions, involves re-presenting the creek in numerous localities. But this also means literally remaking the creek by engineering it to conform to the configuration of a 'healthy stream'. Thus, not only are the discursive relations that create the creek in the municipal hall or local school reconfigured, but the physical relations that construct the material creek are also altered. Highlighting the social-material hybrid from which the activists' agency emerges, we relate the representations, material work and relations they use to transform both the creek and the community.