Rhetorical New Materialisms (RNM)

Gries, Laurie E.; Clary-Lemon, Jennifer; Druschke, Caroline Gottschalk; Rivers, Nathaniel A.; Nicotra, Jodie; Ackerman, John; Grant, David M.; Ríos, Gabriela R.; Hawk, Byron; Hanan, Joshua S.; Arola, Kristin L.; Rickert, Thomas; Driskill, Qwo-Li; Sackey, Donnie Johnson

doi:10.1080/02773945.2022.2032815

Cited by 15 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The combination of the Driftless Area's distinct geomorphology—with broad loess-covered uplands, steep hillslopes, and deeply incised valleys (Knox, 1982)—and its tangled history of Euro-American settlement—with the profound changes to the landscape that resulted from the conversion from prairie, forest, and oak-savannah to cropland and pasture—produced devastating erosion, flooding, and downstream sedimentation that dramatically altered the form and function of its stream-floodplain ecosystems (Happ, 1944; Knox, 2006). These widespread changes were the tangible residue of white settlement and had immediate negative economic consequences on even settlers themselves, both in terms of agricultural productivity and flood damages.…”

Section: Stream Restoration In the Driftless Area Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

Grass versus trees: A proxy debate for deeper anxieties about competing stream worlds

Gottschalk Druschke,

Booth,

Lave

et al. 2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Stream restoration has become an increasingly important focus in southwestern Wisconsin's Driftless Area, an unglaciated, hilly pocket of the Upper Mississippi River Basin rich in groundwater-driven coldwater streams, recreationally important trout species, and agricultural communities. Climate change is driving a major increase in precipitation and flooding across this rural and often under-resourced region, effects complicated by the ongoing legacies of white settlement and the changes it wrought to area streams, including the burial of floodplains in sediment displaced off area hillslopes. As managers work to consider how to “restore” Driftless streams, riparian vegetation—grass versus trees—has become a central and surprisingly controversial node. Current stream restoration practice typically includes the removal of riparian trees, though that practice has come under increasing criticism. Grounded in more than 5 years of qualitative and biophysical fieldwork in the region, we build from interviews gathered with 18 Driftless Area stream restoration managers from 2018 to 2020 to point to the ways that managers leverage arguments about erosion, flooding, habitat, and angler access, among other things, in service of grass and trees. Indexing the surface flows and underflows of this restoration debate, we introduce the rhetorical concept of the proxy debate to argue that debates about grass versus trees are tethered to competing perspectives on scale, temporality, and dynamism, surficial distractions from much deeper anxieties about what a stream is and should be. We turn to the ways that these distractions serve to further distance the stream restoration enterprise from acknowledging the ongoing human and hydrologic legacies of settler colonialism, and we close by suggesting that careful attention to rhetorical power—both to what arguments say and do, and to what they elide—offers a tentative first step toward restoring lands and relations by questioning what is taken for granted and what lies beneath.

show abstract

Section: Stream Restoration In the Driftless Area Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%