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

We describe and theorize how 'grass-roots' environmental activists create a 'healthy stream' in their municipality. We frame this activity as a work o f 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 inscrip tions, involves re-presenting the creek in numerous localities. But this al so means literally remaking the creek by engineering it to conform to the c onfiguration of a 'healthy stream'. Thus, not only are the discursive relat ions that create the creek in the municipal hall or local school reconfigur ed, but the physical relations that construct the material creek are also a ltered. Highlighting the social-material hybrid from which the activists' a gency emerges, we relate the representations, material work and relations t hey use to transform both the creek and the community.