Plaster Creek: A Portentous Portrait

As part of my increased attempts at "doing things," I've begun to take advantage of some of the resources and opportunities on offer from the stream projects sponsored by the West Michigan Environmental Action Council (WMEAC) and Calvin College's own Plater Creek Watershed Working Group. I've been learning some basics about the life of the stream and its interesting mesh of contexts (environmental, cultural, political, etc.). I've also been trying to get my feet wet, so to speak, in watershed issues as (I hope) a form of involvement that can continue and expand in the years to come, wherever I happen to be living.


---> click here for more maps

Plaster Creek is a more relatively minor part of the Grand River watershed, which is itself a more major player (about 13%) in the Lake Michigan drainage basin, draining approximately 5,572 square miles of west and central Michigan. The creek is considered one of the unhealthiest in the region, a title that is not hard to believe after a few brief encounters with its sudsy, odorous water and its often ill-used banks. Due to high E. coli levels from agricultural run-off outside of the city, Plaster Creek has been labeled unsafe for even partial immersion or casual contact, although this is unbeknownst to the many kids who play in its waters in summertime (as kids are supposed to do). Passing on through suburban housing developments and their strip malls, run-off from the expansive green- and blacktop of lawns and parking lots further pollutes and also destabilizes the flow of the creek (contributing to its unhealthy flood cycles). Finally, in urban residential and industrial areas, more run-off, excessive amounts of litter, and industrial pollutants make their contributions before the creek merges with the Grand River and the rest of the Great Lakes Region's water supply.

Wading through or walking along part of it, it stinks of all of the stuff about us and our so-called prosperity that we try to hide from ourselves. Many of the decisions that have effected the creek, dumping into it wherever convenient or adjusting it (with a backhoe) where it happens to be an inconvenience, make it a destructive force rather than a healthy source of dynamic creative and destruction. Piles of dead lawn topple into the mud as it undercuts its own reseeded and thus rootless banks. The water rises and falls at an unhealthy pace. The transformations that take place now lead to decreased carrying capacity and biodiversity. The Plaster Creek watershed, which includes both human and non-human forces, increasingly erodes and pollutes and degrades itself, which no one seems to mind as long as it stays hidden——tucked away from the subdivision by a landscaped barrier mound or behind a chain-link fence where only the homeless spend time.

I'll admit that this a rather bleak description of things and fails to mention some of the most positive and exciting parts of Plaster Creek's life. But that other side of things will have to wait for another post. I recognize the potential for rhetoric such as I've just offered to become part of an unhealthy and potentially dishonest "discourse of catastrophe." There is the chance that I might be playing into the sort of ideological recuperation that is at work in some mainstream Green propaganda. And yet, I have yet to see other approaches that avoid either apathy or elitism (related to what Timothy Morton has been calling "Beautiful Soul Syndrome"). I would like to imagine a strategic contribution——a contamination, if you will——that we can make to the sleight-of-hand environmental initiatives and policy adjustments championed by corporate publicity stunts or those public officials with vested interests. Riffing on Morton's thesis about Hegel and environmentalism, I wonder if the attitudes that we encode in our ideas and social movements——humility and care, for example——could be part of the change that is happening, even if they are bound up in beliefs and methods and systems (self-righteously jumping around, waving our hands to get the attention of the rich and powerful) that seem less than ideal. After all, it is this sort of emergency-portrait which I think most needs to be disclosed, both personally and collectively, as the vision which demands our hasty and wide-ranging response.