Watershed as Common-Place: Communicating for Conservation at the Watershed Scale

Abstract

This article, highlighting qualitative data collected from farmers and landowners in the Clear Creek watershed in eastern Iowa, offers a situated analysis of the relationship between rhetorical change and landscape change. After chronicling the rise of government-sponsored watershed-based agricultural conservation efforts, I adopt Kenneth Burke's framing of rhetoric as identification to argue that the watershed, as it is mobilized in contemporary conservation efforts, serves as a potent material and symbolic site for identification. Focusing on my ethnographic research in the Clear Creek watershed in eastern Iowa, I consider how farmers' and landowners' identification with the watershed has prompted changes to the landscape for the sake of soil and water conservation. I then consider the implications of this argument for extending theories of the rhetorical landscape, suggesting that rhetorical landscapes contain elements of both the symbolic and the material.

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