Contribution short abstract:

This contribution considers wetland restoration in Lake Erie as an archival praxis. It details how the connectivity of a given wetland to its wider watershed does not exist as a fixed property, but is rather something actively negotiated through varying systems of value and more-than-human memory.

Contribution long abstract:

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are toxic growth events that have long-plagued Lake Erie waters and are historically associated with the leaching of nutrient fertilizers applied to farm fields as well as the loss of wetlands throughout the region. This workshop contribution details recent efforts by the state to develop a comprehensive nutrient budget of Lake Erie’s watershed that policy makers argue is necessary for assessing various HAB mitigation strategies, notably wetland restoration. While “restoring” wetland ecosystems in watersheds has been proven to mitigate nutrient loads in downstream water bodies like Lake Erie, there is little agreement about how wetlands should be restored or, more specifically, what qualities in space and time they should be restored to. Through discussion of how wetland ecologists practically and epistemically account for such unknowns within a specific restored wetland site, this contribution details how the connectivity of a given wetland to its wider watershed does not exist as a fixed property of the landscape, but is rather something actively negotiated through varying systems of value and more-than-human processes. In this way, it argues that state-authorized modes of political memory and data-hungry algorithms mutually condition Lake Erie’s watershed as an archive of increasing political significance. Through discussion of seemingly mundane matters such as scientific protocol, state bureaucracy, and 19th century artifacts of settler-colonial wetland destruction, I show how memory within Lake Erie’s watershed is saturated with legacies of settler-colonial terraforming and more-than-human processes to inspire a wider political imagination of harm in Lake Erie to cohere.