#Creekshed Creative Wilds

 #Creekshed  examines the human and natural stories about waters that drain into Tampa Bay. The project's principal investigators  Thomas Hallock  (USF) and  Amanda Hagood  (Eckerd College) use narrative to better understand headwaters ̶ broadly defined. We want to know when a creek becomes a culvert or ditch; the lost or misremembered histories behind active or buried springs; the relationship between water quality and social health; and explore the boundaries between built and natural environments, for even the smallest aquatic systems feeding Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

This online exhibit and complementary  #Creekshed digital collection  curated by USF Libraries will serve as a hub to document the #creekshed community project as it evolves and grows.

#Creekshed partners include  Creative Loafing Tampa Bay ,  Eckerd College , and the  University of South Florida Libraries .

Early in his career as a faculty member at USF’s Florida Studies program, Dr. Thomas Hallock offered a year-long course called “The Rivers of Florida.” He found that the written assignments of his students all seemed to follow the same script, one that celebrated nature and condemned the built environment, with no thought about how the two exist together.  To explore writing about nature in the urban landscape, Hallock created the “City Wilds” column in Tampa Bay’s alt-weekly Creative Loafing, which combines urban exploration with meditations on the environment, and invited Dr. Amanda Hagood to join him as a contributor.     

These scholars are environmental humanists, who study how history, philosophy, ethics and literature all come together around our relationships with the natural environment. Together, they explore the springs and waterways of Tampa Bay in an attempt to better understand how the natural and built environments define the place they call home.  Publishing their column through a popular publication such as Creative Loafing ensures that everyone has access to it.  “We want nature writing to appear beside drink specials,” Hallock quips, “We want to reach people where they are.”  The result, they hope, is providing residents with a different perspective on the landscape they take for granted every day. 

Dr. Hagood especially likes the term “storied waterways” to describe her subjects.  “We attach all these stories and meanings to geographic and hydrologic features.  I think we are trying to model a certain thought process.” 

According to Dr. Hallock, “There is no word for the successful incorporation of nature in the city.  There’s wilderness, and the farmer has the bucolic or pastoral landscape, but we have no word for the natural and built environment in an interface.  If we don’t have the word for it, then we don’t think this way.  We are looking for the intersection between the built and natural environment.”

Hallock elaborates on their non-scientific role in environmental studies, providing “stories to remind people about the countless points of intersection between the natural and human, and how we can become better stewards and caretakers in a fun and original way.”  

For both scholars, the column represents the launching pad for a larger #creekshed project that can encompass other mediums of expression, such as public art and music. Hagood is keen to incorporate the writing of her students into the project, while Hallock would like to invite artists and other scholars to contribute.   

The #creekshed project kicked off in March 2022 with the art exhibition “Take Me to the Water(s),” a group show of mixed media by Salt Creek Summer Artists in Residence sponsored by the Tampa Bay Estuary Program. 

This online exhibit and complementary  #Creekshed digital collection  curated by USF Libraries will serve as a hub to document the #creekshed community project as it evolves and grows.

Browse the #Creekshed article abstracts below and read the full text on  Digital Commons .

Tracing tributaries helps us see how we have engineered growing crises.

A Goliath grouper washed up along Lassing Park, just south of downtown St. Pete. Karenia brevis, or red tide, had churned up the west coast of Florida.  Because humans have juiced up our estuaries with sewage dumps, grass clippings, agricultural and road run-off, the blooms intensify. To honor the grouper, and this summer's continuing bloom, Creative Loafing columnist Amanda Hagood and I have decided to launch the #creekshed project.  Citation: Hallock, Thomas B., "#Creekshed - "New ‘Creekshed Project’ Will Look for the Headwaters of Tampa Bay’s Polluted Gulf" (2021). #Creekshed. 1.  https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/1 

Booker Creek, a stadium nobody likes and a city's unresolved conflicts.

Booker Creek is a lesson in forgetting. Its most scenic stretches formerly ran through Campbell Park, once part of a black middle-class neighborhood leveled for I-175. Tropicana Stadium’s parking lots were the Gas Plant District, a poor but thriving remnant of Jim Crow-era segregation. Big profits, my crystal ball says, will be made from past wrongs. If not reparations here, then where?

Citation: Hallock, Thomas B., "#Creekshed - Paddling Toward Reparations" (2017). #Creekshed. 2.  https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/2 

What wildlife do we miss at 70 miles per hour?

We learn a lot by following streams to their sources. Ecologists tell us to look for connections, to trace energy flows beyond any single habitat or "patch." Swamps, streams, retention ponds and canals together form one community, one citified whole. I have lived in St. Petersburg since 2001 and never thought about the wilderness under our interstate. I love the boardwalks at Sawgrass and Weedon Island. Still, I never stopped to ask, what connects the two?

Citation: Hallock, Thomas B., "#Creekshed - An Interstate Runs through It" (2016). #Creekshed. 3.  https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/3 

Kayaking from St. Pete to Gulfport via ditches, creeks and ponds.

Only a nutcase would paddle up Salt Creek. Locals warn us about alligators. Salt Creek offers a history of border culture and fish kills. It has been home to squatters and chicken thieves.  Reporters in the 1970s called the creek “a smelly dump,” with water a “dull rust color” and eight times the coliform levels safe for human contact. The creek has not improved much with neglect.  When does a creek become a ditch? What happens when a body of water loses its name?

Citation: Hallock, Thomas B., "#Creekshed - Paddling across Pinellas" (2016). #Creekshed. 4.   https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/4 

In March 1922 the godfather of American city planning, John Nolen, paid St. Petersburg a visit.  Hoping to bring order to a runaway real estate boom, city leaders invited Nolen to draw up a plan. Few cities have been gifted with a blueprint of such quality. Bartlett Pond, the overgrown lake I am paddling today, would have fit within Nolen’s greenbelt. Sadly, the Nolen plan was never adapted. Managed growth did not square with quick profits.

Citation: Hallock, Thomas B., "#Creekshed - John Nolen Gave St. Pete a Chance to Embrace Nature, but the City Passed" (2020). #Creekshed. 5.   https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/5 

Where does the river end and lawful access begin?

Who owns a river? Or a riverbed? Florida riparian law, as a legal expert put it to me,"is a mess." Where does the river end and lawful access begin? Fixated by nature with borders and boundaries, I wanted to explore for myself the upper Hillsborough, in Pasco County, where the river has no launch.

Citation: Hallock, Thomas B., "#Creekshed - Trespassing, Crystal Springs" (2017). #Creekshed. 6.    https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/6 

What happened to Sulphur Springs? And what does it reflect about our ongoing reckoning with Florida’s water resources?

In the annals of Florida springs attractions, Sulphur Springs occupies a puzzling place. It represents the epitome of our state’s celebrated tradition of springs tourism. Once heralded for the curative properties of its waters, the spring is now deemed unsafe for swimming. You could say that Sulphur Springs was, in this sense, the victim of progress and its legendary failure to foresee its own consequences: to recognize the reality that nothing we do in this wet sponge of a state stays out of the water table for long.

Citation: Hagood, Amanda, "#Creekshed - Sulphur Springs’ Past Reminds Us that Sustainability and Justice are Deeply Entwined" (2021). #Creekshed. 7.   https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/7 

It shows you can bring a spring back if you do the right things.

When Water Works park opened in 2014, it was a culmination of decades of planning and remediation work designed to transform a disused storage yard for city vehicles into a green space that celebrated the city’s relationship to the river. But perhaps the most miraculous transformation of all has been that of Ulele Spring, the beating heart of this urban oasis. Ulele now pulses out 672,000 gallons of cool, clear water per day through three ponds where native plants flourish and birds, fish, and manatees thrive.  

Citation: Hagood, Amanda, "#Creekshed - Tampa’s Ulele Springs Is a ‘Symbol of Hope’ When It Comes to Restoring Florida’s Natural Water Sources" (2021). #Creekshed. 8.   https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/8 

Florida summers make me nervous. Climate change, with its welter of disastrous effects, is unfolding faster and with greater intensity than we ever really believed it would. Rising sea levels are impacting coastal communities from Fort Lauderdale, which has installed an elaborate system of tidal valves to combat flooding, to Yankeetown, where saltwater intrusion has begun to create a rim of dead and dying trees where coastal forests used to be. For all the global significance of these transformations, there is something acutely local in the way I worry.

Citation: Hagood, Amanda, "#Creekshed - Florida Summers Make Me Nervous and Not Just for the Normal Reasons" (2021). #Creekshed. 9.  https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/creekshed/9 

Navigate through the Florida waterways and creeksheds documented in the #Creekshed project.

Do you have a #Creekshed story to share? Please leave a comment on our  FLENH Hub  and be sure to mention #Creekshed.