Seminar Slides for  'storytelling science' problem solving

Abilene's  WATERSHED Storytelling ConferencE Postponed


The 'Abilene Watershed Storytelling Conference' was to be held March 18-20, 2020. We are waiting for a time when the coronavirus is no longer a health issue.


Presenters are encouraged to send their PowerPoint or session paper to David Boje  Boje email



 

In addition to academic presentations in disciplines ranging from science to storytelling, we will tour the local water plant, have a guided tour of a reservoir that is being cleaned and revitalized, the former mayor will discuss why cleaning up Abilene's waterways was a key issue in his campaign, and much more!  This is a great opportunity to experience first-hand in a workshop format how community members might "restory"
the current situation and create a new story vision of the future."

 Please send your abstracts of 250 words or less for a presentation/poster session or workshop by February 1st to Professor David Boje (davidboje@gmail.com), Professor Duncan Pelly (duncan.pelly@gmail.com), and Professor Grace Ann Rosile (garosile@nmsu.edu)

We are looking forward to seeing you in Abilene!

Learn about Texas Watersheds
Texas Watershed Steward Handbook
Where are the Texas Watersheds
Map of Abilene Watershed

Become a Watershed Steward?


"The word stewardship means taking the responsibility to care for the well-being of something that is valued. Watershed stewardship means caring for the water, air and biodiversity in an entire watershed, while acknowledging that all resources are connected and all are affected by natural and human activities. Water is the most critical component of life" More


Watershed Projects near Abilene ♦ Estimated $17 million benefits ♦ Reduced water levels in Lake Brownwood ♦ Prevented loss of human life ♦ Saved Brownwood from a catastrophic event Watershed Projects near San Antonio ♦ Estimated $19 million benefits ♦ Reduced water levels in developed areas ♦ Prevented loss of human life ♦ Held floodwaters for Edwards Aquifer recharge More

We welcome submissions from diverse perspectives.  Topics for academic workshops and paper presentations may include storytelling and narratives (see https://davidboje.com/Abilene for examples), research perspectives from the hard sciences, or explorations of the impact of the water crisis from social science and humanities lenses.  Practitioner workshops and presentations may describe the processes of  watershed critical zone management, water acquisition, treatment, transmission, and recycling; case or anecdotal studies of the role and impact of the water crisis on watershed, or historical analysis of the role of water in religion and spirituality.  The aforementioned is intended to illustrate the spectrum of approaches welcome at the 'Abilene Watershed Storytelling Conference.'      

Professors David M. Boje, Ph.D., Grace Ann Rosile, Ph.D. and Duncan Pelly, Ph.D. will facilitate the conference, plan the presentations, and host interactive sessions.  



Why Watershed Storytelling? Essay for Abilene Water Storytelling Conference by David Boje (February 21, 2020)
I have been writing about Mikhail Bakhtin’s chronotopes (spacetime conceptions), and relating them to water and the watershed oppositions worked out in social heteroglossia (opposing forces of centripetal & centrifugal).  The basic message I have is we need to move from abstracting to grounding, and a way to do that is to pay attention to Rogue-Clown-Fool and the Idyllic Nature of Water in relation to Family and Small Farmer Agriculture. We can do this by treating our home property as a watershed.

9 Chronotopes figure
Figure 1: 9 Chronotopes

Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) rogue-clown-fool chronotope, for example, perfectly describes how multinational water corporations are ‘rogues’ (Nestle, Coke, Pepsi, etc. & Suez, Veolia, Bechtel) doing water privatization and water commodification in the face of growing water shortages. 

Rogures Gallery of Multinational Water Titans
Figure 2: Rogues Gallery of Multinational Water Titans

These water corporations are self-appointed heroes in romance adventure exploits bringing water to the masses, professing water sustainable development, coupled with water chivalry adventure, engaging in strategies of water commodification, water privatization, and water speculation. These rogues playing their roles, makes the role of clown and fool so very important, in order to expose some basic fake storytelling water corporations seem addicted to engage in. The clown has an ancient privilege to speak back to power, using otherwise unacceptable language. The rogues of water capitalism meet every three years at their World Water Forum, and the clown turns up in the street theater outside.  Sometimes the fool turns up too. The fool is a very special style, able to make water capitalism strange, so the audience that is uncomprehending of the aliveness of the watershed’s relation to land (soil & atmosphere) are able to laugh at how the fool is unable to understand modern water life, uncomprehending of water capitalism practices — and that is the way the fool has the most ancient wisdom, to show the falsity of how people take their watershed for granted, and behave so entirely stupidly, wasting water, unable to comprehend water beyond the water bottle, and the tap. In time of climate change, watersheds are not understood by most people on Earth. Luna B. Leopold (son of Aldo Leopold) understood watersheds, the relation of hydrological cycle to the geomorphology (mountains, valleys, etc.), who the tributaries are like the tine veins of the body feeding life’s blood to the flesh. Water corporations commodify, extracting surface water and groundwater, while water supply companies privatize, and meanwhile white fragile critical zone of Earth’s crust is denied the basis of life. 

The storytelling of place (i.e. Abilene) in relation to time (i.e. Industrial Revolution) imprints the Idylls of Love, Family, Agriculture-Labor, and Craft-labor as 19th century capitalism made its transition (Bakhtin, 1981). Advertised as "Future Great City of West Texas", Abilene has a special history as several churches began, and the city became known as a good place to raise a family (saloons abolished in 1903, and no alcohol sales until 1978). It was also a good place to become farmer, rancher, or craftsperson, for families to build a future of family generations. Universities settled in Abilene to train students in the future of 19th century capitalism, but with Christian values 1891 to 1923 (More):

  1. 1891 Simmons [Baptist] College [now Hardin-Simmons University]
  2. 1906 Abilene Christian University [opened as Childers Classical Institute]
  3. 1923 McMurry College [now McMurry University]
  4. 2010 Texas Tech University Health Science Center & Texas State Technical College West Texas

Abilene has always been an 'Idyll' an idealized pastoral scene of farm and ranching families settling in a rustic frontier rail townsite. After nomadic tribes of Native Americans were driven from the place, Abilene was founded in 1880, when several ranchers and business owners (of land around what would be Abilene) negotiated with Texas and Pacific Railroad to place a rail station at 'Abilene' instead of Buffalo Gap, in order to make westward expansion economically profitable. Abilene townsite auctioned 300 lots May 15, 1881 in the watershed between Cedar and Big Elm creeks, east of Catclaw Creek. The problem the Idyll (idealism) of Family, Agriculture-labor, and Craft-Labor faced was the "anarchy of greed" (Bakhtin, 1981: 231) despite the religious universities, can take over in the marketplace. The ancient relation of farmng and ranching families to the ethics of Nautre, and life in the rhythm of Nature in the "spatial corner of the world" (225), the mix of Love, Labor, Family in Pastoral comes into contact with different Idylls: consumerism, individual life rather than family life, and pursuit of love of money and wealth (for its own sake). As this transition happens, the unity of place, the familiar teritory of creeks, fields, rivers, and forest, that sense of 'home' becomes background to what comes into foreground in the storytelling, modern life that is global rather than local, individualistic (mobile) rather than (rooted in) family of generations of grand parents and grandchildren. As local-place of Abilene gives ways to global places, the unity of place, fragments and disolves into individual lives that are placeless.


Abilene Railsite in 1880
Source

"By the 1870s the Indians had been driven out, and cattlemen began to graze their herds in the area...  1880, several ranchers and businessmen—Claiborne W. Merchant, John Merchant, John N. Simpson, John T. Berry, and S. L. Chalk—met with H. C. Whithers, the Texas and Pacific track and townsite locator, and arranged to have the railroad bypass Buffalo Gap." (More).

A drawback to Abilene was its watershed only had 23.78 inches of rainfall. So the city excavated series of resrvoirs it named lakes, in order to insure municipal water supply with growth of population:

  1. Lytle Lake (1897)
  2. Lake Abilene (1919)
  3. Lake Kirby (1927)
  4. Lake Phantom Hill (1937)

Attention to the history of Abilene's watershed, the formation of its dams and reservoirs, and to changes in the ways of agriculture, business, and city life is what we call 'storytelling of the critical zone' where water is life.

Abilene's basic reality, once upon a time, had its unity of place, in the reality of the rhythm of its watershed, in the actual bosom of Nature. This is how storytelling changes with socioeconomic context: As global capitalism become foregrounded, individualized lives of consumers left the Family, Agriculture-Labor, Craft-Labor, and so on, in the background. In other words, the storytelling of farming and raching generation-after-generation families lost ground to individual life, consumers not knowing where their drinking water comes from, city folk not know where the flush goes.  Earth becomes storied as just 'real estate', streams and forests as 'resources' without any sense of steardship. Nature, love family and childrearing become isolated in global life. As this happens the storytelling undergoes corresponding changes. There are no farming and ranching, no family heros allive in the globalized world.We are witness to the breakup of the wholeness of the locale of place. In globalized 'placelessness' the prodigal son or daught, does not return home from their egotistic isoilated individualism to their place of organic link to Nature. Society has brokedown, and educaiton is able about demolishing the anient Idylls, those bygone ethics, and in its place we are "under the influence of money" (Bakhtin, 1981: 235).

“Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.” -Will Rogers

DISCOVER Abilene's Watershed AND WHAT IS ITS CRITICAL ZONE

Abilene Watershed
Click to Change Map
Using Water Storytelling to Discover Abilene's Watershed This is a storytelling project about the entire watershed, its 'critical zone'. Foregrounding the importance of  the watershed, we live, work, and play in this the very 'thin' surface of the Planet Earth (its fragile layer of soil and atmosphere) —what is now often called the 'Critical Zone' (CZ).
 

This conference will examine ways to prepare for the global water crises as foreseen by hydrologists, ecologists, futurists, and the United Nations. Abilene is a uniquely germane setting for this conference because it enjoys some of the highest quality water in the United States, due in large part to rigorous treatment processes.  Federal Regulations require testing for 75 radiological and chemical substances, but Abilene screens for more than 170, with all contaminants being below state and federal regulations, and many are absent from the water.  As part of the conference, participants will have the opportunity to tour local water sources and treatment plants.  

Giving Depth to the Surface – an Exercise in the Gaia-graphy of Critical Zones* Alexandra Arènes, Bruno Latour, Jérôme Gaillardet. (More on giving depth to the surface).
Example of Critical Zone Map
Above is example of Critical Zone Map of Watershed (Arènes, Latour & Gaillardet, p. 6, More)

Here is another view of the Critical Zone of Part of the Watershed
Critical Zone of a Watershed
Figure in Chorover et al. (2007)

Chorover, J., R. Kretzschmar, F. Garcia-Pichel, and D. L. Sparks (2007). The Critical Zone. Illustration modified from Chorover, J., R. Kretzschmar, F. Garcia-Pichel, and D. L. Sparks. 2007. Soil biogeochemical processes in the critical zone. Elements 3, 321-326. (artwork by R. Kindlimann). Accessed Jan 2 2020 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_critical_zone#/media/File:Czone_chorover_et_al_catalina_jemez_czo.png.

The future of our planet climate, the survival of most species, depends upon getting beyond ‘fake storytelling’ to ‘true storytelling.’  We have been combining Quantum Storytelling (Boje & Rosile), ‘Indigenous Ways of Knowing’ (aka IWOK; e.g. Gregory Cajete, Don Pepion, Tyron Love, and many other indigenous scholars) Gaia Storytelling Conversations (Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, Julia Hayden), Material Storytelling (Anete Strand), and True Storytelling (Jens Larsen, Lena Bruun, & David Boje). What these approaches share in common is a move beyond humancentric to posthumanist storytelling, a move beyond social constructivism to relational ontologies, from Western Ways of Knowing (WWOK) to Indigenous Ways of Knowing (IWOK), and from predatory neoliberal capitalism (turning more and more fascist) to a grounding in what Donna Haraway (2016) calls ‘multispecies storytelling’ and what Wilma Dykeman (1955) calls ‘nature’s sponge’ (see Boje, Hillon-Cai, & Hillon, 2019) or what is called elsewhere, the Earth's critical zone:

“… heterogeneous, near surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources” (National Research Council, 2001).

 

            Bruno Latour in a series of lectures has been calling for a deconstruction of globalization, a move away from cartographer’s images of the globe, in favor of an understanding of the ‘Earth’s critical zone.’



The Abilene Watershed is a place of life, a " multiplicity of nested envelopes necessary for sustaining life" ( Arènes, Latour & Gaillardet, p. 4, More). A watershed is the living stories of all the species of plants, rocks, animals, birds, wildlife, peoples, soil, forest, creeks, ponds, streams, rivers, and what communities create (roads, businesses, cities, agriculture, recreation, and so on). We can do Watershed Storytelling with different kinds of maps.
Satelite Map of Abilene Watershded Percipitation
Abilene Watershed Satellite Map (More)

Watershed Storytelling begins with the history of the watershed, profiling its past and future condition, doing watershed planing, understanding watershed hydrology, farming, mapping the water flows, doing some research on the problems and solutions to 'watershed stewardship.' Notice Lake fort Phantom Hill in above map.

When droughts happen there the agiencies managing the Abilene Watershed take action
Drought 2019
Abilene 2019, at tip of Read (D3) Exceptional Drought intensity

Judge Downing Bolls said "adequate precipitation has fallen throughout Taylor County today" and more is expected over the next several days.

Judge Bolls said "although I do not encourage burning at this time unless it is essential, I continue to caution all citizens of Taylor County to exercise great caution with outdoor burning."

He also encouraged people to contact their fire department and have safe guards in place before they do any outdoor burning. (More)


Different maps tell alternative stories, such as this Farming map of Taylor County, and its Oats, Sorghum, and Winter Wheat history 2007-2016.

Taylor County Farm crop yield map
More on this Farming Map

Google Satellite Map of Abilene Watershed (More) (in Google street map you can see McMurry University, More)
Google Satilitte Map


Depending upon how you map it, the Abilene Watershed is a rich and diverse place of geography, geology, hydrology, climate, ecosystems, cultural, and historical storytelling. It is about an expanding population and the ways human activities contribute to changing or sustaining its climate. Notice Kirby Lake in the above map.

Notice this next Map includes McMurry College (actually its a University), but is NOT in the above maps.
McMurry University shown in this map
Esri Map shows McMurry College (its a University) More
Notice Lytle Lake and a pond at Grover Nelson Park, identified in this map, but not the other map. It is important to profile the entire watershed, all its ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, its soil (see Taylor County Soil Map) and its groundwater (aquifers).

MapBox Map does include McMurry University and Lytle Lake
MapBox Map does include McMurry University and Lytle Lake (More)

Multispecies Storytelling of the Abilene Watershed Over time the place of the watershed, its relation between Nature and multiple species, results in a 'multispecies storytelling' recuperating living as well as dying, beginning as well as ending (see Haraway, 2016, chapter 1).
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.

This Watershed Storytelling is important for students and teachers, poeple of all ages, so we learn the relationships of life in the Critical Zone, that thin layer of atmospheric water, flowing liguid water and ground water, the ways of the water cycle. It is the peculation, evaporation, and movement of the water cycle that naturally cleans the water. The various agencies work to do distillation, and skimming, and farious water treatments using biological microorganisms, adding chemicals like chlorine to get some control over water quality.

This is called 'washing the water' cleaning the water you use in home, city, and business of its pollutants, so that revitalized water can be sent downstream to the next user.

moral answerability for ‘washing the water’ making any water we use fit for reuse downstream, because water is not a commodity to be privatized.

 Water is a Living Thing, part of Nature's Sponge, in the Critical Zone of the Earth's crust

“Because just as the river belongs to no one, it belongs to everyone – and everyone is held accountable for its health and condition” (Dykeman, 1955: 291).

 

            Wilma Dykeman begins with a theory “water is a living thing” with a story to tell, if we know how to listen to Nature, and find our role in it (p. 282). It is a theory about the multiplicity of life in a place: “The multiplicity of the minute hidden lives around us” (p. 4) in “Natures’ sponge” (p. 13). Dykeman (IBID.) asks, “Where does the responsibility lie for cleaning up our water?” Her answer: “Every city and town, and every industry is responsible for cleaning up the pollution it creates” (IBID.). Every city and industry is morally answerable to clean the water it uses for reuse downstream.

References

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist; Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.  Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Boje, D. M. (2018). Preface: “Global Capitalism is Unsustainable" for Savall, H., & Peron, Michel, Zardet, Veronique, & Bonnet, Marc. Socially Responsible Capitalism. London: Routledge. Citing from http://davidboje.com/vita/paper_pdfs/Preface Boje - After TLH editing Apr 14 2017.docx

Boje, D. M. (2019a). Global Storytelling: There is No Planet B. Singapore/London/NY: World Scientific.

Boje, D. M. (2019b). Organizational Research: Storytelling In Action. London/NY: Routledge.

Boje, D. M. (2019c, in review). Storytelling Interventions in Global Water Crisis. In review at publisher.

Boje, D. M.; Cai-Hillon, Yue; Hillon, Mark E. (2019).Who Killed The French Broad?  Wilma Dykeman’s Contribution to Storytelling Research. Proceedings of 9th Annual New Mexico Quantum Storytelling Conference, ‘Quantum Storytelling Annual Review: Volume 9; David M. Boje (Ed.), Dec 15.

Chorover, J., R. Kretzschmar, F. Garcia-Pichel, and D. L. Sparks (2007). The Critical Zone. Illustration modified from Chorover, J., R. Kretzschmar, F. Garcia-Pichel, and D. L. Sparks. 2007. Soil biogeochemical processes in the critical zone. Elements 3, 321-326. (artwork by R. Kindlimann). Accessed Jan 2 2020 at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_critical_zone#/media/File:Czone_chorover_et_al_catalina_jemez_czo.png.

Dykeman, Wilma. (1955/1965/1985). The French Broad. Illustrated by Douglas Gorsline. 1955 and 1965 is the NY: Holt Rinehart and Winston Inc. edition.  1965 is the Dykeman introduction.1985 is Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, from which I am quoting.

Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Larsen, Jens; Bruun, Lena; Boje, D. M. (in press). True Storytelling. London: Routledge.




LAST YEAR'S EVENTS

Abilene storytelling science 2018

 David Boje and Grace Ann Rosile

Grace Ann will do Tribal Wisdom for Business Ethics

David Boje will do 'storytelling science' problem solving

New Cover water storytelling science book

Boje's Slides for the seminar 'Storytelling Abilene's Creation Care for Water -- are here - Please download and enjoy

Water has Many Stories to Tell BOJE

  Seminar Series Title: 'storytelling science' 'little s' for your dissertation and after
                                     David M. Boje
Seminar is 10-14.00 on 14 May, 2019

-         
Please Download 'Doing storytelling science' book from this folder
and
Please also download Boje's Storytellling and Water Book

Doing 'storytelling science'

David M. Boje & Grace Ann Rosile

in submission, UK, US, Singapore: World Scientific


SLIDE SHOWS THAT COULD ALSO SAVE YOUR LIFE
1. Why Coke and Diet Coke are Poison
2. Why Pepsi is worse


Why Tap Water is better Choice than Bottle Water
Water Replenishment Infographic


I hope we can explore some of this and anything else in the book above or the ones below. Let me know by email before the seminar, so I can ready myself. Check the Story Map at this link https://www.coca-colacompany.com/watermap

Find your country, or some other country, then find the counternarratives to the Story Map stories, or find the 'untold stories' (Hitchin, 2014), which are places water bottlers are extracting water, and not disclosing the story.

We checked and Abilene has Coca-Cola bottlers but they are not on the STORY MAP.

We need as qualitative storytelling researchers begin to challenge the water quantification methodology of the 'story maps' of the water corporations commodifying and privatizing water that was once a community good. See for example the methodology of Deloitte consulting firm hired by Coca-Cola Company to justify, legitimate, and tolerate the water replenishment corporate narratives. Deloitte's equivocating is quite metaphysical " Deloitte was also engaged to review and validate the quantification of water-related replenish benefits .... Deloitte does not express any form of validation on them." On page 1 they add " Methodologies for quantifying Replenish benefits and associated data needs were identified, and the methods were applied to projects with sufficient data for the calculations" with page 4 " benefit of approximately 25.6 BL/yr."  What are these mysterious calculations? For example in Table 1, in Pakistan, there is the conjecture:

" 61 roof water harvesting schemes were established in three sites: Namli Mera, Kundla and Tauheedabad where there was shortage of spring and stream water. Each roof‐water harvesting scheme consists of collection channels around the roof and a storage tank connected with a wash room or a washing tap." This is said to have 7.90 million liters a year replenishment rate. We are told that in Pakistan (to take but one example): " Roof water harvesting schemes were established in three sites where there was shortage of spring and stream water." In Template 3, Deloitte says Coca-Cola needs to provide actual numbers to make calculations possible. This begs the question, where does the number 7.90 million come form, how is a non-existent number interpreted as a story on a story map (where by the way, I cannot find a story for Pakistan). Perhaps you can!


David M. Boje

Professor, Aalborg University (each May)
Emeritus and Regents Professor, New Mexico State University
Sustainability Storytelling Lab at the European School of Governance (EUSG)
Adjunct Cabrini University, Philadelphia, PN
all around 'specific' intellectual and 'Critter.'


New Cover water storytelling science book 
storytelling conversation interviewing book download free until published


    Dragon book book cover Critical Theory ethics book cover

 Postmdoern Org Theory Book CoverTheaters of Capitalism cover


      



Multispecies Storytelling of the Abilene Watershed