The only path up the drumlin is a desire line, the long work of many feet insisting on the view. The vantage up top, a 270° panorama of Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley, is rangy. You can see the smokestack of an old foundry beside the new manufacturer of wind turbines. You can see the Menomonee River, once anoxic, still gross, but now traversed by otters and kingfishers. You can see the working trainyard, the bike trails and soccer fields, and three glass-domed biomes, another era’s strange idea of how to be with plants. There’s the ungrand downtown skyline, and just out of sight, the yellow bridge named for a socialist mayor. Below the bridge, a water treatment plant processes the city’s sewage before releasing it into Lake Michigan. Eventually the microorganisms that eat the shit will get sold as fertilizer, and this is a socialist legacy, too, a century-old scheme to recycle waste and keep city utilities cheap. There’s a joke in that, or several — in any case, something about the drumlin vantage invites the mind to get mapping. You stand up there and find yourself tracing what is seen and unseen, what remains and what doesn’t, the layers of history, the layers of life.

Take the desire line back down the drumlin for another kind of view, the close texture of a young prairie. Milkweed and coneflowers, compass plants and bee balm. Young aspens stand shock-absorbing the wind. Baby oaks grow slowly, stabilized with stakes. Twenty years ago, this place was a flat, scarred brownfield; today, it is a sprawling restoration project dotted with “glacial” hills rebuilt with highway rubble. At any given moment amidst this new topography, you might see a tree heavy with monarchs resting before migration, or a class teaching kids to fish. There are beavers, mink, and hawks. Some days high schoolers take river samples or tend green infrastructure beds. Some days teams of volunteers fan out to seed or remove plants. Some days burn crews seed prescribed fires, throwing flames from gas cans and water from big metal backpacks. The heat convections the smoke in, up, and away.

How to describe how it feels to encounter this place. In the 80s, the land was slated to become a prison; in the 90s, developers hoped to turn it into lofts and a mall. That something else happened is a minor miracle. A neighborhood health org had to seek better green spaces for a working-class neighborhood plagued by industrial pollution. A New Urbanist mayor had to use eminent domain to seize the land, and a local urban ecology org had to retool their mission for a new center on a different side of town. Five decades earlier, a Red Power campaign had to occupy and win transfer of a Coast Guard station, clearing way for a Potawatomi-owned casino who could later fund ventures across the city. And despite everything that is amazing about this new greenway, it isn’t a utopia. Land restoration practices are at once reparative and haunted by the practices they seek to supplant. Conservation wardens patrol in jeeps that look like just like the Sheriff’s, making visible the connection between policing and the provisioning of public land. A nearby pizza factory is a reliable union-buster, and a neighboring tannery smells like death. Once a year, fighter jets do loop-de-loops over the valley en route to the air show, a vector of militarized entertainment, flying low and loud.

New Drumlin is a press project that takes inspiration from this new drumlin. We are less interested in editorial manifestos than the slow work of seeking more livable political and ecological arrangements. How exactly a book might contribute to this work is an open question, and New Drumlin is a call to ask it frankly. We pursue practical materialism, deep mapping, multi-disciplinary collaboration, experiments in distribution, and robust off-page commitments. Beyond that, we keep our field of operations strategically undescribed.