This chapter explores the concept of ditching as a tactic, both materially and metaphorically, for minimally disruptive change. Using the Black Dirt Region in New York State as a case study, the chapter examines how engagement at a very small, local scale can impact large, dynamic urban-natural systems. A history of the transformation of the Drowned Lands to the Black Dirt region explores how grass-roots drainage associations urbanized watersheds as part of the large-scale transformation of wetlands across the United States. The subsequent management of the Black Dirt as an infrastructure is critiqued through examining how the dynamic processes of this ditch-scape, from erosion to land subsidence, make the region ever more vulnerable to climatic risk. The second half of the chapter explores what it would mean to reframe the Black Dirt not as, to paraphrase Latour, simply a landscape of production, but instead as a landscape of process. Reframing the ditch from an object into an apparatus through the concept of ‘ditching’, offers the potential to both understand and intervene in the cultural and ecological entanglements of urban regions, through a linear zone that spans the aquatic to the terrestrial to the atmospheric. Examples of ‘unditching’ and ‘deditching’ are explored, as well as how collective actions of maintenance and reconstruction can be re-designed to new ends in the context of rising climatic challenges. Through working with processes living and material, human and elemental, ditching can be imagined as a radical, ameliorative act to bring our politics and our design practices “down to earth.”