Rebecca Lave, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 2012, 184 pages, $59.95 hardback, $22.95 paper, ISBN 9780820343914 (hardback), 9780820343921 (paper).

One would not expect a benign-sounding occupation like stream restoration to be associated with “wars,” but rivers are contested objects of public concern. As Rebecca Lave shows, they are also objects of scholarly concern for social and natural scientists alike. Lave’s interpretation of the “Rosgen Wars,” named after stream restoration entrepreneur Dave Rosgen, exposes the way in which the neoliberal regime has deepened the division between the slow experimentation of positivist scientists versus the quicker solutions of on-the-ground practitioners.

Without her analysis, the story would remain esoteric, but Lave makes an example of this case that connects social science with natural systems, illustrates power dynamics within the emerging ecosystem service sector, and uncovers some very real weaknesses in higher education. The book’s title reveals its intention to mix theory and subject. The word “fields” here refers to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of field while evoking an image of a place in nature where streams are found. In relying so heavily on Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, Lave invites the reader to judge her work through his criteria, and it is in this evaluation where this book succeeds beyond expectation.

The theoretical framework of field, capital, and habitus is critical for exposing the power dynamics involved in challenging the authority of scientists to make claims – a dynamic in which, in Lave’s view, the scientists are losing. Restorationists skipping the introduction for the juicier gossip of Chapter 2’s who’s who in the battle over how to measure watershed dynamics would miss how the shared frameworks of everyone involved – Rosgen, funders, and academics alike –  reproduce a commitment to the market that is so entrenched it goes unnoticed. Likewise, social scientists who might be tempted to skip Chapter 2’s careful description of the “wadeability” of a river would miss how rivers spatially link the water supply to markets, labor, and pollutants.

It is here where Lave accomplishes what many scholars drawn to interdisciplinary studies aspire to –  to stand confidently in two separated academic disciplines, in this case, sociology and fluvial geomorphology. The need to integrate the sciences has been made apparent for decades (for example, Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 225), but solid examples are few and far between. Let this book be a guide in showing what the social sciences can do for the natural sciences – indeed, it has already been praised in the geomorphology community for holding up a mirror to their operations (Doyle, 2013). In retracing the emergence of stream restoration, Lave places it within the current socio-political mood. Stream restoration, the process of converting a stream from “degraded” to “healthy,” has been embedded into the US legal framework as a requirement of the Clean Water Act. The negative impacts of urbanization and industrialization on streams are known, yet, society still carries an ideology of growth (Lave: 26). As society makes more and more demands on natural resources, it is not the environmental scientists who are responding to the goal of “undoing anthropological damage” (page 24), but one self-taught practitioner, Dave Rosgen.

The practice of stream restoration requires a breadth of knowledge in a range of topics. But academia is ill-suited to produce competitive job candidates in the field since programs often privilege depth in one discipline. Tellingly, Lave could not find a university in the United States that offers a comprehensive stream restoration program. Rosgen fills this gap by offering a shorter, cheaper alternative to a PhD packaged as a four-level course. Critics warn that this approach could cause more harm than good by unleashing poorly trained practitioners into the field to create inappropriate stream channels. Yet, Rosgen’s course design, known as Natural Channel Design (NCD), has been so successful that government agencies require his workshop for those applying for contracts. Even applicants with a PhD can be deemed unqualified without his certification. Rosgen is not so much extending the market as much as responding to it, and his success in doing so directly challenges the dominant authority of academic scientists to make knowledge claims about natural resources.

Lave suggests that this is happening in a particularly critical moment. She makes a distinction between publicly-funded Cold War science management and today’s commercialized focus on applying science to social problems. She explains how the processes of production, circulation, and application of knowledge claims were once viewed as separate, but have since become one. For instance, Rosgen succeeds by producing his work with circulation and application in mind by packaging it into a ready-made classification system that can be packed up and shipped to anywhere in the country. As further evidence of a new moment of science due to neoliberal dominance, Lave points to the fact that the primary funding arm of US science, the National Science Foundation, shifted policy in 1997 to require that all research must “have a broader impact” – code for applied work. In this way, the penetration of neoliberal values into the academic landscape allows the goals of outsiders to shape the new ways of acting in the world of science.

It is here where Lave lays out her argument grounded in the theory of Bourdieu. In order to circumvent the system – in order for someone to gain the support of the neoliberal market regime despite the ruling establishment (in this case, academia) –  one must follow a simple rule: mirror the habitus of the formal structure (in this case, neoliberalism). Rosgen does this by targeting distinct material to his audience, providing a continuous flow of information, creating a confined environment where his ideas cannot be questioned, and employing a specific form of teamwork that creates social capital between students. Academia, on the other hand, has not adapted as completely to the neoliberal agenda. The combined effect of Rosgen’s course, Lave argues, is a system that reflects the overall societal structure enough to make real social change within the system of how knowledge claims are made.

There is not much to critique in this book. It is path-breaking as an example of how to link the social and natural sciences, careful in its treatment of a politically hot topic, and beautiful as a sociological analysis of an occupational field. Despite its elegance, Lave fails to comment on how the set up between Rosgen and environmental scientists undermines the broader project of restoring streams. As Lave herself mentions, Rosgen does not see himself in competition with scientists. Instead, he sees himself as fighting the forces of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) whose civil works programs have often resulted in negative consequences to ecological health. The real fight is not even between Rosgen and USACE either, rather, between nature and society’s ideas of what “nature” should look like. For example, the United States is spending billions of dollars in the name of stream restoration without collecting biophysical measures. In a meta-analysis in which Lave participated, an estimated $14-15 billion has been spent on stream restoration in the United States since 1990 (Bernhardt et al. 2005). Of the over 37,000 restored rivers in the study, only 10% evaluated the performance of the stated goals: to enhance water quality, manage riparian zones, improve habitat, improve fish passage, or stabilize the bank (Bernhardt et al. 2005).

In other words, using the scientific method of testing hypotheses through monitoring results is not common practice. This suggests that the stream restoration business is not about science at all but allaying society’s anxieties about anthropomorphic damage to the environment. The problem facing stream restoration is not whether scientists or practitioners have authoritative control over knowledge, but the group division between those who are knowledgeable. To suggest an application for her work might be a neoliberalist action, but Lave could have concluded the book with a process for Rosgen’s supporters and critics to use her new perspective in finding a way to put down their ideological weapons and collaborate to make stream restoration both economically and ecologically viable. Until they do, it is the streams that lose the war. 

References

Bernhardt E, et. al. (2005) Synthesizing US river restoration efforts. Science 308(5722): 636.

Bourdieu P and LJ Wacquant L (1992) An invitation to reflexive sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Doyle M (2013) Fields and Streams: Stream restoration, neoliberalism, and the future of environmental science. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union 94(9): 92-93.