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Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science
Examining the science of stream restoration, Rebecca Lave argues that the neoliberal emphasis on the privatization and commercialization of knowledge has fundamentally changed the way that science is funded, organized, and viewed in the United States.
Stream restoration science and practice is in a startling state. The most widely respected expert in the field, Dave Rosgen, is a private consultant with relatively little formal scientific training. Since the mid-1990s, many academic and federal agency–based scientists have denounced Rosgen as a charlatan and a hack. Despite this, Rosgen’s Natural Channel Design approach, classification system, and short-course series are not only accepted but are viewed as more legitimate than academically produced knowledge and training. Rosgen’s methods are now promoted by federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, as well as by resource agencies in dozens of states.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Lave demonstrates that the primary cause of Rosgen’s success is neither the method nor the man but is instead the assignment of a new legitimacy to scientific claims developed outside the academy, concurrent with academic scientists’ decreasing ability to defend their turf. What is at stake in the Rosgen wars, argues Lave, is not just the ecological health of our rivers and streams but the very future of environmental science.
Stream restoration science and practice is in a startling state. The most widely respected expert in the field, Dave Rosgen, is a private consultant with relatively little formal scientific training. Since the mid-1990s, many academic and federal agency–based scientists have denounced Rosgen as a charlatan and a hack. Despite this, Rosgen’s Natural Channel Design approach, classification system, and short-course series are not only accepted but are viewed as more legitimate than academically produced knowledge and training. Rosgen’s methods are now promoted by federal agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, as well as by resource agencies in dozens of states.
Drawing on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, Lave demonstrates that the primary cause of Rosgen’s success is neither the method nor the man but is instead the assignment of a new legitimacy to scientific claims developed outside the academy, concurrent with academic scientists’ decreasing ability to defend their turf. What is at stake in the Rosgen wars, argues Lave, is not just the ecological health of our rivers and streams but the very future of environmental science.
- GenresGeographyNonfiction
184 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 2012
About the author
Rebecca Lave
7 books3 followersRebecca Lave is a professor of geography at Indiana University. Her research takes a critical physical geography approach, combining political economy, science and technology studies, and fluvial geomorphology to analyze stream restoration, the politics of environmental expertise, and community-based responses to flooding.
She has published in journals including Science and Social Studies of Science, and is the author of two monographs: “Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science” (2012, University of Georgia Press) and “Streams of Revenues: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates” (2021 MIT Press; co-written with Martin Doyle).
She has published in journals including Science and Social Studies of Science, and is the author of two monographs: “Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science” (2012, University of Georgia Press) and “Streams of Revenues: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates” (2021 MIT Press; co-written with Martin Doyle).
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May 23, 2023
An excellent work that draws on Bourdieu’s theories to analyze the increasing neoliberalization of stream restoration in the United States.
The first chapter is a great overview of the work of Bourdieu that is relevant to the book’s arguments. Lave writes:
“In this book I build that bridge on the analytical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, whose insistence on the centrality of political economy, power, and domination makes his work very compatible with political ecologists’ typical concerns.
…Bourdieu’s key intervention in STS was also one of the first formulations of his field concept, which, along with capital and habitus, forms the heart of his analytical framework (Bourdieu 1975). A field is a bounded, structured social arena that provides a particular set of opportunities and constraints to those who participate in it: religion, science, art, and the state are the core fields, but he also acknowledged the utility of field analysis for understanding the dynamics and structure of any field of practice, from amateur boxing to beauty pageants… To understand the specificity of a field, Bourdieu argues, focus on the forms of power and prestige (capital) that are valued within it and the particular ways in which it shapes the conscious and subconscious practice of participants (the habitus it instills).
Struggle—to delimit the boundaries of the field, to determine conditions of entry, and, most especially, to define the types of capital of most value — is a defining feature of Bourdieu’s profoundly agonistic (combative) field concept. This struggle takes place within the hierarchical structure provided by fields, each of which is organized around an axis whose poles Bourdieu defines as autonomous and heteronomous. At the autonomous end of any field are those actors whose production is controlled most thoroughly by the forms of capital specific to that field; at the heteronomous end are those whose production is shaped primarily by outside forces (figure 1.5). For example, in the literary field, writers with deep artistic credibility but few readers would sit at the autonomous end of the field; Danielle Steele would reign at the heteronomous pole. The relative autonomy of a field can be measured by “the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers,” including those closest to the heteronomous pole, who are “therefore the most responsive to external demands” (Bourdieu 1983, 321).”
The main guy this book sort of revolves around is Dave Rosgen, who's sort of this outsider maverick hydrologist. He's a bit of an entrepreneur that develops Natural Channel Design courses that get widely adopted (via market contacts) by several federal agencies like the EPA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Forest Service. Rosgen is disdained within academic restoration science circles as a charlatan with a PhD that required no course work and was supervised by someone who was effectively his employee. He also refuses to subject his publications to peer review, nor transparently share his data sets for review. The conflict that emerged between Rosgen and more established restoration scientists in academia has come to be known as the Rosgen Wars.
Lave then takes Chapter 2 to provide some context for these skirmishes. She gives a little primer on what stream restoration science is about and what Rosgen’s Natural Channel Design is like as well.
Lave then introduces her reader to Rosgen, how he relates to the field of stream restoration, and the remarkable shift he was able to actualize in the internal power structure of the field — drawing particularly from a case study in North Carolina (Chapter 3).
Next, we follow Rosgen as he climbs in legitimacy as his critics descend. We look at what sort of claims and counterclaims were made in this contestation, and why no one has bothered accumulating data to resolve what are seemingly empirical questions in the debate. We get a good glimpse here of Bourdieu’s theory in action as we follow various forms of capital and credentials deployed, ranging from practical experience, empirical knowledge, modelling skills, and academic status (Chapter 4).
In Chapter 5, Lave explains how Rosgen was able to garner his support base by focusing on day-today practice of stream restoration, and how Natural Channel Design has become central to stream restoration and the field’s new habitus, as Bourdieu would call it.
After this, Lave takes time to propose why Rosgen’s habitus prevailed, and she believes it has to do with the forces of political economy at the time which favoured “market-based environmental management” as well as the “neoliberalization of the production of scientific knowledge claims.” (Chapter 6).
Finally, Lave’s conclusion returns to how the field concept productively brings together STS and political ecology, and then speculates that the Rosgen Wars are just the start, and neoliberalization will likely spread further into the environmental sciences.
The first chapter is a great overview of the work of Bourdieu that is relevant to the book’s arguments. Lave writes:
“In this book I build that bridge on the analytical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, whose insistence on the centrality of political economy, power, and domination makes his work very compatible with political ecologists’ typical concerns.
…Bourdieu’s key intervention in STS was also one of the first formulations of his field concept, which, along with capital and habitus, forms the heart of his analytical framework (Bourdieu 1975). A field is a bounded, structured social arena that provides a particular set of opportunities and constraints to those who participate in it: religion, science, art, and the state are the core fields, but he also acknowledged the utility of field analysis for understanding the dynamics and structure of any field of practice, from amateur boxing to beauty pageants… To understand the specificity of a field, Bourdieu argues, focus on the forms of power and prestige (capital) that are valued within it and the particular ways in which it shapes the conscious and subconscious practice of participants (the habitus it instills).
Struggle—to delimit the boundaries of the field, to determine conditions of entry, and, most especially, to define the types of capital of most value — is a defining feature of Bourdieu’s profoundly agonistic (combative) field concept. This struggle takes place within the hierarchical structure provided by fields, each of which is organized around an axis whose poles Bourdieu defines as autonomous and heteronomous. At the autonomous end of any field are those actors whose production is controlled most thoroughly by the forms of capital specific to that field; at the heteronomous end are those whose production is shaped primarily by outside forces (figure 1.5). For example, in the literary field, writers with deep artistic credibility but few readers would sit at the autonomous end of the field; Danielle Steele would reign at the heteronomous pole. The relative autonomy of a field can be measured by “the extent to which it manages to impose its own norms and sanctions on the whole set of producers,” including those closest to the heteronomous pole, who are “therefore the most responsive to external demands” (Bourdieu 1983, 321).”
The main guy this book sort of revolves around is Dave Rosgen, who's sort of this outsider maverick hydrologist. He's a bit of an entrepreneur that develops Natural Channel Design courses that get widely adopted (via market contacts) by several federal agencies like the EPA, US Fish and Wildlife Service, and US Forest Service. Rosgen is disdained within academic restoration science circles as a charlatan with a PhD that required no course work and was supervised by someone who was effectively his employee. He also refuses to subject his publications to peer review, nor transparently share his data sets for review. The conflict that emerged between Rosgen and more established restoration scientists in academia has come to be known as the Rosgen Wars.
Lave then takes Chapter 2 to provide some context for these skirmishes. She gives a little primer on what stream restoration science is about and what Rosgen’s Natural Channel Design is like as well.
Lave then introduces her reader to Rosgen, how he relates to the field of stream restoration, and the remarkable shift he was able to actualize in the internal power structure of the field — drawing particularly from a case study in North Carolina (Chapter 3).
Next, we follow Rosgen as he climbs in legitimacy as his critics descend. We look at what sort of claims and counterclaims were made in this contestation, and why no one has bothered accumulating data to resolve what are seemingly empirical questions in the debate. We get a good glimpse here of Bourdieu’s theory in action as we follow various forms of capital and credentials deployed, ranging from practical experience, empirical knowledge, modelling skills, and academic status (Chapter 4).
In Chapter 5, Lave explains how Rosgen was able to garner his support base by focusing on day-today practice of stream restoration, and how Natural Channel Design has become central to stream restoration and the field’s new habitus, as Bourdieu would call it.
After this, Lave takes time to propose why Rosgen’s habitus prevailed, and she believes it has to do with the forces of political economy at the time which favoured “market-based environmental management” as well as the “neoliberalization of the production of scientific knowledge claims.” (Chapter 6).
Finally, Lave’s conclusion returns to how the field concept productively brings together STS and political ecology, and then speculates that the Rosgen Wars are just the start, and neoliberalization will likely spread further into the environmental sciences.
August 12, 2019
An interesting book that draws attention to a pressing issue: the neoliberalization (and by extension, commodification and commercialization) of ecological restoration. My main critique is that it focuses too closely on one particular issue, that being the debate over natural channel design in stream restoration, rather than providing a more holistic overview on the subject.
September 16, 2022
It’s an interesting book and topic. Lave is a strong writer though, as a whole, it was a little too academic to make for easy reading. Which is to be expected given it stems from her dissertation. It’s a bit heavier on the political ecology than I expected; I most enjoyed the discussion of stream restoration science.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews