Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science by Rebecca Lave (review)

The two billion dollar a year industry you didn’t know about: with a stronghold in the southeast, environmental consultants and state regulators across the U.S. are hard at work trying to turn entrenched, chemical-laden, and otherwise trashed streams back into more valuable habitats. Their efforts are often driven by laws like the Clean Water Act, and frontline regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers require some kind of scientific input about how streams can be restored, and what counts as good stream restoration. This is far from a simple task. One Dave Rosgen has charged onto the scene, answering with a streamlined vision of streams that has variously enthralled and outraged consultants, scientists, and regulators in the industry. Likewise, it’s into this debate that Rebecca Lave wades in her new book, Fields and Streams: Stream Restoration, Neoliberalism, and the Future of Environmental Science. She provides not only a voice of reason in the debate, but makes clear by focusing on Rosgen’s work that the “Rosgen Wars” teach us how to understand more broadly the trajectory of environmental science today.

The argument in Fields and Streams is that Dave Rosgen’s success and his vilification are both products of changing political economic circumstances. His step by step guide to restoration (dubbed “Natural Channel Design”) and system of stream metrics and classification have become the most legitimate way of thinking about stream restoration because they are straightforward enough for private consultants to deploy and easy for regulators in state agencies stressed by neoliberalization to act upon. This systematic set of principles and metrics for restoration that was developed in the Rockies is supposed to apply anywhere. Dubbing a bottomland sinuous stream an “E6” stream makes that stream understandable to anyone across the country and gives time-crunched decision-makers a quick reference for decisions regarding management and restoration, like when they ask housing developers to restore the same type of stream they paved over. Rosgen has also been vilified precisely because of what he’s offered, even though other researchers, particularly university academics, have failed to produce the kind of stream science regulators and consultants find useful. When Lave talks about the future of environmental science, the uncertain role of public universities is what she’s concerned with.

The first chapter outlines Lave’s novel approach to environmental science and political economy. Setting out to bridge political ecology and science and technology studies (STS), she makes a useful distinction between the production, circulation, and application of knowledge. While STS researchers have characterized many of those moments, they have shied away from thinking about political economic forces that shape them. Political ecologists are quick to point to political and economic forces in the circulation and application of environmental science, but not its production. For Lave, the goal is to see all three moments as both worked on by and working on state and market forces, a goal for which the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu provides a schema. The approach here may require followers to read up on Bourdieu, but the concepts—habitus and field—are fairly intuitive and Lave provides easy to understand examples before deploying them.

When fleshed out, the theory here is not overbearing but arises out of close analysis. Indeed, Lave’s own stream science background comes from extensive research nationwide, including participation alongside regulatory staff and consultants at Rosgen’s NCD trainings. The key chapter in the book is the fourth, in which Lave guides us through the substance of what are called the Rosgen Wars. Under contention is whether NCD erroneously implies that stream functions follow stream form, or, as the title of the book itself alludes to, whether “if you build it, they will come.” But...