The controversy over Natural Channel Design (NCD) has perplexed, and sometimes paralyzed, the stream restoration community in the United States for more than a decade. Despite the high level of ...energy expended by participants on both sides, the content of the discussion has not advanced significantly. The two sides seem to be talking past each other, rather than engaging in constructive conversation. This paper attempts to start that conversation. Based on five years of primarily social science research, this paper explains the key components of the NCD approach, evaluates a number of the most common objections raised by its critics, offers a brief explanation for the widespread use of NCD, and concludes with suggestions about how to bring the controversy to a close.
The Future of Environmental Expertise Lave, Rebecca
Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
03/2015, Letnik:
105, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Many have observed the decline of scientific authority over the last three decades, for reasons ranging from the toxic legacies of Cold War science (Beck 1992), to the current commercialization and ...privatization of knowledge production (Mirowski 2011), to the success of social constructivist critique (Latour 2004). Whatever the cause(s), it seems clear that the relationship among academia, the military, and state and economic elites is shifting once again. A new regime of knowledge production is emerging (Pestre 2003) in which academia carries significantly less clout than it has over the previous half-century, and broadly legitimate knowledge claims are increasingly developed outside of the academy. These changes carry obvious implications for the future of academic legitimacy and institutions. The implications for environmental and social justice are less obvious, although perhaps even more important, as the ways in which knowledge is vetted and the questions investigated (or ignored) shift. In this article, I use exploration of the changing relationship between academic and extramural knowledge producers to lay out potential futures for the production of environmental knowledge. I argue that although academics have been notably unsuccessful in challenging private-sector, commercialized environmental knowledge claims, we are increasingly successful in leveraging our remaining authority to enable the democratization of knowledge production to intellectually and politically progressive ends.
In order for nature/society scholars to understand the dynamics of environmental appropriation, commercialization, and privatization, we must attend to the production of the environmental science ...that enables them. Case studies from anthropology, geography, history of science, science and technology studies, and sociology demonstrate that the neoliberal forces whose application we study and contest are also changing the production of environmental knowledge claims both inside and outside the university. Neoliberalism's core epistemological claim about the market's superiority as information processor has made restructuring the university a surprisingly central project. Further, because knowledge has become a key site of capital accumulation, the transformative reach of neoliberal science regimes extends outside the university into the various forms of extramural science, such as citizen science, crowdsourcing, indigenous knowledge, and local knowledge. Neoliberal science regimes' impacts on these forms of extramural science are strikingly similar, and quite different from the most common consequences within academia.
Lave, Rebecca, 2009. The Controversy Over Natural Channel Design: Substantive Explanations and Potential Avenues for Resolution. Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA) ...45(6):1519‐1532.
: The controversy over Natural Channel Design (NCD) has perplexed, and sometimes paralyzed, the stream restoration community in the United States for more than a decade. Despite the high level of energy expended by participants on both sides, the content of the discussion has not advanced significantly. The two sides seem to be talking past each other, rather than engaging in constructive conversation. This paper attempts to start that conversation. Based on five years of primarily social science research, this paper explains the key components of the NCD approach, evaluates a number of the most common objections raised by its critics, offers a brief explanation for the widespread use of NCD, and concludes with suggestions about how to bring the controversy to a close.
•Ecological and economic goals for stream restoration are deeply contradictory.•Along with methodological uncertainty, this contradiction threatened restoration’s future.•Rosgen raised expectations ...by asserting that restored channels could be natural and stable.•Those generative expectations enabled both Rosgen’s and the stream restoration field’s success.
The modern holistic wave of stream restoration was born in the 1970s from the combined support of a strong grassroots movement and new federal environmental legislation, most notably the Clean Water Act. Before holistic stream restoration could properly start, however, it was stopped in its tracks by two big issues: were the far more intensive interventions necessary to holistic restoration actually doable; and was it possible to reconcile the ecological goals of setting streams and rivers free with the powerful economic demands to minimize impacts from flooding and erosion? Taken together, these two issue called the whole project of stream restoration into doubt. But then a consultant, Dave Rosgen, stepped up with a restoration approach that promised both freedom and constraint: picturesque rivers teaming with game fish in a channel that stayed where it was put. Drawing on the sociology of expectations literature within STS, I argue that it was the expectations raised by this apparent resolution of the contradiction at the heart of stream restoration that transformed both Rosgen and the restoration field from shaky prospects into contenders, setting the stage for the exponential growth of stream restoration, and Rosgen’s success within in it.
Whether (and how) physical and human geography should be integrated is a longstanding debate in our field. I return here to two entries in this debate from the early years of Progress in Physical ...Geography. While John Thornes’ 1981 progress report on atmospheric science reads like an early call for critical physical geography, the focus of this special issue, Ron Johnston’s 1983 article emphatically asserts that no such synthesis is intellectually or practically necessary. I argue, however, that Johnston’s article, perhaps inadvertently, lays the groundwork for integrated research.
Taking a critical physical geography approach, this article provides the first side‐by‐side review of the physical and social literature on hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” as it is frequently ...referred to. We note the striking disparities between the physical science literature's description of the relatively manageable impacts of fracking and the almost apocalyptic tone taken in some popular press and critical social science literature. We argue that these disparities may be a result of the dramatic shift in the geography of energy production in the US. The rise of fracking has redistributed environmental injustices beyond traditional national sacrifice zones, such as Appalachia, and towards regions that in many cases are wealthier than Appalachia and have not recently borne the brunt of energy production, causing profound social, cultural, and economic shocks. Reviewing the physical and social science literature together suggests that we reconsider the fracking research agenda. Studies of the physical impacts of hydraulic fracturing should be expanded to address communities' concerns about habitat fragmentation and the impacts of the myriad truck trips required to service fracking wells, neither of which currently are given much attention. Social science research on fracking could benefit from an increase in comparative work, assessing the relative economic and social impacts in regions where energy production is ramping up in relation to regions where it is declining.
Whether (and how) physical and human geography should be integrated is a longstanding debate in our field. I return here to two entries in this debate from the early years of Progress in Physical ...Geography . While John Thornes' 1981 progress report on atmospheric science reads like an early call for critical physical geography, the focus of this special issue, Ron Johnston's 1983 article emphatically asserts that no such synthesis is intellectually or practically necessary. I argue, however, that Johnston's article, perhaps inadvertently, lays the groundwork for integrated research.
•We conducted a Q-method survey of US stream restoration practitioners.•We designed and used the Q-TIP survey platform (https://qtip.geography.wisc.edu/).•Participants expressed four different views ...of stream restoration assessment.•These views vary on the feasibility of measuring outcomes.•Methodological rules of thumb limit Q, but we demonstrate unconventional approaches.
We present results from a Q-method survey on a key question in water governance and reflect on Q-method as an approach that quantitatively distinguishes qualitative subject-positions. The survey was conducted with the Q-TIP platform, which we designed for the study and is now open to all researchers (https://qtip.geography.wisc.edu/). Our study asked how stream restoration should be evaluated in state regulatory programs. Streams are dynamic and multi-scalar geomorphological, chemical, biological, as well as socio-cultural systems and it is not obvious what good restoration means or how it should be assessed. Across the stream restoration community we found four different priorities, each of which differently characterizes the feasibility of assessing outcomes. These four perspectives were that metrics of success should: (a) be rigorous and site-focused; (b) be simple and easy to implement in the field; (c) capture complexity; (d) reflect innovations in watershed planning, ecosystem functions, and stakeholder inclusion. These subject-positions on assessment do not, however, map cleanly onto informant profession or background, and a single informant can hold more than one view. Despite relatively limited uptake in geography, Q offers the promise of a critical quantitative approach to researching subjectivity in a way that is compatible with poststructural understandings of identity. We use our case material to show that methodological rules of thumb limit Q’s potential, but we demonstrate unconventional approaches. Drawing on the process and results of our survey of stream restoration practitioners, we argue that Q-method can help in the task of representing subjectivity while respecting its complexity.
Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science Lave, Rebecca; Mirowski, Philip; Randalls, Samuel
Social studies of science,
10/2010, Letnik:
40, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this special issue, we focus on the particular impacts of neoliberalism as a regime of scientific management. Drawing on a wide range of studies from other fields, as well as the four cases in ...this issue, we argue that while there are important differences in how neoliberalism has been implemented across nations and disciplines, there are a set of key principles and common outcomes that can serve a heuristic function for STS scholars attempting a more careful examination of neoliberalism. These common outcomes include: the rollback of public funding for universities; the separation of research and teaching missions, leading to rising numbers of temporary faculty; the dissolution of the scientific author; the narrowing of research agendas to focus on the needs of commercial actors; an increasing reliance on market take-up to adjudicate intellectual disputes; and the intense fortification of intellectual property in an attempt to commercialize knowledge, impeding the production and dissemination of science. Taken together, these shifts suggest that the impact of neoliberal science policy and management extends far beyond the patent system into the methods, organization, and content of science. We thus urge STS scholars to undertake a detailed exploration of exactly how the external political—economic forces of neoliberalism are transforming technoscience.
