Rebecca Lave

Contributions of cultural services to the ecosystem services agenda

Cultural ecosystem services (ES) are consistently recognized but not yet adequately defined or integrated within the ES framework. A substantial body of models, methods, and data relevant to cultural services has been developed within the social and behavioral sciences before and outside of the ES approach. A selective review of work in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance demonstrates opportunities for operationally defining cultural services in terms of socioecological models, consistent with the larger set of ES. Such models explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits, facilitating communication between scientists and stakeholders and enabling economic, multicriterion, deliberative evaluation and other methods that can clarify tradeoffs and synergies involving cultural ES. Based on this approach, a common representation is offered that frames cultural services, along with all ES, by the relative contribution of relevant ecological structures and functions and by applicable social evaluation approaches. This perspective provides a foundation for merging ecological and social science epistemologies to define and integrate cultural services better within the broader ES framework.

Introduction: STS and Neoliberal Science

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.

Privatizing stream restoration in the US

In this paper, we use a case study of the stream restoration field to demonstrate how the particular state and market logics of neoliberalism are shifting both the practice of restoration scientists and the relations between public and private sector science. In particular, the embrace of neoliberal environmental management regimes has intensified the demand for environmental scientists to produce applied science that can: (1) be taught as a standardized package; (2) be used by agencies to justify decisions; and (3) form the basis for new markets in ecosystems services. At this point, private sector science produces the most influential knowledge claims, the most widely used applications, and the primary educational system for stream restoration in the US. We argue that the needs of markets and regulatory agencies are heavily implicated in this privatization process, and that the resulting impacts on restoration science and the dynamics of the stream restoration field in the US thus cannot be described without attention to political—economic relations.

Stacking ecosystem services

Ecosystem service markets are increasingly used as a policy solution to environmental problems ranging from endangered species to climate change. Such markets trade in ecosystem credits created at restoration sites where conservation projects are designed and built to compensate for regulated environmental impacts. “Credit stacking” occurs when multiple, spatially overlapping credits representing different ecosystem services are sold separately to compensate for different impacts. Discussion of stacking has grown rapidly over the past three years, and it will generate increasing interest given the growing multibillion-dollar international market in carbon, habitat, and water-quality credits. Because ecosystem functions at compensation sites are interdependent and integrated, stacking may result in net environmental losses. Unless stacked compensation sites and impact sites are treated symmetrically in the accounting of environmental gains and losses, stacking may also cause environmental gains at compensa...

Bridging Political Ecology and STS: A Field Analysis of the Rosgen Wars

Since the late 1990s there have been many calls to bring critical geography into conversation with science and technology studies (STS). Although the strongest cross-fertilization to date has been ontological, political economy is another productive area for conversation between the two fields. More specifically, I argue that fully understanding the role that environmental science plays in expropriation requires expanding our focus of analysis to include not just the application of science but also its production and circulation. Through a field analysis of the Rosgen Wars, a fight that has convulsed the American stream restoration field since the mid-1990s, I demonstrate how Bourdieus analytical framework can bridge political ecology and STS, revealing the political economic relations central to the development of scientific knowledge claims, education, authority, and policy.

Why You Should Pay Attention to Stream Mitigation Banking

tream mitigation banking is rapidly becoming a major driver of the stream restoration industry, particularly in the Southeast. Like other types of mitigation banking regulated by the Clean Water Act Section 404 program, stream mitigation banking (SMB) gives developers the option to offset construction impacts by purchasing “credits.” These credits are generated by for-profit companies that restore damaged streams on a speculative basis and are approved by federal regulatory agencies. In states such as North Carolina, SMB has now eclipsed wetlands banking in terms of number of credits bought and sold. SMB is becoming a major private-sector source of stream restoration funding, perhaps presaging a major shift in what has been until now a predominantly publicly funded market. In addition to its growing eco-nomic importance, the emerging practice of SMB is worth attention because many of the tensions and debates that have been settled in the more established practice of wet-lands mitigation banking are still unresolved, and thus potentially open to input from practitioners and scientists. The most important of these are the proper amount and location of compensation, and how stream credits should be certified and measured.Mitigation banking began in the early 1990s, when private developers frustrated with the slow pace of Section 404 permitting and the high cost of creating new on-site wetlands proposed the creation of large consolidated areas of constructed wetlands as advance compensation to the Chicago, Savannah, and Jacksonville Districts of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps). Working together, developers and local Corps and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) staff developed the regulatory rules necessary to define, create, and maintain a market in a new commod-ity: wetlands credits (Robertson 2006). As will by now be familiar to most

The morphology of streams restored for market and nonmarket purposes: Insights from a mixed natural‐social science approach

We use geomorphic surveys to quantify the differences between restored and nonrestored streams, and the difference between streams restored for market purposes (compensatory mitigation) from those restored for nonmarket programs. We also analyze the social and political-economic drivers of the stream restoration and mitigation industry using analysis of policy documents and interviews with key personnel including regulators, mitigation bankers, stream designers, and scientists. Restored streams are typically wider and geomorphically more homogenous than nonrestored streams. Streams restored for the mitigation market are typically headwater streams and part of a large, complex of long restored main channels, and many restored tributaries; streams restored for nonmarket purposes are typically shorter and consist of the main channel only. Interviews reveal that designers integrate many influences including economic and regulatory constraints, but traditions of practice have a large influence as well. Thus, social forces shape the morphology of restored streams.

The Future of Environmental Expertise

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.

Introduction to special issue on critical physical geography

The relationship (or lack thereof) between physical and human geography is a longstanding discussion within our field. In PiPG alone there have been dozens of articles that raise the issue over more than three decades. Some authors call for physical/human synthesis (e.g. Bracken and Oughton’s 2009 special issue of Area; Clifford, 2002; Harrison et al.’s 2008 special issue of Geoforum; Massey, 1999; Thornes, 1981); others are less convinced that deep integration is feasible, or even desirable (e.g. Demeritt, 2009; Johnston, 1983; Johnston, 2012; Thrift, 2002). But even a brief review of the literature makes two points glaringly clear: this discussion has been going on for decades and, given its regular reoccurrence, it would seem we have remarkably little to show for it. A great deal of ink and angst has been expended on the topic of integrating our field, and yet physical and human geography appear to have remained stubbornly, and in some cases hostilely, separate. Given that long and not notably effective history, why would you bother to read this special issue? Because the articles that follow depart from every paper cited above in one very important way: instead of calling for integrated work, they do it, demonstrating the scientific and political utility of integrating critical human and physical geography in practice. Individually or in teams, the authors in this special issue work across the divide, combining insights from geomorphology, ecology, and biogeography with approaches from participatory action research, political ecology, science and technology studies, and environmental history. While these authors hail from disparate geographic fields, the broad approach they share is critical physical geography (Lave, 2014; Lave et al., 2014), a new field that combines

Introducing Critical Physical Geography

In this chapter, the Handbook editors introduce the emerging field of Critical Physical Geography. We explain its core tenets and its primary methodological principles and epistemological assumptions. We address intellectual and practical barriers to the kind of careful integrative eco-social research that typifies Critical Physical Geography and also the reasons why it is worth overcoming those barriers. After an overview of the structure of the Handbook, we close with a discussion of why the field of Geography is home to this effort to integrate attention to power relations and their material impacts with deep knowledge of particular biophysical systems.