A remarkable account of Montana's efforts to save its trout streams and rivers from pollution and neglect. The fabled nature of Montana's streams cannot be taken for granted. In the late 1800s many of Montana's rivers were filled with pollution and dying fish. Certain key conservation and restoration policies between 1900 and 1940 set the stage for the waters that now draw visitors and anglers from around the world. Yet, many of those same rivers and streams are once again facing devastating environmental threats. Montana is a paradigm for conservation issues that are faced around the nation and around the world. Yet, no one has ever managed to tell the story of the policies and unique policy makers who made this all possible. And, no one has therefore been able to turn back to that history as a source of direction for dealing with the ongoing environmental challenges facing streams everywhere.

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.

A young Indian woman, accompanied by her infant and her cruel husband, experiences joy and heartbreak when she joins the Lewis and Clark expedition seeking a way to the Pacific.

Aldo Leopold, father of the "land ethic," once said, "The time has come for science to busy itself with the earth itself. The first step is to reconstruct a sample of what we had to begin with." The concept he expressedâ€"restorationâ€"is defined in this comprehensive new volume that examines the prospects for repairing the damage society has done to the nation's aquatic resources: lakes, rivers and streams, and wetlands. Restoration of Aquatic Ecosystems outlines a national strategy for aquatic restoration, with practical recommendations, and features case studies of aquatic restoration activities around the country. The committee examines: Key concepts and techniques used in restoration. Common factors in successful restoration efforts. Threats to the health of the nation's aquatic ecosystems. Approaches to evaluation before, during, and after a restoration project. The emerging specialties of restoration and landscape ecology.

This book deals with the ecology of rivers and streams in the Oriental Region, and describes the composition of their unique fauna - especially the diverse array of animals which live on and among the bottom sediments. Dichotomous keys are provided as an aid to the identification of these animals, and the book is illustrated by over 100 pages of line drawings and maps. Special emphasis is given to the impact of human activities on streams and rivers, and the book concludes with a discussion of conservation and management options for these endangered habitats.

An analysis of stream mitigation banking and the challenges of implementing market-based approaches to environmental conservation. Market-based approaches to environmental conservation have been increasingly prevalent since the early 1990s. The goal of these markets is to reduce environmental harm not by preventing it, but by pricing it. A housing development on land threaded with streams, for example, can divert them into underground pipes if the developer pays to restore streams elsewhere. But does this increasingly common approach actually improve environmental well-being? In Streams of Revenue, Rebecca Lave and Martin Doyle answer this question by analyzing the history, implementation, and environmental outcomes of one of these markets: stream mitigation banking. In stream mitigation banking, an entrepreneur speculatively restores a stream, generating “stream credits” that can be purchased by a developer to fulfill regulatory requirements of the Clean Water Act. Tracing mitigation banking from conceptual beginnings to implementation, the authors find that in practice it is very difficult to establish equivalence between the ecosystems harmed and those that are restored, and to cope with the many sources of uncertainty that make positive restoration outcomes unlikely. Lave and Doyle argue that market-based approaches have failed to deliver on conservation goals and call for a radical reconfiguration of the process.

The ecology of rivers and streams; Types of rivers; The biota of rivers; Management, conservation, and restoration of rivers.

Ann L. Riley describes an interdisciplinary approach to stream management that does not attempt to control streams, but rather considers the stream as a feature in the urban environment. She presents a logical sequence of land-use planning, site design, and watershed restoration measures along with stream channel modifications and floodproofing strategies that can be used in place of destructive and expensive public works projects. She features examples of effective and environmentally sensitive bank stabilization and flood damage reduction projects, with information on both the planning processes and end results. Chapters provide: history of urban stream management and restoration; information on federal programs, technical assistance, and funding opportunities; and in-depth guidance on implementing projects: collecting watershed and stream channel data, installing revegetation projects, protecting buildings from overbank stream flows.

This document is a cooperative effort among fifteen Federal agencies and partners to produce a common reference on stream corridor restoration. It responds to a growing national and international interest in restoring stream corridors.