Streams of Revenue: The Restoration Economy and the Ecosystems It Creates

by Rebecca Lave, Martin Doyle

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Paperback

Published January 26, 2021

About the author

Rebecca 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).

Reviews

[Joe M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Certainly worth what little time it took me to read it, but after 140 pages painstakingly examining the history of stream restoration & MES, the 10-page conclusion felt Sopranos-level abrupt. "Maximize uncertainty" sounds like harsh medicine after you've spent seven chapters explaining why regulatory markets abhor uncertainty.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While a bit dry, this was an interesting deep dive into the intersection between markets and regulation, as well as the difficulties in meeting the desires of various market participants. In this case, guidelines are often influenced by the desire for ease of measurement rather than positive ecosystem impact.

[Adam Weis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting overview of stream mitigation banking and how market-based conservation doesn't work so well to actually achieve ecological goals. Some nice history in there too, shout-out Greg and Inter-Fluve- glad we don't do mitigation banking!