River Restoration: Disappointing, Nascent, Yet Desperately Needed

Abstract Earth is undergoing systemic global ecological collapse caused by human civilization. If the same currency ratio spent on fighting crisis to bearing damages was applied as that evident in addressing crime, then the United States alone would spend $1.1 trillion annually on ecological stewardship. However, would ecosystem scientists, managers, and engineers successfully spend such wealth to avert collapse? No. This article explores scientific and institutional dilemmas hindering the disappointing, nascent ecological engineering subfield of river restoration. Whereas other reviews place most blame on practioners, this article takes academic science to task for setting up failure by accepting statistical correlation over mechanistic understanding. Rather than just criticize though, this article provides hopeful ideas to improve river science and the practice of ecological engineering of rivers.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Reference Module in Earth Systems and Environmental Sciences

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Political Science, Engineering, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/b978-0-12-409548-9.12449-2
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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