100th Anniversary Lecture with Rebecca Lave

Flooding is increasing in frequency and magnitude in many parts of the US, leading to calls for increased structural protection from dams and levees.  But such structures are expensive, environmentally damaging, and inflexible once built; further, as Gilbert White pointed out 80 years ago, dams and levees can actually increase the impact of floods by luring people and development into areas at risk of catastrophic inundation when structures fail. For many, Natural Flood Management (NFM) is an appealing alternative and a marked departure from the cost, environmental harm, and risk of flood control structures. NFM hopes to attenuate flooding by slowing water down and increasing infiltration through techniques such as reforestation and land management change. This is a compelling approach in theory, but it is not yet clear if NFM can provide effective flood attenuation in practice. Neither modeling nor empirical evidence from its limited deployment in test catchments suggest that NFM can be a major force in flood attenuation, creating a Catch 22: without evidence of its effectiveness, NFM cannot be widely deployed, but until it is widely deployed it cannot be proven effective. Our current work seeks to escape this Catch-22 through analysis of historical cases in the US Midwest where techniques that would today fit under the umbrella of NFM were widely adopted. In this talk, I report on how we are combining spatial analysis, hydrology, environmental history, STS and political economy to assess whether past approaches might provide the seeds of a very different approach to flood attenuation in the future.

 

Rebecca Lave is Associate Dean for the Social & Historical Sciences at Indiana University and Past President of the American Association of Geographers.  Her research takes a Critical Physical Geography approach, combining political economy, STS, and fluvial geomorphology to analyze stream restoration, the politics of environmental expertise, and non-structural approaches to flooding.  Her most recent book, The Field Guide to Mixing Social and Biophysical Methods in Environmental Research came out (open access!) in 2025.