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River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region's rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.

This article reviews the work of several sets of researchers prominent in current debates over how sustainability might be interpreted and achieved. The notion of ‘sustainable development’ has reached a conceptual dead-end. Geographers may offer more effective investigations and critiques of socioecological transformations by instead focusing on ‘sustainability’ and its application to multiple dimensions of human and nonhuman processes. Such a move within geography demands critical engagement with ongoing debates in ecological economics, the ecological sciences and social applications of sustainability. Geographers are well positioned to address crucial gaps in these fields of inquiry and to propel debates over sustainability in several fruitful directions.

The prolonged history of industrialization, flood control, and hydropower production has led to the construction of 80,000 dams across the U.S. generating significant hydrologic, ecological, and social adjustments. With the increased ecological attention on re-establishing riverine connectivity, dam removal is becoming an important part of large-scale river restoration nationally, especially in New England, due to its early European settlement and history of waterpower-based industry. To capture the broader dimensions of dam removal, we constructed a GIS database of all inventoried dams in New England irrespective of size and reservoir volume to document the magnitude of fragmentation. We compared the characteristics of these existing dams to the attributes of all removed dams over the last ∼25 years. Our results reveal that the National Inventory of Dams significantly underestimates the actual number of dams (4,000 compared to >14,000). To combat the effects of these ecological barriers, dam removal in New England has been robust with 127 dams having been removed between ca. 1990-2013. These removed dams range in size, with the largest number (30%) ranging between 2-4 m high, but 22% of the removed dams were between 4-6 m. They are not isolated to small drainage basins: most drained watersheds between 100-1,000 km 2. Regionally, dam removal has reconnected ∼3% (3,770 river km) of the regional river network although primarily through a few select dams where abundant barrier-free river lengths occur, suggesting that a more strategic removal approach has the opportunity to enhance the magnitude and rate of river re-connection. Given the regional-scale restoration of forest cover and water quality over the past century, dam removal offers a significant opportunity to capitalize on these efforts, providing watershed scale restoration and enhancing watershed resilience in the face of significant regional and global anthropogenic changes.

This paper examines recent conflicts over freshwater fisheries in Cambodia using the notion of accumulation through dispossession as a conceptual starting point. Despite a recent material turn, theoretical literature on the political economy of the environment has only partially incorporated an ecologically nuanced view of nature into analyses of its transformation under processes of capital accumulation. The biophysical characteristics of riverine fisheries are predicated on the ecohydrologic dynamics of water flows, and these characteristics dictate strategies of appropriation for both subsistence and commercial use. The complexity of these material characteristics is compounded in the case of Cambodian fisheries, where an array of state‐ and market‐driven processes promote the dispossession of resources and constrain the livelihood opportunities of rural communities dependent on fishing. Theories of capital accumulation and how accumulation induces socioecological conflicts can be very useful, firstly, for explaining the origins of environmental conflicts and, secondly, for grounding the analysis of such conflicts in the politics of accumulation as mediated by state actors. Conversely, theoretical framings of primitive accumulation must examine the “things” being accumulated (eg riverine fisheries) in far more biophysically specific ways, and must recognize the circuitous pathways, particularly in cases involving developmental states, that strategies of accumulation follow.

Environmental managers in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly perceiving dam removal as a critical tool for river restoration and enhancing watershed resilience. In New England, over 125 dams have been dismantled for ecological and economic rationales. A surprising number of these removals, including many that are ongoing, have generated heated conflicts between restoration proponents and local communities who value their dammed landscapes. Using a comparative case study approach, we examine the environmental conflict around efforts to remove six dams in New England. Each of these removal efforts followed quite different paths and resultant outcomes: successful removal, stalled removal, and failure despite seemingly favorable institutional conditions. Lengthy conflicts often transpired in instances where removals occurred, but these were successfully arbitrated by paying attention to local historical-geographical conditions conducive to removal and by brokering effective compromises between dam owners and the various local actors and stakeholders involved in the removal process. Yet our results across all cases suggest that these are necessary, but not sufficient conditions for restoration through dam removal since a similar set of conditions typified cases where removals are continuously stalled or completely halted. Scholars examining the intersection between ecological restoration and environmental politics should remain vigilant in seeking patterns and generalities across cases of environmental conflict in order to promote important biophysical goals, but must also remain open to the ways in which those goals are thwarted and shaped by conflicts that are deeply contingent on historical-geographical conditions and broader institutional networks of power and influence.

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