LangeMemo27

The road to environmental hydrology has been far from direct for Vincent Hill, a tall, bespectacled man in his early 50s. He earned his PhD in hydrology in the late-1980s and quickly earned a tenure track job, not in hydrology, but in civil engineering based upon his success at measuring and predicting changes in river water velocity. His presence in the civil engineering department results from the usefulness of his models for the design of dams. In the mid-1990s, Hill, like a number of his colleagues, became interested in applying his knowledge of hydrological modeling to environmental problems arising from global warming. Environmental hydrology was nothing new at the time, however, it was around this time that the field witnessed an influx of individuals like Hill. The proximate cause was the Manibeli declaration of 1994, which condemned dams as inefficient and responsible for environmental degradation. Within 5 years, the World Bank, the global dam financier par excellence, had drastically cut back its budget for new large dam projects. The dam exiles brought with them new methodologies, techniques, and their own distinctive hydrological imagination. They did not, however, bring any new funding sources. Hill and his ilk have been creating new, sophisticated models hydrological models, but they are locked in a struggle with more traditional elements in the field over which research trajectories are most promising.