he could make a watercourse self-organize into a stable riverbed

"A new perspective"
"This is a perspective that is very similar to that of Viktor Schauberger's way of reasoning. He early observed that untouched watercourses had a kind of structural stability. From those observations he suggested methods for river regulation --- based on the perspective of giving water impulses for self-organization to take place. By using suitable guide vanes and by taking into account the effect of the surrounding vegetation on water flow and temperature, he could make a watercourse self-organize into a stable riverbed.

This way of regulating rivers and watercourses differs from the traditional, which tries to steer the flow, and which disregards the 'eco-system' which the flowing water and its interaction with riverbed and vegetation makes up --- with floods and bank erosion as the natural result. Schauberger e.g. noted that the sediment transport capacity of the flow affected sand and bank development, which affected vegetation, which in turn affected the flow image of the water, through among other things the vegetation's cooling effect. The system bites itself in the tail, as it were.

A problem has been to interpret the language of Schauberger, as it was more that of a naturalist than of a hydrologist. He more looked at the wholeness of the system, than to its detailed composition, and focused on its flow image, without knowing or modelling the underlying mechanisms."

More at:

http://www.iet-community.org/research/flowtechnique.html