I'm extending an application to do recovery w/o human intervention.
Think of it as a "soft restart". I've written the code and I want to
test it. What kind of non catastrophic action can I do to the Berkeley
DB environment that would cause it to tell my app to run recovery? I'm
using BerkeleyDB 4.4.20 on Linux.

This should do what you want:

dbenv->set_flags(dbenv, DB_PANIC_ENVIRONMENT, 1);

Regards,
Michael.