The author intends to provide us with “biographies” of all his rivers. Now, what is exactly a “river's biography”? It certainly includes a clear description of the river, with its hydrology (sources, flows, landscapes) and its people—those that lived with and changed the river, and possibly vice versa.

One would not expect a benign-sounding occupation like stream restoration to be associated with “wars,” but rivers are contested objects of public concern. As Rebecca Lave shows, they are also objects of scholarly concern for social and natural scientists alike.

Holland has located and studied in detail a number of important sources and incorporated them with material from other sources — newspapers and trade journals, for example — to create a fascinating, detailed appreciation of how settlers in a new land of which they had little if any prior knowledge learned by trial and error, operating often on the basis of environmental understandings based on misapprehensions that New Zealand’s climate and environments were similar to those of their Mediterranean antipodes (having failed to seek much from those—the Maori—who preceded and lived alongside them there).

On 9 May 2013 the iconic ‘Keeling Curve’ measured an average of over 400 ppm CO2 through the day. A symbolic threshold was crossed, that might not matter precisely in ecological terms, but which matters greatly in terms of contemporary global politics. It matters not only in terms of climate change but as a symbolic marker of the larger transformations underway, processes that now frequently invoke discussions in terms of the putative new geological epoch of the Anthropocene.

Sociologist John Urry’s recent "Climate Change and Society" is worthwhile because of his insistence that social science perspectives on climate change are dangerously absent from climate change analyses and solutions. As a remedy, his book is a vision for a disciplinary reconsideration of high-carbon human lives, why social scientists should reconsider the centrality of carbon to modernity, and a suggested political and economic solution that addresses both human and non-human climate concerns.