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Neoliberal reforms during the 1990s transformed natural resource access and environmental management worldwide. In Peru, hydroelectricity privatization allowed Duke Energy to consolidate control over the Cañón del Pato facility on the Santa River, which is fed largely by Cordillera Blanca glacier runoff. Once Duke Energy Egenor began management in 1997, the state's hydroelectric company, Electroperú, ended its glacier monitoring and glacial lake engineering programs. This was the first break in continuous glacier disaster prevention programs since 1951. Neoliberal privatization thus heightened climate change vulnerability while simultaneously making Duke Energy a major but highly contested stakeholder in the Santa River waterscape that extended up to Cordillera Blanca glaciers. Meanwhile, threats from glacier retreat and the 1997 El Niño event continued. In 2003, fears of another glacial lake outburst flood at Lake Palcacocha above Huaraz spurred government programs to manage glacier hazards and bolstered popular protests against Duke Energy.

What has by now become the classic entrance into Venice is all water: a drive or a train ride takes one across the Lagoon on the Ponte della Libertà and then the Linea 1 vaporetto completes the trip, down the length of the Grand Canal to Piazza San Marco. Unquestionably, Venice's eponymous claim to be its own archetype derives from the very number of its canals, and the breadth and complexity of the network they form. The gondoliers established themselves in the lucrative business of shunting passengers from the train station to the better hotels, most of which were (and are) located around Piazza San Marco. Gondolas have become the key icon through which tourists can enter Venice's waterscape and thus engage with the true logic of the city itself. Since they are not actually taken anywhere, of course, it also cannot be said that tourists are exposed to the real logic of the Venetian waterways.

This chapter delves into how Savannah River valley residents had organized to oppose aspects of Georgia's and South Carolina's hydraulic waterscape. Aside from the Flint River case, southerners had a poor success rate when it came to beating dam proposals. Early-nineteenth-century fishermen tried arguing against antebellum dams in the 1850s; anglers attempted to save migratory fish runs at the Augusta Canal diversion dam; and progressive preservationists unsuccessfully fought the Atlanta-based Georgia Power Company's New South-era Tallulah Falls project in the 1910s. These events reflected grassroots preservation and conservation moments observed in other parts of the nation. But in the Sun Belt period, conservation and environmental activists became uninvolved countryside associates dedicated to shaping the Savannah River valley's Piedmont. Sun Belt countryside conservationists and environmentalists represented streams of a big dam backlash that recast the outlines of national water and power politics.

Chapter 3 considers Virginia Algonquian place names, concluding that the Tsenacomacoh landscape was understood and labelled from the vantage of a canoe. Place names typically referenced navigation along and across rivers as well as favoured locations for fishing and for gathering wild, wetland plants. Such representations of space and of mobility hint that Tsenacomacoh was constructed on an estuarine landscape initially inhabited by forager-fishers. The rivers, streams, and embayed waters of the Chesapeake estuary provided the primary pathways connecting places in this setting. Algonquian place names framed travel through Tsenacomacoh’s waterscape, resulting in naming practices keyed to the dynamic interface between dry land and tidal water.

This chapter differs from other in the book in that it works far more directly with the conjunctural politics of postapartheid South Africa. Seeking to build on the example of Antonio Gramsci, for whom concepts needed to be wrestled with in the concrete and complex realities of the world, it seeks to develop a clearer understanding of what happens to this emerging consciousness when it articulates with previous memories of struggle, comradeship, alliances, and enmities. Gramsci sought to build on Marx’s philosophy of praxis through respecting the struggles and conceptions of what he was to term “subalterns.” Far from romanticizing subaltern conceptions of the world, he sought to understand how these often fragmented and “incoherent” understandings contained within them a potential core of radicalism that could become a “coherent” view that fused theory and practice into world-changing praxis. The chapter demonstrates how Gramsci might have understood such a transformation as operating within a socio-natural context. It examines the contested waterscape of Inanda, a postapartheid informal settlement in South Africa, considering not only how the environment is shaped by particular mental conceptions, but how this then serves to stabilize particular worldviews at particular times. In large part this is related to how ideas articulate with prior historical memory. Building on an immanent critique of the nature of everyday life necessitates a much clearer understanding of this articulation of past and present.

Chapter 6 presents the interaction between space and time in determining the organization of natural communities in high altitude heterogeneous waterscapes. After explaining why high altitude waters represent suitable models for examining metacommunity organization, the chapter focuses on dispersal—a central process to allow colonization and establishment of populations in remote localities and to counter local extinctions. Community organization patterns are then described for a variety of organisms living in high altitude waters, from microbes to invertebrates to fish and birds. These patterns reveal that both environmental and spatial variables are generally involved in species assembling. Examples of studies on directional spatial processes (e.g. through wind and water flow), waterscape genetics, and temporal variability (synchrony/asynchrony) are highlighted as promising research areas to increase the current knowledge on high altitude metacommunity dynamics.