This book is a fascinating and passionate ethnography of ‘popular activism in local symbolic spaces’ of Salvador, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina (p. 13). Stephanie Kane focuses on ‘activist resistance’ (p. 10) in ‘urban aquatic ecology’ (p. 9). The book is valuable for its comparative ethnographic account of how activists struggle with other non-state actors and state authorities regarding water in two port cities. The author's ultimate aim, however, is more ambitious; she argues that ‘the harmful acts that degrade the environment should join the gallery of globally recognized vicious behavior, acts as violent and intimate as street assaults’ (p. 176).

Kane's work on Bahia focuses on conflicts surrounding Lagoa de Abaeté, near Itapuã in Salvador. Her work in this site, a ‘central element in Bahian iconography’ (p. 23), centres on Antonio Conceição Reis, an activist concerned with the lake who ran an NGO that works with at-risk youth but who was murdered a few months after Kane left Salvador for Buenos Aires. Her interest in Abaeté focuses on disputes among activists and state agencies over the causes of alleged water-level decline. The argument about environmental degradation as a type of crime scene is not carried through this section of the book, but Kane interprets the murder of Reis as follows: ‘The assassination of one man, one lake, trumpets thousands of occurrences of violence sweeping across and beyond Brazil against all people and water places’ (p. 87). This is passionate writing, but Kane's findings on environmentalism should dialogue with the work of other scholars, such as Kathryn Hochstetler and Margaret Keck's Greening Brazil (Duke University Press, 2007), notably absent from the book's bibliography.

Kane's ethnography highlights the poor environmental knowledge of competing state agencies, but she neglects to conduct ethnography at the Secretaría de Recursos Hídricos (Water Resources Secretariat, SRH). At this key site of state power, hydrologists and engineers would have much to say about Abaeté, and their interactions with researchers might reveal the highly dispersed environmental governance that the Bahian state created, seemingly in order to block informed action, which is similar to the strategy of ‘judicial ambiguity’ that Kane discusses later in the book (p. 170).

The Abaeté story shifts, after a meander through some tangential matters, to Salvador's Bahia Azul, a US $600 million sanitation project, but Kane fails to acknowledge the significant reduction in infant mortality and gastrointestinal illness reported in The Lancet (370: 9599 (2007), pp. 1622–8) and elsewhere. Why is Bahia Azul not a site for ethnography? How do people who may have benefited from Bahia Azul experience the change in sanitation? Who was excluded, and why, from Bahia Azul?

In Buenos Aires, Kane covers several processes linked only by vague connections. For example, she follows a protest march in Buenos Aires on World Water Day, while adding a discussion of the iconography of the stunning Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes. Following on from her environmental crime emphasis, she argues that ‘the [Argentine] military dictatorship's silencing of the public sphere facilitated its shutdown of infrastructural investment and construction and contributed to the public health and environmental emergencies of today’ (p. 103). But the evidence she provides focuses on performances at protests and dilemmas faced by activists representing people adversely affected by state-led water interventions. There is more description than analysis of the water supply problems. Millions of people are not connected either to water or sewage networks; moreover, the rivers that reach the Plata are highly polluted. Why are so many people excluded? How, specifically, did the military regime perpetuate the ‘crime’ of exclusion and pollution?

Another aspect of Kane's Buenos Aires work is an iconographic comparison of bridges at two sites, La Boca and Madero; however, Kane needs to devote more visually to these sites, and situate the sites in space, to sustain her argument that bridges ‘encapsulate the changing and contested meaning of the waterfronts’ (p. 117). Instead, we get flourishes such as this: ‘The need to cross the river and the engineered response that enabled crossing created characteristic coherences in cultural orientation that orient the production and reproduction of the material structures and sociocultural practices – the fixities – that define and shape flows’ (p. 125, emphasis in original).

The lack of detail regarding actual water issues continues in later chapters. In a chapter on the Tigre Delta (and waters flowing into the Reconquista River), on the northern edge of Greater Buenos Aires, we learn much about ‘neighborhood activists’ (p. 137) who are struggling to get the national government to intervene and improve water quality, but we learn little about the ‘eco-blind’ engineering, the water pollution or the spatial aspects of the problem. Nonetheless, Kane's ethnographic reading of tensions between activists and attorneys is fascinating. She follows this with a chapter linking her interest in people displaced from the Yacyretá hydroelectric project with a serendipitous encounter with a protest group from San Juan province against Barrick Gold's mining operations and the firm's close relations to provincial elites. However, there is little attempt to show how her findings on Yacyretá add to the existing literature, nor is there space to develop a comparative analysis of the two protest movements.

This book is insightful in using ethnography to discuss environmental activism in two cities, but it is flawed in some aspects. First, Kane makes little attempt to produce a true comparison between Salvador and Buenos Aires in terms of activism or environmental ‘crimes’, even though she argues for the comparability of cities. Second, Kane's conflation of environmental degradation with crime is flawed. The book lacks development of the concept of environmental crime, so that it is unclear at what point environmental degradation becomes a crime. How much reduction in water quality would constitute ‘crime’? Who should be punished, and by whom? Are ‘crimes’ against water different from ‘crimes’ relating to soil, plants, animals or the atmosphere? Moreover, the notion of environmental crime is not supported by her ethnographic work. Do activists interpret pollution or lack of sanitation as ‘crimes’? These aspects of Kane's argument may be flawed, or at least require clarification, but her ethnography tells a story that is passionate, insightful and moving, revealing the difficulties and contradictions that environmental movements face when confronting entrenched and powerful actors.