In this stellar history, geographer Christopher Sneddon traces the twentieth-century boom that saw 50,000 big dams built worldwide. The US Bureau of Reclamation presided, from the Great Depression megaproject Hoover Dam to the cold-war export of bureau engineers to more than 100 countries. Yet by 1969, assistant commissioner Gilbert Stamm saw that doing “marvellous things with materials” does not necessarily meet human needs. Societies and rivers, Sneddon shows, make for a complex confluence.

Just before the explosive advent of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring in 1962, radical ecologist Murray Bookchin published Our Synthetic Environment, warning of impacts from pesticides, industrial farming and deforestation. He went on to pen Crisis in Our Cities (1965), which predicted global warming from fossil-fuel use, and to teach solar-power technology and urban farming. The prescient Bookchin emerges in Janet Biehl's politics-heavy biography as incisive, inventive and pragmatic — a refreshing contrast to today's environmental doom-mongers and techno-utopians alike.

Advances in digitization will soon obviate the need for doctors, teachers and lawyers. So write 'legal futurist' Richard Susskind and economist Daniel Susskind, arguing that the professions are unaffordable, antiquated and opaque. Analysing how the algorithmic juggernaut is forcing the decomposition of traditional careers, the authors propose six new professional models — such as “knowledge engineers” — that together form a non-alarmist vision of how “increasingly capable” machines could help to redistribute expertise.

Anyone who has ever thrilled to bats' aerial feats, pollinating prowess or outright charisma will delight in ecologist Merlin Tuttle's scientific memoir. Drawing on 55 years of research, Tuttle relates exhilarating moments galore, from his teenage sighting of a “mother lode” of 100,000 gray myotis deep in a Tennessee cave, to dangling from a hot-air balloon to spot free-tail bats and dodging spears in Kenya while hot on the trail of chiropteran carnivores.