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Andrew Westoll and Brian Harvey are both Canadian biologists, both committed conservationists, both global adventurers. Both are practised irregulars in the battle against environmental stupidity and ecological oversimplification.

Both are also first-time book writers, Westoll with Riverbones, about his circuitous adventures in the little-known South American country of Suriname; Harvey with The End of the River, a book the geographical dimensions of which are global, but which focuses chiefly on the writer's travels and obsessions along the Sao Francisco River in southeastern Brazil.

It would be easy to assess either of these authors' compelling new works in strictly ecological terms; both books are about waterways, lost Edens and the absurd politics and greed of planetary breakdown. But to do so would be a shortcoming and a lie, in that each book is also a freewheeling and vividly written essay on the mysteries and longings of what it is to be human in a world of cynicism and loss — and more significantly, what it is to be hopeful, to persevere, in the search for redemption and beauty.

Toward the end of his book, Westoll laments that his erstwhile girlfriend, Emma — who has been left behind in Canada — has called him a "hopeless" romantic. "But I am not a hopeless romantic," he objects. "I am, instead, a very hopeful one."

At least part of Westoll's hope, both for the world and for his privileged place within it, lies in his preference for "the illumination of stories" over "the rationalism of science." And in that spirit of illumination, he roils through Suriname, a lightly populated, industrially exploited country, 90 per cent of which is covered in steamy rain forest.

En route, he describes the country's violent history, its frightful poverty and, as a kind of leitmotif, his fanciful and elusive search for the okopipi, a small, highly poisonous blue frog, only 300 of which remain, in the deepest part of the Suriname jungle.

The book is clammy with humidity, dense with allegorical undergrowth. And Westoll's writing and storytelling are perhaps most vivid and pertinent in his descriptions of the lives and practices of Suriname's jungle people, the Maroons. At one point, deep in the rain forest, he bunks in with the tribe's "royal family," and at another boats far up the Sipaliwini River into a world of pounding drums, hysterical funerals and bizarre mutilation of the body.

What Westoll wants of his experiences, he says, is to "push past softness and cliché, to discover something fundamental, hard and true." And yet there is a tenderness and sadness to his writing, an acceptance and a dismissal of fate, captured intrinsically in the delicacy and nuances of the writing. A beautiful Maroon woman slips "into the late-morning sun as if it were a spotlight." The writer and his lost girlfriend "mourn in silence on the phone."

Brian Harvey shows an equivalent fascination and deftness with language and its effects, and with the memorable luminescence of a story well told.

The End of the River is a brilliant and instructive book, alive with the author's seditious intelligence, his inner compulsions and restlessness, the lot of which are wedded to his literal journey in a way that recalls the travel writing of one of Harvey's heroes, Sir Richard Burton, who during the mid-1800s explored the Sao Francisco River that so obsesses Harvey today.

The book is founded on the author's lifelong fascination with fish, an attraction that began in the "bottle room" of the British Columbia Provincial Museum when Harvey was a child, and eventually extended to fish and fishing cultures as far away as Japan, the Philippines and South America. Harvey's book sweeps across continents and oceans, taking us to hand-wringing conservation conferences in Europe, to his home river — the Fraser — in British Columbia, to the fish hatcheries and markets of the Far East — visiting in the process seedy Thai hotels, Amazonian outposts and Brazil's raucous Carnaval.

But mainly it is the story of the depredations — the dams, the redirection, the pollution, the deforestation — that have been visited upon what Brazilians refer to as the "Vielle Chico," Old Frank, the Sao Francisco, one of South America's signature rivers, and on its declining and abused fish populations.

Harvey's obsession with the Sao Francisco began, in effect, in 1996, when as an ambitious young biologist he had the opportunity to see the effects of a new Venezuelan power dam on the River Grande — a project that had left millions of curamata, a metre-long fish, idling helplessly in a reservoir, unable to move either up or down river.

"What's going to happen to them?" he had the temerity to ask the proud proponents of the vast new technological and social miracle.

What was going to happen to them? As it turned out, no one knew. Or cared. Which set Harvey's compass in a direction that he is still following.

Specifically, the book focuses on the long debate, a kind of ideological death match, over a massive proposed diversion project on the Sao Francisco that has been planned and consulted for more than a decade, and which has affected elections, demonstrations, hunger strikes and endless irresolvable dust-ups over the folly and potential benefits of the megaproject. Other projects like it — say, on the Colorado River in the United States — have brought water to places that never had it, but have destroyed the environment of the rivers.

If not this, cry the diversion's backers, how will the dry areas of northeastern Brazil get water? How will the people irrigate their crops, eat, carry on? How will the river carry on if the unresolved project goes ahead?

After years of warfare over the colossal benighted diversion, with its corruption and prevarications and rationales, its inane political and economic pathology, its billions in hypothetical costs — in short, its hopelessness — Harvey returns to the Sao Francisco, wondering if perhaps he has missed something. Is there perhaps some new way of seeing it all, some redemptive philosophy or attitude — perhaps even some alternative? He is hoping to meet some avatar of new possibility and, indeed, meets a young woman working for the Mennonite Central Committee who, ignoring the megaproject, is quietly going village to village, house to house, helping people without water build inexpensive concrete cisterns, in which they can store rainwater, of all things.

"By her actions Beth was saying to me, 'Let the technocrats and the zealots and the saints fight this one out to its — probably foregone — conclusion. I'm going to pour some concrete of my own.' It was a philosophy that made a lot of sense to me, especially after a day that included not only the constant reminder of the supreme folly of the Sao Francisco diversion, but also the graphic demonstration of how a simple technology like cisterns could profoundly affect lives."

In the end, Westoll, too, locates a symbol for private resurrection, a little blue frog, which he speculates might be the "perfect metaphor for a country so ecologically, economically and politically fragile, for the delicate spirit of the Lost Eden."

Alternatively, it might be seen as a representation of the hundreds of plainer species, such as the fish of the Sao Francisco — and of ecosystems everywhere — that are daily being compromised or lost to the desperate and ill-fated advances of civilized life.

Charles Wilkins's recent memoir, In the Land of Long Fingernails, was recently named to The Globe and Mail's 100 top books of 2008.