A Professor of History at the University of Bielefeld, Joachim Radkau published the German version of Natur und Macht in 2002. This Cambridge edition, produced in cooperation with the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., differs in many ways from most volumes on global environmental history published in the United States in recent decades. Its emphasis on the Old World, particularly Europe, provides a welcome complement to the widespread preoccupation with the Americas and Oceania, illustrating how concerns with sustainable human-environmental relations were central to European consciousness for many centuries before the colonization of the New World. In rich anecdotal detail, Radkau's narrative shows ways in which local populations and central administrators have dealt with recurrent problems of soil degradation, deforestation, irrigation, and air and water pollution. Making this material available for English-speakers is the book's chief merit.

There is little theoretical treatment here of the historical data. Radkau's environmental history is not “global” in the sense that it shows how environmental changes in different parts of the world are interconnected. Rather, it offers an amorphous flow of national and local case studies, focusing more on the environmental records of individual nations and (essentialized) religions and peoples—such as Muslims and Indians (or “Indios,” as he frequently calls them)—than on the global historical processes that generated their problems as well as their options. There is also a troubling inclination toward an explicit European (even German) exceptionalism, as in assertions that in Central and Western Europe “environmental problems were more or less solved” (p. 151) and that, ubiquitously, the idea of reforestation came from Germany (167–68). Referring to, among others, Jared Diamond (whom he calls an “ethnologist”), Radkau lists the features that supposedly made Europe uniquely sustainable, such as the many domesticated animals, the abundance of forest, the robust soils, the regularity of rainfall, the many streams suitable for water mills, and its legal and political institutions (184–94). Where others have seen European expansionism as a strategy of environmental load displacement, that is, a response to socio-ecological crisis, Radkau sees it as a sign of stability and success (204).

For Radkau, environmental history seems primarily to be the history of environmentalism. His ambition to offer general statements on a phenomenon as heterogeneous as the pervasive concern with human-environmental relations can only lead to inconsistencies and contradictions, as in his discussions of local and individual agency versus large-scale, central coordination, or his ambiguous account of the German love for a nationalized Heimat (236, 308) or the “exemplary” environmental record of the dictatorial “ecotopia” of Bhutan (285). Although frequently an advocate of local community wisdom and tacit practical knowledge, he has an unmistakable faith in the authority of the nation state. Similarly ambivalent are his assessments of national versus global environmental policy (286–88). His apparent determination to accommodate and legitimize every possible perspective—from sober rationality and pragmatism to romanticism and mysticism—leaves the reader asking for a bottom line. No wonder that a German radio journalist, to the author's consternation, presented Natur und Macht as a dismissal of environmental worries (326). The book presents a number of normative assertions, but hardly any theoretical conclusions except, perhaps, the recurrent and commonplace observation that solutions tend to create new problems.

Radkau's discussion of the relation between environmentalism and fascism is interesting (260–65). Although he credits the Nazi regime with an exceptional environmental awareness, there is only fleeting mention of how the anxieties of modernity may have been the common root of both brown and green inclinations (265–66, 270). In any case, he notes that the Nazi experience has given Germany a very different history of environmentalism than, say, the United States, where, for instance, radical activists do not find spiritual approaches to ecology tainted with fascist connotations (278).

Radkau's concern with “power” seems almost completely restricted to the sphere of politics and policies, and serious critical analyses of the environmental implications of economic systems are absent, as are world-system analysis and the sociology of modernity. Although occasionally critical of the “concentration of capital” and the “quest for private profit” (299), he suggests that environmental protection is “dependent on cooperation with economic forces” (280) and that to draw adversarial “battle lines” between ecology and economy is “absurd” (305, 313). He does note, however, that the new petroleum energy regime associated with the post-war “50s syndrome” (252) represents a decisive discontinuity in human-environmental relations.

For what audience was this book written? Its 407 densely packed pages (of which 77 are endnotes) include not a single illustration or diagram. Although meticulously well written, the arguments are presented in a meandering, essay-like style that mixes themes, places, periods, and genres in an undisciplined and unpredictable manner. The table of contents provides little guidance regarding specific topics or data, but there is a twenty-two-page index. Few will have the patience to digest this voluminous and rambling text without recourse to any coherent framework for theoretical analysis or even the option of systematically searching for relevant topics. Those who do will find a treasure house of historical information, and for those who read German there is an impressive bibliography for further reading.