Tobias Huff's environmental history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is a groundbreaking intervention in the burgeoning historiography of German socialism and the environment. The existing literature has revealed much about the regime's destruction of the forests, skies, and waters, but historians have typically painted a picture of total disregard for environmental issues on the part of the Socialist Unity Party (SED). In questioning this approach, Huff opens up many new possibilities for the environmental history of East Germany and other Soviet bloc states. He tries to understand how policy makers, with the aid of informal professional networks, worked to forge a viable environmental policy informed by socialist values, and his starting point is that one cannot understand East German environmental policy on the same terms as that of West Germany. Instead of looking for motivations and methods similar to those used by Western conservationists or environmental activists, Huff insists on understanding the local roots of policy and activism in the activities and social networks of GDR experts and institutions. He demonstrates that individual personalities, social networks, and unique contingencies mattered as much, or even more, for environmental outcomes than the supposed Prometheanism of Marxism. Ecological crisis was, in short, not inevitable.

Huff appropriately chooses to focus on air pollution and sulfur dioxide emissions—the cause of acid rain and forest damage. He begins with the stories of environmental activists Reinhold Lingner, a well-known landscape architect, and Erich Zieger, a forester. In his portrayal of the former, Huff shows that dedicated socialists could question economic development programs while voicing concern for nature. In addition, Lingner provides Huff with his first opportunity to reveal the social and professional networks that allowed him to influence the SED leadership. The profile of Zieger, who studied the effects of air pollution on forests, provides more insight into the networks that developed through expert committees established by the State Planning Commission. The disruptions caused by denazification also allowed Zieger to gain influence in the Ministry of Agriculture and the German Academy for Agricultural Science.

Huff also explores the influence of the New Economic System on science and pollution policy in the early 1960s. The most compelling aspect of this section is Huff's exploration of unintended consequences. On the one hand, SED chief Walter Ulbricht's emphasis on scientific planning and decentralization sometimes encouraged environmental protection. With economic decentralization, each enterprise had to remain competitive by using scarce resources more efficiently and by avoiding fines for excessive pollution. In addition, the reform program provided academics and technical experts with greater authority to shape planning. On the other hand, decentralization led to organizational changes for the Ministry of Agriculture. Huff's portrayal of the ministry may overstate its openness to conservation criticism, but he convincingly shows that the decentralization of agricultural planning led to a greater emphasis on technology-driven productivity gains, as well as to fewer opportunities for critics of destructive economic growth to influence decisions. In addition, the New Economic System coincided with a generational shift, as a young cohort of technical experts with SED membership meant that the regime no longer had to rely on the expertise of prewar experts. Now that the SED could find reliable party members to fill positions, critical scientists and planners had fewer opportunities to leverage social connections to influence leadership.

Portraying Ulbricht as surprisingly friendly to environmental reforms, Huff next explains how the GDR became the second state in Europe with an environmental ministry and the first to pass a comprehensive environmental protection law (Landeskulturgesetz). More than just a chance to score points globally, Ulbricht's emphasis on cybernetics and economic efficiency made him receptive to arguments for recycling, as well as to ones about the threat that air pollution might pose to agricultural productivity. Huff reveals how unexpected events limited the law's effectiveness. Once in power, Ulbricht's successor Erich Honecker retained an interest in the foreign policy benefits of the Landeskulturgesetz, but cared less for its domestic benefits. Environmental policy interested him only to the extent that it allowed the GDR to outshine the West. Moreover, the unexpected death of Werner Titel, who had led the initiative to craft the Landeskulturgesetz and became the first head of the Ministry for the Environment, led to the appointment of a non-SED member as his replacement. As a result, the Ministry enjoyed much less trust among SED leaders. The oil crises of the 1970s, which limited the GDR's access to inexpensive oil reserves, threatened the ministry's room for maneuver even more. The Ministry of the Environment appears here as less obstructionist than it does in previous scholarship on the subject, even though it did work to tamp down popular environmentalism. Rather than offer a story of cynical manipulation of pollution statistics, Huff reveals that the ministry fought sincere battles with the Ministry of Economics, which was focused on growth, by arguing that environmental protection had propaganda benefits abroad.

On the whole, Huff's book shines because of its attention to context and contingency. It describes how landscape planners and scientists from different institutions attempted to build on each other's work while advocating common causes. With neither a free press nor the right of free assembly, social and professional networks were vital to the spread of such ideas and to the development of effective strategies in East Germany. Huff could have traced some of these connections more fully, however. It is true, for instance, that Lingner drew on Marxist ideas when developing his plans for landscape protection, but Huff barely mentions the more conservative traditions in landscape care and nature protection that also influenced him. Greater discussion of the ways in which medical experts and public hygiene influenced foresters and biologists studying air pollution would have been welcome as well. In addition, Huff barely recognizes how the growth of vacationing and tourism intersected with environmental planning. Huff's study should nevertheless lead to further research into East German environmental policy because it shows that its history cannot be dismissed with simplistic narratives about socialism's utter failure to care for the environment. As more scholars reveal nuanced policy shifts and demonstrate the passionate interactions of technical experts, our understanding of East Germany's land-use policies and the reasons for its failures will only become more sophisticated.