Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (Publications of the German Historical Institute)

Radkau, JoachimJoachim Radkau is Associate Professor of History at Universität Bielefeld in Germany. His books include Deutsche Industrie und Politik von Bismarck bis zur Gegenwart (1974). Holz: Ein Naturstoff in der Technikgeschichte (in collaboration with Ingrid Schäfer, 1987), Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (1998), and the biography of Max Weber, Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (2005).

This book aims to demonstrate that the changing relationship between humanity and nature is key to understanding world history. Humans have been grappling with environmental problems since prehistoric times, and the environmental unsustainability of human practices has often been a decisive, if not immediately evident, shaping factor in history. The measures that societies and states have adopted to stabilize the relationship between humans and the natural world have repeatedly contributed to environmental crises over the course of history. Nature and Power traces the expanding scope of environmental action: from initiatives undertaken by individual villages and cities, environmental policy has become a global concern. Efforts to steer human use of nature and natural resources have become complicated, as Nature and Power shows, by particularities of culture and by the vagaries of human nature itself. Environmental history, the author argues, is ultimately the history of human hopes and fears.

Nature and Power explores the interaction between humanity and the natural environment from prehistoric times to the present.

From the contents:
1. Thinking about environmental history
2. The ecology of subsistence and tacit knowledge - primeval symbioses between humans and nature
3. Water, forests, and power
4. Colonialism as a watershed in environmental history
5. At the limits of nature
6. In the labyrinth of globalization
Conclusion