Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt (review)

Natur und Macht: Eine Weltgeschichte der Umwelt. By Joachim Radkau. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000. Pp. 438. DM 58.

The relation of mankind and nature in history has attracted considerable interest in recent years, and a rapidly growing body of scholarship in environmental history provides evidence that this relationship is far from simple. A wealth of empirical data and a diversity of theories and ideological objectives that appear to resist any plausible synthesis have precipitated an oft-lamented state of fragmentation in the literature. Now Joachim Radkau, a historian at Bielefeld University, seeks to repair this fragmentation by daring to assay nothing less than a world history of the environment. The result is impressive.

In the interest of transcending a biased view of environmental history that is strongly focused on the industrial era, Radkau devotes the major part of his book to preindustrial societies. He argues that environmental problems--whether preindustrial or industrial--display many similarities; indeed, they appear "somehow pretty simple" insofar as they refer to patterns of population pressure that lead to environmental degradation (p. 17ff.). Radkau regards the environment as a major factor not only in the formation of human cultures but in their stability and decline as well. Hence his interest in topics such as agriculture and forestry, colonialism and migration.

The central themes of Natur und Macht concern soils, forests, and water. Radkau discusses agricultural practices, irrigation and hydraulic engineering, and forest management as well as the impact of social and cultural traditions on soil fertility and sustainability. He relates the stability of a culture to its use of natural resources. It was nonsustainable practices that caused environmental changes such as soil degradation due to erosion, possibly the main reason for the decline of the Mayan culture, or due to salinization caused by irrigation, which was responsible for the collapse of the Mesopotamian culture. Chinese culture, on the other hand, achieved remarkable stability because it institutionalized the systematic use of human and animal excrement for soil fertilization. A major force for environmental stability was the power of states or social institutions.

Although the increased exploitation of fossil fuels in the nineteenth century clearly marks a nonsustainable development, Radkau emphasizes that early industrialization was based on renewable energy sources and that subsistence agriculture remained intact throughout most of the century. The "deepest turning point in environmental and social history dates to very recent times," he writes (p. 57). The United States developed the "basic pattern of nonsustainability" that in the twentieth century swept the world (p. 215). This pattern involved a dramatic acceleration in the exploitation of nonrenewable resources. "Americanization," nonsustainable economic growth in total disregard of its ecological consequences, is now the norm.

Radkau presents an enormous amount of diverse material in a very readable form. He discusses the changing ecological and historical role of individual plants and animals in various times and places, covers a wide range of responses to the environment, and analyzes numerous historical theories and interpretive stances. He has mastered a huge literature, drawing on historians, anthropologists, ethnographers, biologists, political scientists, economists, and environmentalists. But he is also well aware of the limits of knowledge in environmental history, and he avoids simple answers to complex questions.

Matthias Heymann

Dr. Heymann is a researcher at the Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology.

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