Nature and Power
A Global History of the Environment

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

Joachim Radkau (Author), Thomas Dunlap (Translated by)

9780521616737, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 4 February 2008

450 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.4 cm, 0.62 kg

"Radkau has crafted a book of extraordinary scope by building on regional environmental histories as well as earlier world histories...Thomas Dunlap translated Nature and Power for this English edition, and his translation is virtually flawless, providing exquisite prose that never reveals that the ideas originated in a different language."
World History Bulletin, Kim Little, University of Central Arkansas

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.

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.

Subject Areas: The environment [RN], General & world history [HBG]