Unlike the American environmental movement, which is still dominated by debates about wilderness conservation and the retention of untouched spaces, discussions of the German landscape have long recognized human impact as part of the "natural order." Drawing on a variety of sites as examples, including forests, waterways, the Autobahn, and natural history museums, the essays demonstrate how environmental debates in Germany have generally centered on the best ways to harmonize human priorities and organic order, rather than on attempts to reify wilderness as a place to escape from industrial society. Germany's Nature is essential reading for students and professionals working in the fields of environmental studies, European history, and the history of science and technology.

The Landscape of German Environmental History / Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller Part 1: Seeing Like a State: Water, Forests, and Power. Germany as a Focus of European 'Particularities' in Environmental History / Joachim Radkau Conviction and Constraint: Hydraulic Engineers and Amelioration Projects in Nineteenth-Century Prussia / Rita Gudermann A Sylvan People: Wilhelmine Forestry and the Forest as a Symbol of Germandom / Michael Imort Forestry and the German Imperial Imagination: Conflicts over Forest Use in German East Africa / Thaddeus Sunseri Part 2: The Cultural Landscapes of Home. Organic Machines: Cars, Drivers, and Nature from Imperial to Nazi Germany / Rudy Koshar Biology Heimat Family: Nature and Gender in German Natural History Museums around 1900 / Susanne Köstering Part 3: The Politics of Conservation. Indication and Identification: On the History of Bird Protection in Germany, 1800-1918 / Friedemann Schmoll Protecting Nature Between Democracy and Dictatorship: The Changing Ideology of the Bourgeois Conservationist Movement, 1925-1935 / John Alexander Williams Protecting Nature in a Divided Nation: Conservation in the Two Germanys, 1945-1972 / Sandra Chaney