Joachim Radkau’s Age of Ecology is a path-breaking contribution to global history. It is also one of the most important works in recent decades in the field of environmental history, as well as a significant intervention in the field of the history of global social movements. The book is, as Radkau himself points out (p. x), a companion volume to his equally magnificent Nature and Power (Cambridge, 2008), which paid less attention to individual activists and movements than this current volume. The German environmental movement in particular has often been accused of lacking an awareness of its history – or even of being devoid of history and therefore historical relevance as such. Many contemporaries since the 1970s have also argued that environmental movements have whipped up irrational fears, again especially with regard to Germany: talk about “German Angst” was an especially prominent means of denouncing environmentalism as a form of inward-looking romanticism with dangerous political consequences.

Radkau argues strongly against both allegations, and a short review cannot do justice to the wealth of material covered by the book. In his impressively wide-ranging first chapter, he provides a brief history of “environmentalism before the environmental movement”: discussing fears of wood shortage alongside ideas developed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as the German Romantics, the growth of concerns about public health in the context of smoke abatement, covering life reform movements, and the problematic question of environmentalism in Nazi Germany. Throughout, he particularly stresses the importance of toxicology for modern environmental awareness – a highly innovative insight.

By embedding the “age of ecology” and its environmental movements, whose true beginning he still locates in the 1970s, Radkau historicizes the period around the 1970s as a caesura for the history of global environmental movements. He therefore provides an important corrective to interpretations that regard environmental movements as a sub-section of “new social movements”. Interestingly, the oil crisis – and the discussion about fossil fuels that it spurred in the 1970s – which other authors have stressed as a marker of change, only makes a cameo appearance in the book. Radkau nonetheless maintains that developments from the mid-1960s acquired a novel quality because of the growing awareness of translocal, transnational, or even global connections, as the second chapter convincingly shows. The third chapter demonstrates how this new environmentalism and what the author calls “networked” thinking was characterized by a wide reach and variety, and one that was often driven as much by “practical priorities” as utopian ideals. The fourth chapter zooms in on some of the key protagonists, with a special sub-section devoted to women activists. The fifth chapter investigates the ways in which environmental movements interacted with their opponents, both in terms of their ideology, but also in terms of the means and forms of protest. An especially interesting section in this chapter delves into the history of the relationship between economic and ecological thinking. The last chapter discusses the consequences of the end of the Cold War for the global environmental movements and asks whether one can discern a transition from (socialist) concerns about social justice towards (ecological) worries about “climate justice”.

Radkau is one of the leading environmental historians not only in Germany, but worldwide. And this book, in highlighting the variations and variability of global environmental movements across time and space, shows him at the height of his powers. He was based at Bielefeld, the university that has given its name to a whole school of scholarship in the history of social structures, inspired mainly by the sociologist Max Weber. Among Radkau’s other major works is a biography of Weber, which focuses primarily on how the sociologist’s inner life and emotions were reflected in his scholarly writings. This ability to relate the history of social structures in the vein of the Bielefeld school (and the “ordered” temporal and spatial notions it implies) to topics and phenomena that seem to be at odds with such an approach, is reflected again in this book: ecological moments and environmental movements operate within contexts, structures, and problem constellations that transcend (and have transcended for some time) the confines of the nation state, while they have also been deeply embedded in local contexts and sutured tightly to individual biographies.

Throughout the book, we find reflections and astute observations on the interactions between individual activists, their ideas, the movements they are active in, and the constraints they are working under, so that this is never simply a narrative of different organizational histories. The key strength of Radkau’s work is how it consistently highlights the intersections and interactions between local concerns, national frameworks of understandings, and global conjunctures, and how it manages to bring together a deep appreciation of the interplay between longer-range historical genealogies of environmental consciousness on the one hand with, on the other hand, the “eventfulness” (William Sewell) of political activism, and the “structure of conjuncture” (Marshall Sahlins) that enable such activism. Chapter 2 on what Radkau’s calls, not without irony, “The Great Chain Reaction” is a good illustration of how this works in practice: the “data cluster” at the beginning of that chapter (pp. 79–89) – a sort of chronological list of relevant events which precedes several chapters – highlights, across ten pages, the “synchronicity” of events and developments across the world from 1965 to 1972.

Radkau himself, though, is rather cautious in deploying complex analytical concepts, although he discusses some contemporary approaches to the study of social movements in the introduction. The book is theoretically informed without ever being theoretical. It is, therefore, much more than an organizational history of environmental movements around the world over the course of the last two centuries. It is also a reflection on the relationship between structure and agency, and what happens to that relationship when problems move from local issues to global contexts and back again. And it is an excellent example of how one might write a politically committed history, in particular a history that provides the critical resources for political action, that is nonetheless not a simple product of what some have criticized as “agenda history”.

Thanks to Patrick Camiller’s precise translation, this landmark study – first published in Germany in 2011, days before the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe – is now also available to Anglophone readers. Radkau argues that the modern environmental movement is ultimately a product of the Enlightenment during the “age of ecology”, which therefore becomes a “new enlightenment” (p. 7). But the book, though clearly highly sympathetic towards its protagonists, is not hagiographic. For Radkau accepts, with Max Horkeimer and Theodor Adorno’s critical reading of the Enlightenment, its flaws, paradoxes, and ambiguities, and entanglement “in the mechanisms of power” (p. 426). Radkau’s book is not a Western-centric history either, although some rather problematic assumptions, based on reified assumptions about “culture” and “civilization”, creep in at times, for example, when Radkau discusses the lack of “ancient temples and Gothic cathedrals” in the United States and Australia as “cultural backgrounds” that “should not be overlooked”. They “left [he claims] only natural landmarks as national monuments” (p. 123).

Given that Radkau himself has stressed the importance of emotions not only for Max Weber’s scholarship, but also for late imperial and Weimar Germany as a whole in his inspiring Age of Nervousness (Zeitalter der Nervosität, Munich, 1998), one might perhaps have wished for a more in-depth reflection on the emotions of environmental activists and their resonances. Indeed, emotions have played a fundamental role in mobilizations both by environmental movements and by those against them – accusations of scaremongering, for instance, were among the key rhetorical tools of anti-environmentalists. Radkau would be the first to admit the importance of this factor, and it is thus regrettable that he does not engage more with recent research on the history of emotions (by among others, Peter Stearns, Frank Biess, Ute Frevert, and Jan Plamper – some of their work admittedly published after the German edition of this book appeared). In this emerging research field it has been stressed that emotions can have their own rationality – and rationality its own emotions. In short: it is not necessary to play out emotions against reason and rationality; they can also be seen as mutually constitutive. The opposition of emotions and reason has its own history that might require more critical analysis, in particular in the context of the Cold War that remains rather underexplored in Radkau’s study.

But even in containing within its narrative certain assumptions that some readers might find problematic, in disclosing them and thus making them discussable, Radkau’s book is itself a product of the enlightenment about environmental hazards, the history of which it so impressively recounts. Others have critically remarked that a book entitled Age of Ecology should have given more prominence to the opponents of the “alternative futures” (p. 427). Yet, this book gives readers the space for such reflections, especially because Radkau makes, in good Weberian fashion, his own preferences, assumptions, and biographical experiences clear. This is also pertinent in terms of the movements analysed, as Radkau’s book also demonstrates that environmentalism has hardly ever arrived with self-evident recipes for policies and action. Thus, the book offers its readers an impressive experience of learning and analysis. It is a critique in the best possible sense. Ultimately, Radkau’s study shows that the Enlightenment ideas that influenced the environmental movements, with all their flaws and ambiguities, may still be the best chance we have for improving the world we live in.