250年来，德国人开垦沼泽，排干酸沼，将莱茵河裁弯取直，建设威廉港，在河流高峡修筑大坝，以人的力量显著改变了自然的面貌。他们为什么要这样做？他们为什么能够这样做？“征服自然”带来了怎样的后果？ 现代景观形成的历史，也是现代国家形成的历史。在一切环境改造的背后都蕴藏着深厚的政治、文化、经济因素，本书以德国为例，将这些因素与生态因素结合在一起加以考察，同时对人类千方百计“征服”自然所付出的巨大代价进行了反思。

This brilliant new book explores how, over the last 250 years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. It investigates how the most fundamental element - water - was 'conquered' by draining fens and marshes, straightening the courses of rivers, building high dams and exploiting hydro-electric power. The book begins in the 1740s with Frederick the Great of Prussia, who regarded the reclamation of marshland as 'conquests from barbarism'. We meet Johann Gottfried Tulla, 'the man who tamed the wild Rhine' in the nineteenth century. We learn about the construction of the Prussian port of Wilhelmshaven on the Jade Bay, later to become a symbol of the new Germany's naval ambitions. We witness the colonisation of the moors and the triumph of the steamship. We encounter Otto Intze, 'master dambuilder' of the years around 1900