This book tells the story of how a fertile European country, as a result of overpopulation and military armament, overexploited its fields and forests in a nonsustainable fashion. By the eighteenth century Denmark, along with other European countries, found itself in an ecological crisis caused by clear felling of forests, sand drift, floods, inadequate soil fertilization, and cattle disease.

The crisis was overcome by a green biotechnological revolution that changed the whole pattern of agriculture, and by the abandonment of wood as a raw material and source of energy in favour of coal and iron. This development had wide, unexpected consequences for the landscape, patterns of disease, politics, social structure, art, and literature.

The book outlines the background of the present-day ecological crisis, both in the industrial world and in developing countries, and is the first attempt to understand early modern Europe from a consistently ecological viewpoint.