What does it mean to hold on to hope after history has shown us how easily good causes can go astray?

Environmental historian Frank Uekötter joins Bill and Anders for a thought-provoking conversation about how good intentions and bad systems can collide, and what history can teach us about the moral boundaries of environmental action. Uekötter’s work, including The Vortex and The Green and the Brown, explores how modern environmentalism took shape in the twentieth century and how ideals of nature and progress became entangled with politics, ideology, and power. Together, they step back from today’s headlines to ask what happens when noble causes lose sight of their context, and how well-meaning people can drift into compromise when conviction overrides reflection.

Drawing on the story of Germany’s conservation movement under the Nazi regime, Uekötter explains how early environmentalists entered what he calls a “Faustian bargain,” believing they could advance their goals by working within an authoritarian system. The discussion traces how that moral logic unfolded, why it endured long after 1945, and what it reveals about the dangers of obsession, certainty, and self-deception in movements that see themselves as righteous. They also unpack the broader lessons from The Vortex, where Uekötter argues that global environmental challenges rarely fit neat patterns, and that history, like nature, resists simple narratives.

Throughout the conversation, Bill and Anders wrestle with questions that echo far beyond Germany’s past. How do we protect nature without losing sight of democratic values? How can conservation remain grounded in humility rather than ideology? What signs warn us when environmental rhetoric starts to slip into something more dangerous? And, perhaps most importantly, what does it mean to hold on to hope after history has shown us how easily good causes can go astray?

Today’s highlights:

• Good Intentions, Bad Systems – Anders opens with a question about how environmental ideals can be co-opted for illiberal ends, and Frank explains why history’s value isn’t in drawing one-to-one parallels but in seeing how even well-meaning causes can drift off course.
• The Vortex – Frank describes his book as a world environmental history about “good people in not-so-good times.” He explains how environmentalism, as a global concept, only really took shape in the mid-20th century, and why the historian’s job is to show that while much is new, patterns still “rhyme.”
• The Global South – A key shift in modern scholarship, Frank notes, is recognizing how Western environmental ideas and tools were exported to very different contexts—sometimes creating paradoxical problems that reveal how interconnected and unequal the world remains.
• The Green and the Brown – Frank traces how German conservationists entered a “Faustian bargain” with the Nazi regime, believing they could advance their goals by working within a system of oppression. A landmark 1935 law on nature protection seemed like a dream come true, blinding many to the regime’s violence and exploitation.
• Delusion and Complicity – Conservationists convinced themselves the Nazis were allies, ignoring how policies of conquest and autarky destroyed the very landscapes they claimed to protect. Frank calls it a “story of delusion,” one that shows how movements can lie to themselves about their true friends.
• Living Space and Ideology – The Nazi idea of Lebensraum, or “living space,” linked land, race, and survival in ways that turned ecological thinking into justification for expansion and war. Frank calls it a “zombie idea” that should have died long ago but still warns of how resource rhetoric can become ideological.
• Reckoning with the Past – After 1945, conservationists largely carried on as if nothing had happened. Real reckoning didn’t begin until the 1980s, when scholars and activists began confronting those uncomfortable legacies and asking what traditions and assumptions still lingered.
• Modern Parallels – Bill and Anders reflect on how hard it can be to face our own histories of displacement and environmental harm, from Manifest Destiny to today’s public lands debates. Frank emphasizes that denial often hides behind the words “that’s not us,” and that humility begins with recognizing our likeness to those before us.
• Hope and Responsibility – Despite the darkness in the history he studies, Frank still holds onto what he calls a “well-grounded hope.” He believes understanding context helps us make wiser decisions, and that the historian’s role is to offer perspective, not despair. “Hope,” he says, “is probably the most precious resource you can have.”

Links & Resources:

Connect with Frank

• The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany – Frank’s landmark study tracing how environmental ideals became entangled with authoritarian politics, and what that history reveals about moral compromise in movements for nature.
• Books from the University of Pittsburgh Press
• The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World
• Exploring Apocalyptica: Coming to Terms with Environmental Alarmism (Editor)
• The Turning Points of Environmental History (Editor)
• The Age of Smoke: Environmental Policy in Germany and the United States, 1880-1970

Frank Uekötter is a historian whose work bridges environmental, political, and social history. He studied at the Universities of Freiburg and Bielefeld in Germany and at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, earning his Ph.D. from Bielefeld in 2001. Early in his career, he organized a landmark conference on the environmental history of Nazi Germany for the German Ministry for the Environment and held a fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C.

In 2006, he joined Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where he helped found the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, an international institute dedicated to the environmental humanities. His time there deepened his belief that history can inform contemporary environmental debates and broadened his perspective from German and U.S. history to a more global view of the modern world.

Frank is now Professor of the History of Technology and Environmental History at Ruhr University Bochum, following a decade at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. He is the author of numerous books including The Green and the Brown and The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World, and leads the European Research Council funded project The Making of Monoculture: A Global History. His research explores the essentials of modern life such as food, energy, air, water, and raw materials, and how societies past and present have shaped and been shaped by their pursuit.

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