This book tells the story of a fertile European country that, as a result of over-population and military armament, over-exploited its fields and forests in a nonsustainable fashion. By the eighteenth century, Denmark, along with other European countries, found itself in an ecological crisis: clear felling of forests, sand drift, floods, inadequate soil fertilization and cattle disease. This book explains how the crisis was overcome, and is the first attempt to understand early modern Europe from a consistently ecological viewpoint.