Historians and nature : comparative approaches to environmental history Introduction Ursula Lehmkuhl Money versus public affairs : reflections on a better balance between public and private goods Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker Historicizing nature : time and space in German and American environmental history Ursula Lehmkuhl Ecologics ecosophy : the event of the city Hanjo Berressem Comments Mark Häberlein Christof Mauch Native Americans history and the environment Christian F. Feest Nature in conflict : disputes surrounding the dike in seventeenth century northern Frisia as a window into an early modern coastal society Marie Luisa Allemeyer Comment Klaus Georg Wey Mercurial nature : the California gold country and the coalfields of the Ruhr Basin 1850 1900 Andrew C. Isenberg Perceptions of space and nature in nineteenth century America Claudia Schnurmann Comments Marc Cioc Nils Freytag The natural space of modernity : a transatlantic perspective on (urban) environmental history Dorothee Brantz City and nature and nature in the city Bernd Herrmann Comments Andrew Hurley James T. Lemon The potential and the reality of safeguarding the environment by American diplomacy Kurk Dorsey Greenpeace and the development of international environmental activism in the 1970s Frank Zelko Comment Kristine Kern