Helmut Jäger begins his textbook 'Introduction to Environmental History' with the sentence: "During the past millenium man influenced the environment more sustainably and more irreversibly in a global scale than during the preceding 1.8 million years since his existence as Homo erectus. Today's threat to the environment is also a threat to mankind". In modern western societies environmental prevention is highly, sometimes even irrational highly accepted. Otherwise, most recently the change of global politic's general framework, including globalization of business, caused a rigid change of political priorities. Resulting from this irrational motives increasingly substitute rational motives as the change in spirit and, thus, coincides with the loss of the most important link of a secular society. These consequences might be predominantly due to the replacement of reliable discussions by obliging and entertaining events as it can be noticed in all levels of politics as well as in science and press coverage. In this way, rational balancing of reasons of future discussions are blocked or even impeded. Reflecting these overall conditions of sensing environment and environmental risks and of decision making's general conditions it turns out to be essential to interfere understanding of environmental processes to avert arbitrary or even manipulated decisions. In this context, surely questioning man's influence on his environment in the past as well as in the present is of importance. Especially concerning the past there are material fundamentals missing for an extensive understanding of the manifold intertwined processes inside the terrestrial ecosystem. This comprehension does not just provide a basis for rating the current state but also for judging future changes of the prevailing environmental conditions. The reconstruction of former environments (i.e. the alteration of the respective basic conditions), either natural or caused by man, can only be determined by parallel and affiliating acquisition of the environmental factors, i.e. man's role as motor for the creation of the man-made environment - finally resulting in a a cultural landscape. The contributions and results reported and discussed during the 26th Annual Geomorphology Conference in Trier in the frame of "Geomorphology and the History of the Environment" are available in this volume. They can be seen as components yielding insight into complex interrelations, which they mediate and also convert into application-oriented, hence practicable use.