The silent coexistence of contemporary and environmental history has changed into an eloquent exchange and has initiated several co-operations in recent years. This is due both to socially-influential environmental challenges as the "climate crisis" and 20th century historians who are closely linked with environmental history. The contributions in this issue explore the potential of an environmental-historical view of Austria in the 20th century on the basis of various aspects: the mobilisation of resources and protests against it during Nazism, the acceleration of material and energy flows and the respective debates ignited by the Marshall Plan, the social consumption of nature and the mobilised environmental movement in the 1970s, as well as photographic representations of Austrian petro-modernity.