Environmental law is an important subject for the further development of the general administrative law. This premise applies, but it has to be re-examined continuously. An example is given by the headword “compound of instruments”. This term describes that public authorities can select from different instruments (or combine these) to accomplish their objectives. This perspective is unaccustomed for the German jurisprudence of administrative law, which acts on the assumption of certain types of action (“administrative act”) to reduce the complexity of legal relations. The following investigation deals with the nature protection law, where planning and individual instructions coexist. Therefore, the historical development of the nature protection law expands the usual view of instrument groups, which is regularly only referred to the example of (new) economic instruments of incentive.