I am in the starting stages of a project titled "Ottoman Environment: Leisure, Pleasure and Well-Being" which concentrates on open sites used for public and popular entertainment in the main Middle Eastern centers. I focus on such cities like Istanbul, Bursa, Edirne, Damascus and Cairo, thus integrating the all-too-often separate spheres of the Arab provinces and the Ottoman heartland. The sites studied are defined broadly as "green lungs" within or near the urban centres instead of using the narrower term "gardens". Ottomans used a wide selection of public spaces for entertainment. These included graveyards (sometimes the main open green spaces in Ottoman towns), rivers, lakes, pools, springs, hills, and rural areas surrounding holy graves. I intend to focus on public outdoor activities embedded in Ottoman society and culture in the early modern period of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, to understand Ottoman perceptions of nature and human relations to it. I will utilise a variety of literary, artistic, archival, pictorial and scientific sources pertaining to Ottoman environmental history. In the framework of MESA 2011 I propose to concentrate on one genre of sources, namely Ottoman bureaucratic correspondence written in Ottoman-Turkish. Although gardens, rivers, and other public spaces did not belong to the state and were not maintained by it, petitions from below by Ottoman subjects often drove the authorities to intervene. Collections like the mühimme defterleri (literally, "the registers for important affairs"), Ali Emiri, Ibnülemin and Cevdet (the last three are eclectic collections named after the late Ottoman bureaucrat who formed them) are a rich source on the bureaucratic aspects of Ottoman daily life, including leisure and recreation. Thus I will be able to present an array of existing concepts, practices, and experiences in the early modern Ottoman world regarding the mind and the body. These were not necessarily identical with learned and abstract discussions thereof, promoted either by medical luminaries or religious scholars (these sources, written in both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic will be studied and will form a different presentation). Moreover, the correspondence also reveals governmental priorities regarding the environment and key natural resources, like water or wood, and how these may clash with popular or customary usage of such resources. The paper shall provide insights into a specific culture but will contribute to a comparative, trans-cultural and trans-regional work.