The MINE Project and the Heidelberg School of Ecological Economics

In this chapter, we present an overview over some guiding ideas of our book. We aim to integrate concepts from various disciplines into a unified picture. A problem like climate change is not solely physical, biological, economic, or social—it encompasses all these aspects and even more if one truly wants to understand it. Anyone who wishes to contribute to meaningful solutions must integrate all these aspects in some way. However, the overview in this book does not claim to offer the complete big picture. This would be impossible due to the inherent ignorance. Instead, we aim to highlight the complexity of the problems on the one hand and provide orientation on how to consider relevant aspects within this complexity, despite the inevitable ignorance that accompanies all acquisition of knowledge, and prepare for action on the other hand. The first attempt at such an overview has been available since 2019, not in the form of a book, but rather in the somewhat unusual form of a digital knowledge map. MINE stands for “Mapping the Interplay between Nature and Economy”. The MINE project, like this book, strives to provide an overview of many relevant aspects of environmental problems and to offer guidance. The perspective of this book understands the economy as a subsystem of nature. We assume that it is the economy that is fundamentally dependent on nature, being subject to its laws and embedded in it. In this book, we are primarily interested in nature in its dynamics, which is why we systematically consider nature in connection with time from the outset. This change of perspective compared to traditional economics locates the approach of our book within a scientific school of thought that has become known under the name Ecological Economics.