MINE – Mapping the Interplay Between Nature and Economy. A Digital Map for Ecological Economics

MINE – Mapping the Interplay Between Nature and Economy is a visual map showing the intersection between nature and economy. This website was launched in January 2019. It summarizes the research project by an interdisciplinary group of scientists, mainly economists, mathematicians, philosophers and physicists at the chair of economic theory at Heidelberg University, which started in 1980. It has contributed and can be broadly linked to the field of Ecological Economics.

MINE summarises the experiences of this research and the accompanying policy consulting activities for Germany, the European Union, the US and China and the scientific methodology of our approach. MINE focusses on interconnections between fifteen fundamental concepts, such as time, thermodynamics, joint production, evolution, ignorance, responsibility, power of judgement and justice.

The lecture starts with a reflection on the motive and the making of MINE (2015-2019). Then, four concepts (joint production, ignorance, responsibility and power of judgement) will be presented. To illustrate them, we first present a sketch of the history of the soda-chlorine industry, which starts in the middle of the 18th century, and is apt to demonstrate the interaction between scarcity of resources, invention and innovation of new techniques as well as their environmentally damaging joint products. The latter led once and again to public resistance and political interventions in the course of time. Employing the introduced four concepts, we examine the example of the soda-chlorine industry from a natural-scientific, economic and a political-philosophical perspective.