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Abstract

The sustainable management of natural resources is one of the most important tasks humanity faces. The interdisciplinary online platform MINE-Mapping the Interplay between Nature andEconomy (www.nature-economy.de) aims to contribute to this. MINE can be understood as a bridge between social sciences, economics and the natural sciences. Important building blocks of this bridge are considerations from the fields of political philosophy and ethics. For socioecological transformation processes, MINE offers foundations that are theoretically comprehensive and at the same time practical for politics and economics. Our considerations show how the ideas of MINE came into being, what constitutes the peculiarity of its approach and what it is capable of achieving. In this way, interested persons from the scientific community as well as ecologically engaged citizens should be led towards a fruitful work with the online platform. After the introduction in Part I, in Part II, from the perspective of Malte Faber, who speaks in first-person, motives and experiences are recounted that have led him to found an interdisciplinary research cooperation since 1980. The methods and insight generated in this cooperation became groundbreaking for MINE. Part III deals with the importance of philosophical reasoning for MINE and addresses some guiding ideas and basic building blocks of MINE's approach from a philosophical perspective. In Part IV, five concepts of MINE - three aspects of time, ignorance, joint production, political responsibility and, power of judgment - are introduced to illustrate the MINE-approach by a concrete transformation problem, namely the river Emscher; which was the central sewer of the Ruhr area around 1900 and was completely renaturalized after several decades in 2020. In Part V, Malte Faber illustrates, again in the firstperson perspective, the orientation of MINE through three messages on transformation. In an addendum, Part VI, we critically comment on the five-before-twelve rhetoric that is widespread especially in discourses of climate protection.