 On this episode, I have the honor to chat with Professor Marina Fischer-Kowalski from Boku University who founded the Institute of Social Ecology already some years ago and is the founding figure of the International Society of Industrial Ecology, the European Society of Ecological Economics, and her work is very interdisciplinary. It has evolved over the years, of course, but it includes elements of social sciences, environmental accounting, and some elements of policy and even politics. She has written countless reports, articles and books on the topics of material flow analysis, industrial ecology, ecological economics, and many more. With all that being said, Marina, thank you a lot for taking the time. Could you perhaps give a brief introduction of yourself? Well, I started in the 80s. I've been trained as a sociologist, and my first major work was a social report on inequality and how it had evolved after the Second World War in Austria. So this report was controversial, but in many ways well received, and this trained me to use, on the one hand, all kinds of public statistics. On the other hand, to utilize the discourse between policymakers and scientists to make things change. And my next step was at OECD in Paris. I was involved in the program. It was not social indicators, it was quality of life for example indicators or something like that. I did a lot of work there, I loved it. But all of a sudden the United States of America found that this program is superfluous because if people have money, they live well and it's not necessary to inquire into all other aspects of their living. So this was frustrating for me as you can imagine. And coming back to Austria and having children, there was a big conflict about the atomic energy plant that was planned in Austria and also a big water that they wanted to use for another energy creation. And so, yeah, this was just a private person. Two publishers wrote me later, why don't I do a report on inequality in the environment? And why don't I do, yeah, I said, well, I'm not an expert there. So then you will write in a way that people understand you. So, okay, I agreed. And I did, I did do a book on state of the environment, measures in environmental politics and reporting on the environment between, and that was a trick, the nine Austrian states. So I got them into competition, which... They love that, right? Benchmarking is already back in the day. Right. But that way I met all sorts of experts. I didn't have any natural science education yet. So I really needed other people and I needed all these civil organizations that were fighting for better environment. So I got in the middle of that scene and looked for a new job. And all of a sudden I got offered the chance from an inter- weird, inter-university, interdisciplinary, yeah, belonging to eight universities. They offered me to build up a research area on society and environment. Why not? That's what I did. That's what I did. And that was a wonderful offer. Yeah. So that was the beginning of the Institute of Social Ecology? Yes. That was the beginning in the mid-80s. I had, of course, I was used to international cooperation. So immediately I cooperated with the Wuppertal Institute, University of Leiden. So I found international partners to develop a new agenda. And I had learned while doing this report on the Austrian environment, I had learned that everybody was crazily focused on wastes and emissions. Okay. And I said, my Christ, this is an irrational way to go about this policy agenda. You have to look at the inputs and then you start understanding the outflows. And it makes no sense to stare at thousands of potentially poisonous or whatever outputs without looking at the amounts of inputs and regulate them and not the other. So that makes sense today. I don't know. Yeah. Today it makes sense, but at that time it was weird. And it was, there were a few intelligent offices in the Austrian Ministry of Environment who found that smart and helped me or finance certain research. Yeah. So how it started. That's how it started. And so was that like a first material flow analysis you would say back in the day? Yeah. Yes, we did. I think that's why the first material flow. Okay. In 88, I think. And the other good experience was that you need to collaborate with very different scientists. You have to have interdisciplinary live. Collaboration. And that's much nicer than at most universities because at. At universities, people all the time compete among one another who is more famous and who has the better message and whatnot. Yeah. But if you depend on a physicist to explain to you why or how you can resolve a certain problem and to a chemist and to a biologist and botanist and an agrarian scientist and whatnot. You don't compete with them. That's foolish. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Except they're the specific knowledge and by asking them questions that are unusual for them. They learn too. And that's how team building evolved and my original team from the early nineties or late eighties. I mean, many of them are still in my team. So we really. Yeah. We liked it together and we were very productive. Yeah.