Geodiversity and the interactions of socio-natural systems in an Anthropocene perspective

Abstract

Earth Sciences' investigations allow us to know that the planet Earth has an age of 4, 6 billion years. During this elapsed time many processes changed radically some aspects of the planet. In the first four billions of Earth's history, life was in its initial stages and was restricted to the ocean bodies. In the other remaining 500 millions of years, living organisms became more diversified, occupied the continental lands and the human society started to participate in the Earth System at about 12.000 years ago, although our species were already present at the planet for at about 200 million years. This means that human's presence in the planet is just a small fraction of the Earth's history. But, on the other hand, human's modern lifestyle caused critical changes in this system, what led some scientific currents to say that we are responsible for the global warming. Beside this, the International Commission on Stratigraphy - ICS, which is the scientific body that sets the global standard for the time scale that expresses the history of the Earth, has a working group that is nowadays discussing the establishment of a new geological epoch known as Anthropocene. This new geological epoch is marked by substantial changes, in part irreversible, to the Earth System that are comparable to or greater in magnitude to other natural phenomena or processes that occurred previously in the planet, such as glaciers and volcanic activity. Will be discussed here the interactions between human societies and the geodiversity elements, which includes minerals, rocks, soils and reliefs, throughout the human history, focusing on the needs of resources to sustain the modern urban life and the myriad of limits, values and services of natural systems and their abiotic elements. Some examples will be presented, including the reality and conflicts of the geodiversity use in Chapada Diamantina, an ancient diamond mining region in the Northeast of Brazil.