Geodiversity: dimensions, connotations, and associations

Abstract

The paper aims to outline the main characteristics of the term ‘geological diversity’ in its three most clear and interrelated aspects: legal, worldview, and natural historic. The legal aspect of geodiversity now seems to be the most clearly comprehended and the most efficient in regard to its primary tasks. The experience of regulation in the international law of various objects of geodiversity is considered in relation to the concept of world her-itage. Based on the convention of biological diversity, which is also part of world heritage, we attempt by anal-ogy to compare biodiversity and geodiversity as an object of legal regulation. The system of Kant’s philosophy is analysed as a worldview basis, which can be used to clarify the meaning of the term ‘geodiversity’ and which is based on the priority of the researcher’s self-reflection in theoretical or practical judgments: being ‘in-tersubjective’ it finds realization in principles of postmodernism and other worldview novelties. The natural his-toric aspects of geodiversity are considered as one of the variants of systematization of the factual materials amassed in the earth sciences, based on the needs of the related scientific, economic, and conservational activ-ities of humans in the geological space. Analysing the demands to science in general and to geology in particu-lar, we suggest that despite the importance of systematizing paradigms, the systematic unity of geology—at least at the current stage of its development—is based on the specifics of geological thinking able to fully comprehend the diversity of geological phenomena and on the basic principles of systematization of the fac-tual material neutral in regard to dominating paradigms. In this sense, geology—as a multi-level dynamic sys-tem of reflection of the results of geological studies—embodies the ‘oncoming movement’ of empirical gener-alizations of the factual material and the conceptual-mathematical models of the more adequate reflection of the diversity of geological phenomena, among which models of fractal geometry appear to be the most pro-spective.