Wherever we live in Britain, we often have cause to look at the buildings and the landscape around us. But to be able to understand their relationship and interdependence we need a concept to link them together. Geodiversity is that concept: the link between people, landscapes arid their culture through the interaction of biodiversity, soils, minerals, rocks, fossils, water, wind, ice and the built environment. You may disagree with the need for yet another term, especially as you may only just becoming familiar with biodiversity, but it is time to get an holistic view of the environment around us. In short, biodiversity can be seen to rely on and therefore become part of the concept of geodiversity - a statement that could be seen as heresy by naturalists and biologists. A tour of England will explain the concept and give tangible evidence of the range and breadth in the geodiversity of these counties, a diversity that spawned much of the early research into past and present natural phenomena and processes, so crucial to understanding our landscape. Common Ground, a Dorset based charity, coined the term 'local distinctiveness' in the 1980s. They could equally have used geodiversity to describe the use of local materials to give character and flavour to buildings in towns and countryside.
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