Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Società geologica italiana“

The combined annual Congress of the Italian Geological Society (Società Geologica Italiana, SGI) and the Italian Mineralogical and Petrological Society (Società Italiana di Mineralogia e Petrologia, SIMP), dedicated to Geosciences for a sustainable future, took place in Turin in September 2022. This was an opportunity to critically reflect on the role of geosciences for our society and planet, and the role that geoscientists have to play in the education of citizens, for the prevention of natural hazards and the conservation of cultural and natural heritage. In continuity with our previous work on the awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals among young geoscientists in Italy, the present study attempts to expand the investigated sample to include the entire Italian community of geoscientists. The aim is to highlight: (1) the most widespread opinions on the link between Earth Sciences and the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN 2030 Agenda; (2) what steps have been taken by Italian Earth Sciences departments for sustainability education and what could be the best strategies to develop sustainability related to geoscience topics. According to 229 answers to a questionnaire sent to congress participants (corresponding to 20% of the total amount), the results highlight that the Italian geocommunity (at least its younger members) has a high awareness of the implications of its work and research with sustainability issues, and, in particular, their responsibility to the environment; notwithstanding this awareness, the level of average familiarity with the 2030 Agenda and its goals is still low. In order to bridge this gap, it is recognized that there is an urgent need for sustainability education efforts in departments and the use of inter- and trans-disciplinary teaching approaches that can educate both students and practitioners to be capable of addressing the challenging issues of today.

La Società Italiana di Scienze Naturali (SISN), fondata a Milano nel 1855 prima con il nome di “Società geologica residente in Milano” e poi, dal 22 gennaio 1860, con il nome che la contraddistingue attualmente, ebbe un ruolo attivo nel processo di costruzione dell’identità nazionale all’indomani dell’Unità d’Italia. Prima società naturalistica italiana, essa manifestò questa vocazione soprattutto attraverso i congressi annuali, organizzati tra il 1864 e il 1906 in varie città della Penisola. Le riunioni straordinarie fuori sede avevano finalità ben precise: l’esplorazione geologica e naturalistica del nuovo territorio unificato, in gran parte ancora sconosciuto; la legittimazione della figura del naturalista come scienziato professionista; la divulgazione della scienza come motore di progresso del paese; l’affermazione della SISN come centro di riferimento per tutti i naturalisti italiani. Il presente lavoro propone dunque una lettura della storia della Società dalle origini al 1906 attraverso la lente dei congressi postunitari.

ABSTRACT Arturo Issel (1842–1922) introduced the regional Tyrrhenian stage of the late Pleistocene in 1914. This still stands within modern stratigraphic classification as an Italian Marine Stage for the Mediterranean Sea marking the base of the Late Pleistocene underlining the scientific importance of Issel's research within the geological sciences. This paper provides a short overview of the career and the wide-ranging interests of this Italian geologist and naturalistic traveller in order to provide a context to the knowledge and research experience behind his stratigraphic work. As university professor in Genovese society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he played an important role in scientific instruction, exploration and research contributing to the popularization of science through museum collections and publications and in the application of such knowledge within public office both in Liguria and within Italy. He formed part of the Italian delegation at International Geological Congresses and held membership of the most outstanding geological societies and scientific academies of the time.

The origin and usage through time of geologia, geognosy, geogony, oryctognosy, geology and geophysics, as characterised by their frequency of occurrence in the Google Books Ngram Corpus, is discussed. The English, French, German, Italian and Spanish corpuses used in this study have been normalised over the same timespan using the average frequencies of occurrence of the same set of ‘neutral’ words in each language (as advocated by Younes and Reips 2019). Use of the term geology is found to predate publication of James Hutton's Theory of the Earth in 1795 by about 100 years; geognosy, oryctognosy and geogony, much less commonly used, became established in the 1780s and began to fall out of use around 1820. The terms geologist, and geognost follow a similar pattern. The emergence of geophysics is a less familiar field: While the phrases physics of the Earth and physical geography can both be traced back to the early 1700s, geophysics only began to be used in the early 1800s and did not really become common until about 1860; geophysicist becomes common in German after 1860, but more generally after 1880. The first geophysics-related publications were bulletins from magnetic and seismic observatories and its first dedicated journal, Beiträge zur Geophysik, began publication in 1887, eighty years after the formation of The Geological Society of London. The tems earth science and geoscience, popular today, have steadily increased in their usage since being introduced in the 1880s and 1930s respectively.

Landscape is part of everyone’s cultural heritage, if recognized and understood; such consciousness fosters a more creative participation of society in a balanced management of the territory and sustainable development: an important resource in times of crisis. Cognitive tools now enjoy a wide use and offer us a means of immediate communicative diffusion of scientific knowledge relative to an area and an environment. LANDSCApp, a smartphone app, gives the public a chance to try an alternative approach to the knowledge of the natural and cultural territorial heritage, thanks to a set of information related to the geological, morphological, environmental settings of the Italian landscapes.

<abstract> <p>The role of geological and geotematic mapping has recently come to the forefront in spatial/environmental management. This paper aims to present some cases of boundary extension in the use of contemporary cartographic tools (GIS and WEBGIS). The potential of digital maps and associated databases offers a wide range of applications, responding to the urgent need to make available to users (practitioners in the technical sectors, planners and society as a whole) the most important concepts to concretely achieve better land management, active risk prevention and sustainable resource enhancement. The application of geomorphological maps to issues closer to society can effectively create its approach to more properly technical-scientific issues, fostering a shared awareness, useful in protecting and enhancing the fragile Italian territory. The described experiences focus on GIS, which confirms its effectiveness both for social involvement in environmental issues, and in territorial/environmental management.</p> </abstract>

Since its founding documents, sustainability has recognized collective well-being and environmental protection as the key to the development of society and, at the same time, the main challenge in the relationships between human activities and the limited capacity of ecosystems to support them. For a long time, it was believed that natural and anthropic systems responded to perturbations gradually through a slow adaptive process. Today, we know that vulnerability (economic, social, environmental and health) projects us into a condition of sudden discontinuity, unpredictable and uncontrollable immersive events, in which every single fragility is related to the "whole" and every single action produces an eco or a cascading effect on the well-being of users and the health of the planet. The global crisis scenarios, the conditions of uncertainty and reality complexity, the limited resources and the variability of the framework of the needs show the failure of a "rigid" conception-organization of the built environment often forced to reorganize itself as a result of stressful events for reach acceptable levels of efficiency or to show its fragility (seismic, hydro-geological, climatic, social) by undermining the concepts of stability (environmental, economic and social security) we are used to. Precisely in urban areas, a context in which human health-planetary health relationships express their effects more than elsewhere, it is necessary to intercept new solutions and rules to deal with the direct consequences (deterioration of surface materials, structures, reduction of energy performance) and indirect (loss of identity, interruption of socio-economic activities, loss of livability and conditions of well-being) of climate change on urban centres. Although the literature recognizes the need for impact forecasting tools, it appears increasingly important to support strategies aimed at increasing adaptability understood as a characteristic of the designed system that allows its transformation/modification, increasing its performance qualities and its life span useful. In this sense, adaptability is one of the fundamental requisites for a holistic-circular regeneration and redevelopment of neighbourhoods and architectures, conceived as products that are not "disposable" but "error-friendliness" or "prone to error" and structured to "regenerate" following damage or decompensation through actions of transformation, repair, maintenance, reuse, reconditioning, etc.A paradigm shift is needed in the interpretation of adaptive intervention as a "regenerative process", understood not only as a solution for the restoration/maintenance of acceptable performance conditions - in a linear vision of the life cycle of the designed system - but a moment of "reset /restart" in which the action (of transformability, maintainability, replaceability, reversibility, mitigation/compensation, etc.) underlies a set of strategies structured in a circular process (Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Re-use, Repair, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, Recycle, Recover). In this sense, interventions on the built environment constitute an opportunity to lead cities towards an ecological transition, if considered both as adaptive actions of external (environmental, social and economic) and internal vulnerabilities (variability linked to user needs) but also as interferences (of circular micro processes) to the linear process with which cities have been conceived and evolved, to constitute a step towards the creation of a potentially regenerative and resilient built environment. The paper is part of a study on the topic of sustainable regeneration and redevelopment of existing buildings and urban areas. It explores the implications between the need for adaptive regeneration to ensure both the adequate levels of performance and functionality of the space (indoor, outdoor space ) with its components/materials and the equally urgent need to conceive such adaptive actions in a circular way. The collection, review and systematization of the literature and case studies led to the identification of a framework of adaptive/circular strategies at the micro (the single component), meso (the building) and macro (the public space) scales. The strategies were then validated in three social housing districts in three Italian cities.