ΜΕΙΟ ΑΜΒΙΕΝTE, MINERAÇÃO E DEMANDAS SOCIAIS EM REGIÕES METROPOLITANAS

Abstract

It's quite common to ordinary people to consider pollution and environmental unbalances as a recent phenomenon explained by today's technological and consuming civilization. Actually this fact is not so straight, and the humankind has been dealing with this sort of problems for quite a long time, at least six centuries, according to the historical registers. It is worth emphasizing that environmental matter became a notorious subject soon afterward the economic bo- om which follows the World War II. The huge increase in production and consumption coupled with high rate of urbanization, generating a severe burden on the natural environment, which had to be su- pported by the society as a whole. The environmental problems we- re aggravated along with the two oil shocks during the 70s, when it was proposed the Zero Economic Growth ZEG, as a mean to pre- vent a global ecological disaster. Fortunately the doomsday did not come out and, today, 26 year later, global figures has been showing that world wealth has tripled and the consumption of base metals in- creased only 42%. Metal are not the great problem anymore, as a result of increase efficiency in use due to higher technological stan- dards.