A commonly voiced presumption (one might say, a hoary old chestnut...) amongst some geologists is that, because the geological record shows that dramatic changes in the Earth's environment have sometimes occurred in the past, similar changes are implicitly more or less acceptable today. Some people have, with straight faces, used this sort of argument to justify the destruction of significant landforms on the grounds that natural erosion will sooner or later do the same thing anyway. However, this argument takes no account of the differing environmental conditions and processes applying at the time of geologically - rapid changes, nor of the natural time scales and rates of change involved in processes such as erosion. The emphasis in geoconservation on maintaining natural rates and magnitudes of change is important because it highlights the fact that, whilst the earth is a dynamically changing environment, it is neither natural nor necessarily desirable for such changes to be artificially accelerated by human activities.

We can distinguish two broad groups of phenomena whose diversity and natural rates and magnitudes of change geoconconservation aims to maintain, namely relict or 'fossil' features formed by past processes that are no longer active today, and contemporary or 'active' features which are being formed by processes that are ongoing today. These two groups of phenomena have implications for the management of geoconservation which differ in certain respects.

The Aims of Geoconservation are discussed in some detail in the following five linked sub-sections: