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-Introducing our Planet-
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The Earth System Many of us feel overwhelmed by the environmental issues that we encounter in newspapers, magazines, television, radio or the Internet. We see weird combinations of letters like PCB and CFC. We read statements from opposing Ph.D. experts, one of whom says that global warming is a serious problem while the other tells us we have nothing to worry about. How can we understand these complicated environmental issues? The reason to care about "systems within systems within systems" is that systems thinking provides us with a way to understand any particular system, especially complicated ones like planet Earth. No matter what the system is, we can always understand it better by asking three systems questions:
Dr. Art's Guide to Planet Earth uses systems thinking to help us understand how our planet works and how we can support the way our planet currently operates. We will learn three guiding principles that can provide a framework for our thinking. These principles help us focus on major concepts rather than becoming lost in confusing details. They provide a framework to guide our actions as individuals, local communities, nations and a global species. We begin with the first systems question: What are the parts of the Earth system? To understand how our planet works, I believe it is best to describe the Earth system in terms of the following three parts:
In examining Earth as a whole, we are going to focus on Earth's matter,
Earth's energy and Earth's life. In other words, we are going to examine
from a systems point of view the stuff (matter) that exists on planet
Earth, the energy that makes things happen on planet Earth, and the
organisms that make our planet unique in the solar system.
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