VSI Earth System ScienceDo you ever wonder how it all works? I mean how it all works – on planet Earth, at least As a naturalist, I find myself asking this question, or at least inquiring into a facet of it multiple times each day.

Had you asked me not so very long ago within which of the scientific fields such questions are best answered, I would have quickly answered ecology. However with the recent publication of Tim Lenton’s Earth System Science; A Very Short Introduction, I was quickly made aware that there was another field of study that sought to explain the proverbial big picture in a perspective so large and all-encompassing that even ecology is only a part.