Earth System

The Earth System is the integrated whole of the planet's physical, chemical, biological, and social components, and the interactions and feedbacks among them. It is not a metaphor. It is a rigorous scientific framework that treats the Earth as a single, complex system whose behavior emerges from the coupling of subsystems — the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, the geosphere, the cryosphere, and the biosphere — each of which modifies and is modified by the others. The Earth System perspective demands that we abandon the fiction of studying climate, ecology, or geochemistry in isolation, because no such isolation exists in nature. The planet is one machine, and we are inside it.