This e-text is designed to engage students across all disciplines. It focuses on ecosystem services as a framework for evaluating how tightly coupled we are with our environment. Natural and human systems rarely exhibit behavior that could be considered linear (thus easily predictable). Therefore, systems thinking and system dynamics have been integrated to help students develop skills for evaluating the significance of feedbacks and time delays and the subsequent impact on the behavior of dynamic, nonlinear systems. Systems thinking and system dynamics also provide a foundation for describing systems that enables iterative learning. By slowing adding complexity to a simple model students are able to build upon that model, yet still maintain focus on basic concepts such as the services of photosynthesis and primary productivity.

The text has been designed from the perspective of ecosystem services to focus attention on our dependency upon the physical, biological and chemical processes of our planet.  The content page is a map of relationships with links to individual chapters so as to provide context to the topic of the chapter. Chapter 1 provides a foundation to the text, to ecosystem services, systems thinking and system dynamics. It concludes with an introduction of the triple bottom line as a paradigm for sustainability. Chapter 2 introduces the regulating and supporting services of air, water, soil and primary productivity, which provide context for the carbon cycle, the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle and biodiversity. Regulating and supporting services provide the foundation for provisioning and cultural services (Chapter 3) that include water resources, energy resources and food resources. Ecosystem services provide the foundation for society and the economy and therefore we consider something sustainable (Chapter 4) when the ecosystem, society and the economy are equally valued.

The grand environmental challenges that the world is facing today are directly related to how we think and how we communicate, collaborate, and compete with one another. This text recognizes that simply providing scientific content is not enough. In addition to content objectives each chapter will include process objectives to remind you that you are here to learn to think in a new way. It is not clear to me what that new way of thinking will be because you arrive here with skills my generation never knew.  As a systems thinker I know that when you change the parts of a system the behavior of that system changes. I have great hope that your generation, the Millennials, will change the system and find solutions to many of our grand challenges. Just remember Albert Einstein when your journey runs into the old guard telling you that it can’t be done.