Systems are very interesting. In many ways, 'everything' is connected to 'everything else', and systems are the best way to study how complex things work. No 150 page Very Short Introduction can include much detail, but Tim Lenton does a pretty good job of explaining to me how the earth, its atmosphere, oceans, biosphere, its people and how we live are all interconnected.

Systems are described by models, and the first chapter explains and gives some simple examples of them, together with cycles, feedback and other basic terms.

The next two chapters discuss the most important cycles, water, CO2, and others. I would have liked more detailed figures and fewer words in these sections. It was sometimes difficult to relate the rudimentary diagrams with the sometimes very dense text. The flow of these chapters can be understood by skimming past the details, though some basic understanding of biology, chemistry, and geology is helpful.

Following chapters were more interesting to me, charting the Earth's past, present, and possible futures, with discussions of how we might counter, or fail to, our current runaway climate crisis.

The final chapter, Generalization, considers Earth's distant future, and that of other planets near us and far away.

With the Earth's climate crisis, systems science is an important topic, making this an important book. ( )