In the near future, Los Angeles is an all but uninhabitable war zone, racked by crime, violence, pollution and poverty. But above the blighted city, a Utopia has arisen: Todos Santos, a thousand-foot high single-structured city, designed to used state-of-the-art technology to create a completely human-friendly environment, offering its dwellers everything they could want in exchange for their oath of allegiance and their constant surveillance.

Offering a uniquely strong emphasis on earth systems and an increased emphasis on environmental topics, Earth Science and the Environment stands out among other earth science introductory textbooks. Discussion of how the solid earth, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and living organisms interact, as well as the effects of these interactions, is presented throughout the text. This introductory textbook provides a rich overview of all Earth-related disciplines, including geology, geography, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy.

This book should be 'the bible' for everyone involved in knowledge management processes. Holland, as one of the complexity theory founders, decribes the essentials of how complex adaptive rules, in relation to the variability of the environment, determine knowledge dynamics and learning capabilities.

Key message of the book is the way that processes of induction, both cognitive and subcognitive, determine rule making, rule adaptation and environment modeling.

With this work Holland (et al.) was the first to close the gap between cognition, complex adaptive systems and knowledge processing. He also provides a sound computational base for the theories presented, opening possibilities for implementation of 'the induction theory' in real world applications.