How does the living planet work? How, in real-life settings, do humans interact with nature's systems? This book tells of scientific efforts to make sense of life-support machinery of spaceship earth to understand what happens when a growing human population tinkers with it. Telescopes in orbiting spacecraft look down on earth and report changes in weather, landscapes and ocean currents. Magical technology of remote sensing looms large here, in text and illustrations. Computerized map-making is adjunct to the more challenging task of making computer models that can describe the world and predict climatic variations and their effects. Unless human equations are explicit, technology and science of planetwide interactions remain half-baked. Hence the renaissance of geography, as great integrating science that links local and global.