ABSTRACT
When I explain to my final-year students the various skips and loops in their lecture programme, I like to say that reality is a bundle, not a list. The world is not organised as a linear narrative. No single element of the physical environment can be analysed comprehensively without reference to the system as a whole, and the physical environment as a whole cannot be understood without reference to its component parts. Therefore, although this book is about glaciers and not about the whole global environment, we need to begin by seeing glaciers as part of a broader environmental system. This chapter outlines some of the principal relationships between glaciers and other components of the environment. The aim is to provide a relatively simple environmental context for what follows in the rest of the book, and the references in the text should provide readers with a route into more specialised literature on the topics that are discussed.
