Almost every day there are new stories about threats to
the natural environment or actual damage to it, or about measures
that have been taken to protect it.  e news is not always bad.
Areas of land are set aside for wildlife. New forests are planted. Steps
are taken to reduce the pollution of air and water.
Behind all of these news stories are the scientists working to
understand more about the natural world and through that understanding
to protect it from avoidable harm.  e scientists include
botanists, zoologists, ecologists, geologists, volcanologists, seismologists,
geomorphologists, meteorologists, climatologists, oceanographers,
and many more. In their diff erent ways all of them are
environmental scientists.
 e work of environmental scientists informs policy as well
as providing news stories.  ere are bodies of local, national, and
international legislation aimed at protecting the environment and
agencies charged with developing and implementing that legislation.
Environmental laws and regulations cover every activity that might
aff ect the environment. Consequently every company and every citizen
needs to be aware of those rules that aff ect them.
 ere are very many books about the environment, environmental
protection, and environmental science. Discovering the Earth is
diff erent—it is a multivolume set for high school students that tells
the stories of how scientists arrived at their present level of understanding.
In doing so, this set provides a background, a historical
context, to the news reports. Inevitably the stories that the books tell
are incomplete. It would be impossible to trace all of the events in the
history of each branch of the environmental sciences and recount the
lives of all the individual scientists who contributed to them. Instead
the books provide a series of snapshots in the form of brief accounts
of particular discoveries and of the people who made them.  ese
stories explain the problem that had to be solved, the way it was
approached, and, in some cases, the dead ends into which scientists
were drawn.