About the Author

"I did not write this book alone. Rather, it has been assembled with the help of my colleagues across Esri and the GIS user community. It represents many of the latest concepts behind modern GIS and the revolution it has created in thinking, action, and technology. Our collective aspiration is to share what we have learned and what we believe is a powerful way to better understand Earth’s systems and guide human action." — Jack Dangermond

Widely acknowledged as the leading visionary in the field of geographic information system (GIS) technology, Jack Dangermond is the cofounder and president of Esri. Jack and his wife, Laura Dangermond, launched Environmental Systems Research Institute (later shortened to Esri) in 1969 with a shared vision that systems thinking along with computer mapping and spatial analysis could help people design a better future.

From their hometown in Redlands, California, they built their small consulting firm for land use planners into a world-leading developer of geospatial technology, including its ubiquitous software product, ArcGIS®. For more than 50 years, their vision has guided Esri’s GIS mapping and analytic technologies worldwide.

From the Book

Flying home from the University of Minnesota in 1966, I found myself in a window seat, absorbed by the views of the Upper Midwest landscape from 30,000 feet. As a new graduate student, I reflected on the teachings of one of my mentors, John Borchert, who first introduced me to the concepts of quantitative geography.

As my flight home continued and the airliner reached the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, I could see spatial systems everywhere: stream networks as part of a hydrology system, road networks interconnecting places, and as the flight passed over Utah’s farmlands, agriculture as its own kind of system. As we reached Las Vegas, yet another type of urban system appeared, surrounded by the vast Mojave Desert. It was there that I had my first aha! moment, realizing that geography and systems modeling provide a framework to understand everything, that systems interconnect, and that the world is a system of systems.