The text contains several unique features for an introductory chemistry text.

1.Water and Sun is the only text which can be used as either an introduction to environmental chemistry or a calculus-based majors introduction to chemistry. In fact, students will have a deeper understanding in some areas.  Since environmental systems are more complex than laboratory systems a non-traditional approach is used for some topics.

2.Water and Sun is the only introductory chemistry text to use Bjerrum’s logC approach to acid/base chemistry.The irony is that the logC approach is less mathematical than the traditional algebraic approach yet, at the same time, it enables a beginner to deal with more complex acid/base chemistry than can be dealt with, at the introductory level, using the algebraic approach. In addition, ionic activity associated with saltwater systems and systems open to carbon dioxide in air, which are too complex to be covered in a traditional introductory class, can (and have to) be understood when dealing with natural systems.

3. Water and Sun is the only introductory chemistry text to employ the global approach to thermodynamics introduced by Henry Bent (The Second Law) and Norman Craig (Entropy Analysis).Through this approach students come away with a deeper understanding by recognizing that there are three basic entropies: thermal, structural and configurational. And the systems approach allows students to be introduced to them gradually; which appears to provide a deeper and more enduring understanding of these topics. Unlike the systems approach, where once the chapter on thermodynamics is started, all of thermodynamics has to be covered by its completion, the river system spreads out the introduction of these basic thermodynamic properties in three chapters.

4. Water and Sun is the only introductory text that enables students to perform calculations concerning global warming potential using current data and kinetic simulations using special software that deals with systems that are at the cutting edge of current environmental issues such as climate change and the stratospheric ozone shield.

5. Water and Sun is the only introductory chemistry text that includes video-based computer experiments, workshops and exercises that involve the user taking measurements from the computer screen.These are not supplemental, optional exercises but rather deal directly with topics in the text and, in some instances, are an integral part, in that subsequent topics in the text assume an understanding developed in them. Moreover, some of the results from real systems do not produce the “expected” results and thus require more than just a rote acceptance of all that is presented.

At the end of each chapter a specific environmental system is presented accompanied by problems/questions which involve an application of knowledge developed during the chapter. Examples include the Larsen B ice shelf, Houston smog, Iron Mountain acid mine drainage, and the Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge.

With the aid of an appendix on Algebra (based on an approach used by Richard Feynman in The Feynman Lectures on Physics) and an appendix on calculus (based on a 1919 book, Calculus Made Easy, by Sylvanus Thompson), topics in these are introduced when necessary to understand an aspect of the system being covered. For example, the calculus of first order kinetics is introduced in the very first chapter to understand hydrologic flow models.  The calculus of kinetics and quantum theory is then revisited in later chapters in dealing with energy flow from the sun.

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