Isolated, reductionist thinking, in which you focus in on some small detail, is clearly important to the development of our knowledge, but by its very nature, this mode of thinking cannot illuminate the interconnections that are so important to the operation of the whole Earth system. Some aspects of Earth, like its weather, change dramatically on short timescales, while others, like the positions and sizes of the continents, show dramatic change only when viewed over hundreds of millions of years. This is a complex definition, but I think it is fairly precise, so it is worth thinking about carefully. A few examples will help. A bathtub is a simple example of a dynamic system.
Water flows into the tub through a faucet and leaves the tub through a drain.
The faucet and the drain represent processes that are related because they both involve water moving into and out of the same reservoir, which is the tub itself. The balance between the inflow through the faucet and the outflow through the drain determines how much water accumulates in the tub. If the inflow and outflow rates are the same, then there will be no change in the amount of water in the tub, so the system would appear to be unchanging and not a true dynamic system. Another example of a dynamic system is a pot of water set on a burner. In this case, energy, rather than matter, flows through the system.