Whole-earth mentor: a conversation with Eugene P. Odum

Natural History, Oct, 1998 by J. Thomas Chaffin

Eugene P. Odum--often called the father of ecology--didn't exactly invent the discipline. Many of its concepts reach back to ancient times. The word itself was coined by German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1869. But during the late 1940s, Eugene Odum led the way in drawing various doctrines together into a new science called ecosystem ecology.

Odum and fellow ecologists G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Raymond Lindeman saw nature as shaped more by physics than by biology--nature as a vital flow of energy from recycled chemicals moving through a thermodynamic system. They thought of energy as a currency shared among the earth's various life forms, and they defined ecosystems--including human societies--as living organic communities within their physical settings.

Odum saw the earth--indeed, the entire universe--as a series of interlocking ecosystems. Each one', he wrote, embraced a unique "strategy of development," each "directed toward achieving as large and diverse an organic structure as is possible within the limits set by the available energy input and the prevailing physical conditions of existence." Each ecosystem, Odum argued, was moving toward, or had already achieved, that goal. In 1953, with the help of his brother and fellow ecologist, Howard Odum, he published Fundamentals of Ecology, the first textbook in the field. The book, which has since appeared in numerous revised editions, secured ecosystem ecology's status as a discipline independent of biology and natural history. As environmentalism began to grab public attention during the late 1960s and the 1970s, the book provided the movement with a vocabulary, as well as a comprehensive vision of nature as a dynamic system.

The son of a sociologist and regional-planning advocate, Eugene Odum was born in 1913 and grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

His interest in birds led him to zoology and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. For his dissertation, he examined avian cardiovascular systems with a device he invented to measure the heartbeat of small birds. Since 1940, Odum has been at the University of Georgia, in Athens, where in 1967 he was instrumental in founding the university's Institute of Ecology.

Interview

You made a name for yourself by trying to see nature holistically, but your interest began with individual species of birds.

I considered going off to get a Ph.D. at Cornell under Arthur A. Allen [a pioneering ornithologist, 1885-1964]. But all Allen did was assign you to a species, and then you wrote a thesis on it. I considered the University of Michigan. They had a great museum there, but I didn't want to be a museum person. I didn't want to shoot and stuff birds; I wanted to study live birds. So I ended up at the University of Illinois--one of the few schools with something like ecology--in the zoology department.

My thesis was in physiological ecology. I wanted to get beyond taxonomy--descriptive ecology--into function, into the physiology of birds and how that related to the larger natural environment. How is everything working out there? What's going on? What are the energy flows?

When you first arrived at the University of Georgia, in 1940, you were allowed to teach some ecology courses. But by the end of that decade, you had a confrontation over the inclusion of ecology in the core curriculum.

We had a meeting about what the core curriculum should be and what every major in biology should take. I suggested that ecology ought to be in there, and they looked at me and laughed. They thought that ecology was just going out and finding animals and describing and collecting them. They said, "There are no principles. It is just organized natural history. It's not an important subject."

They were right about what it was then, but I got mad and walked out. Later they said, "We didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but what is ecology?" Then I realized that nobody had written a general book about ecology. So with help from my brother Howard, I started to write it.

Howard was then a graduate student at Yale under the pioneering ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson. We were interested in putting together the physical and biological sides of ecology. Unlike other books, which started with the organism and ended with the ecosystem, ours started with the ecosystem and worked down--the top-down approach.

Speaking of trying to see the big picture, you were one of the few major figures to embrace James Lovelock's and Lynn Margulis's Gaia hypothesis, published in 1979, which argues that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity that preserves life on earth by controlling the chemical and physical environment.

The Gaia hypothesis is certainly top-down and holistic, and it's now generally accepted--although there's much discussion as to whether it's self-organized. Organisms have not just adapted to different physical environments; they also modify and improve the environment for their own good--just like people. Evolutionary biologists tend to object to the idea, because they think that the environment is just a stage, and the organisms are up there on it fighting each other--survival of the fittest, and that's all there is to it. The physicists, because they observe the universe and how beautifully it operates, see a plan out there.