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

Natural History, Oct, 1998 by J. Thomas Chaffin

Why do you devote so little attention to evolution, natural selection, and to what geologists call deep time?

In ecology today, we say that evolution is not restricted to the organism level. We say that evolution occurs all the way through the spectrum. Earth evolves, populations evolve. In other words, the evolutionary processes are not restricted to the gene. And of course, there is coevolution, which involves two unrelated species and the development of mutualism.

One of our big points now is that as pioneer communities grow large and complex, with all their resources in use, we have increasing mutualism--an evolutionary trend from competition to mutualism. We point out the parallel of the United States and Russia trying for years to kill each other; now it's in their mutual interest to cooperate.

Evolution does not have to involve natural, genetic selection. All this business of cloning and genetic engineering--we're no longer talking about letting natural selection select people. We're talking about us selecting people. We're playing God now. Let's put it this way: evolutionary biology focuses on what happened in the past, but ecology focuses on the present, on what's happening now, and what will happen in the future.

Everything pulses. People are overworried about endangered species. I think it's important, but not the only thing we should study now. But deep time does show us that when there have been mass extinctions, nature is resilient. After each mass extinction, the species left recover their numbers. Diversity is slower. You have a period of wiping out huge numbers of species--and we're doing that-and the questions are: Can we be sure that these species play important roles? Can they be replaced?

You've talked about the need for affluent people to consume less, but you've resisted the allure of ideas like "small is beautiful."

Well, "small is beautiful," but big is powerful. As long as big is powerful, "small is beautiful" won't work. As my father [sociologist Howard Odum] said, "Scientists think they can solve problems by being scientific and rational, but not if people don't want to go along with it."

What we ecologists tell students is to think big but work small. We point out to students right away that you can't do a really holistic study as a thesis--a piece study has to be put in a framework.

Do you feel that the fragmentation of ecology into subdisciplines has resulted, in many cases, in a kind of narrow professionalism and a loss of the holistic vision?

Science in general does that. It's perfectly natural. In a new field you have only a broad picture, and as you get involved and learn more, you become reductionist. But you hope you don't stay on that level and [will] come back to the broad picture.

C. P. Snow, in his book The Two Cultures, articulated the growing dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities. You've said that ecology is the science that's best suited to bridging the two cultures.

Ecology is the best bridge because it's the only one of the major sciences that's increasing in scale of study. In genetics, you study a gene for cancer but not the bigger idea that cancer won't develop unless the environment and other things are conducive to it.