Eugene
Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist
1. Introduction
In July of 1969, when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon and sent back photographs of the earth, Americans beheld for the first time the planet that is our home. We could see oceans, deserts, and clouds, but no political boundaries and no people. From the perspective of the moon, human beings were indistinguishable components of the indivisible biosphere, and national borders were invisible.
Even the environmental degradation that Rachel Carson had made a subject of media attention seven years earlier with her book Silent Spring did not appear in those awesomely beautiful photographs. But the sight of the blue planet spinning in space alerted us to its vulnerability and reminded us of our dependence on its stability. We recognized that humans were now capable of altering the biosphere to such an extent-by pollution of air and water, by nuclear war, by habitat disruption, and by soil damage-as to render it inhospitable to human existence. To learn more about the changes underway in our global ecosystem, and to forestall some of them, Americans turned to ecology.
The media, publicizing our "ravaged environment" in illustrated stories about the nation's smoggy, noisy cities and contaminated rivers and lakes, announced a dramatic shift in American social and scientific priorities. TIME Magazine predicted that pollution would "soon replace the Viet Nam war as the nation's major issue of protest" and called 1969 "the year of ecology." In an article introducing the leading ecologists of the day, whom the magazine designated "the new Jeremiahs," TIME associated ecology with environmentalism, because of ecology's assumption "that all nature is interconnected and that any intervention has far-reaching effects." Newsweek, in early 1970, heralded the dawn of "the Age of Ecology," in which ecologists would teach society about the "web of life."(1) On April 22, 1970, Americans celebrated the first Earth Day.
The following year sales peaked on Eugene Pleasants Odum's Fundamentals of Ecology.(2) Gene Odum, who had been identified by both TIME and Newsweek as one of the country's leading ecologists, had brought the word ecosystem into common parlance by making it the organizing concept in his textbook. The ecosystem, Odum had written in its first edition, published in 1953, is a system composed of biotic communities and their abiotic environment interacting with each other. A lake can be regarded as an ecosystem; so can a marshland; and so can the earth. A "mature" ecosystem, characterized by high species diversity and relationships of interdependence among its component organisms, approaches stability, or homeostasis, and represents nature's "balance." To understand nature in terms of ecosystems is therefore to see its diverse "parts" as interdependent. Fundamentals of Ecology, which began "top-down" with a discussion of the "whole," rather than the parts, made the ecosystem concept central to ecology and in so doing profoundly influenced the environmentalist movement.
The extraordinary sales of Fundamentals signaled the extent of the
environmental revolution that took place in the 1970s, when colleges and
universities around the world instituted ecology courses and degree programs
and the public became familiar with arguments to preserve ecosystems. The
textbook was ultimately translated into twelve languages.(3)
Gene Odum was hailed as "the father of modern ecology."
The Ecosystem Model
The ecosystem was a concept, invented in 1935, whose time in the public spotlight had come in the 1970s. It was scientifically appealing to ecologists who sought ways to understand the function of organisms in relation to each other and to the land. It was politically appealing to environmental activists who sought justification for their arguments against pollution, because it showed that human society and nonhuman nature made up a single interactive system in which pollution of any part potentially affected the whole. It was philosophically appealing to intellectuals who saw relationships between the Vietnam War, racism, capitalism, and environmental destruction because it was a theory of connectivity. And it was ethically appealing to many anti-authoritarian thinkers who, after rejecting religion in favor of science, liked the idea that cooperation among organisms was as important as competition in their survival.
Gene Odum encouraged students to see the social implications of ecosystem science. According to one ecology student who heard Odum lecture at Yale in 1975, when Odum spoke of cooperation, mutualism, and interdependence in nature he imparted the message that if humans acknowledge an interdependence with the other components of an ecosystem, then humans must also acknowledge the necessity to preserve the health of that system.(4) Odum's focus on the whole brought interconnectivity and hence social responsibility to the fore, said Karen Porter, who later became a colleague of Odum's in the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia. "Gene was a proselytizer of holism, and his message of interconnectivity inspired a generation of ecologists."
The holistic vision of nature represented by the ecosystem concept constituted a radical departure from mainstream Western thought. For over two thousand years, cultural expression of all kinds embodied an atomistic and dualistic model of reality. In that model, spirit, whether in the form of God, the soul, the self, or the mind, is separable from a material world, which is composed of discrete entities that interact mechanically. The tendency to understand phenomena in terms of discrete entities can be traced back to the principle, propounded first by Leucippus and Democritus in the fifth century B.C., that nature is composed of particles, or atoms. It remains evident in the individualism that has shaped Western economics, politics, philosophy, and religion. The tendency to dichotomize everything--into oppositions of spirit and matter, soul and body, self and world, and culture and nature--can be traced back to the metaphysics of Plato, who differentiated the static realm of Ideas from the dynamic one of their appearances in nature.
Western science grew out of this conceptual predisposition. The perceived separability of mind from a material world made objectivity seem a theoretical possibility, and the presumed divisibility of that world into parts made investigation of the parts seem an appropriate approach to knowledge. In 1637, philosopher René Descartes enunciated in Discourse on Method a means of obtaining knowledge that is now called "reductionism": dividing the object of investigation into parts and proceeding from the simplest to the most complex. The Cartesian method of studying the parts before the whole, which presupposed the whole being equal to the sum of its parts, made specialization in the parts the means by which society advanced in its understanding of nature. In the Cartesian paradigm, the compilation of information acquired by specialists in nature's parts resulted in knowledge of the whole. The method produced the "bottom-up" approach to the study of nature that ordered biology and ecology textbooks prior to Fundamentals of Ecology.
The culture/nature dualism not only inclined the public to think of "nature" as simply a site for the development of "culture"; it also made "nature" appear to be a repository of "natural resources," available for human use, and land to be potential property. The dualism of "civilized" and "primitive," a correlative of the culture/nature dualism, sanctioned the West's conquest of the earth's "uncivilized" inhabitants and its expansion over the earth's "uncivilized" regions, which imperialists undertook sometimes in the name of Christianity and other times in the pursuit of wealth, which "civilization" required. The externalization of nature in the culture/nature dualism thus turned nonhuman nature into a threat to culture, making the "subduing" of nonhuman nature appear appropriate and necessary. It rendered theoretically unnoticeable the interdependence of humans and other organisms of the earth.
This was the model that ecology had challenged from its Darwinian
beginnings. In 1859 Darwin showed in the Origin of Species that
species interact with one another and evolve by natural selection, and in his
concluding portrayal of nature as a "tangled bank" of plants, birds,
insects, and worms, he marveled that "these elaborately constructed forms,
so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a
manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."(5)
Ten years later, German biologist Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, who had coined the
word Oecologie in 1866, described the new discipline as the study of
that tangled bank.
By ecology we mean the body of knowledge
concerning the economy of nature--the investigation of the total relations of
the animal both to its inorganic and its organic environment; including above
all, its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with
which it comes directly and indirectly into contact--in a word, ecology is the
study of all those complex interrelations referred to by Darwin as the
conditions of the struggle for existence. This science of ecology, often
inaccurately referred to as 'biology' in a narrow sense, has thus far formed
the principal component of what is commonly referred to as "Natural History."(6)
Although Darwin and Haeckel opened the way for the consideration of organic and inorganic nature as interrelated, ecology remained focused on organic nature until 1935, when British ecologist Sir Arthur Tansley named and defined the ecosystem, in an article published in Ecology titled "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts and Terms."(7) Tansley advanced the argument that the basic units of nature are systems, or "ecosystems," "in which plants and animals are components, though not the only components."(8) The ecosystem includes the abiotic environment of the organisms as well.
The ecosystem concept enabled the development of a new kind of science that focused on nature as a set of systems, each of which could be studied as a "whole." Gene Odum and his younger brother Howard Thomas Odum, who contributed to Fundamentals of Ecology,(9) created non-reductionist methods to study the systems by treating them as energy circuits and material flows. Unlike Tansley, who had expressed reservations about the philosophy of "holism" as expounded in 1926 by Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Odums proceeded on the assumption that the whole had properties of its own that were undetectable through examination of the constituent parts alone.(10)
Gene Odum became identified with the
statement, "The ecosystem is greater than the sum of its parts,"
which is inscribed on the bronze bust of him that adorns the entrance to the
Ecology Building at the University of Georgia.
"A sledgehammer of an idea
with which to change the world"
In 1995, Alston Chase published a scathing denunciation of ecosystem environmentalism, motivated by ecosystem science, in a book titled In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology. In it he declared that the ecosystem concept, which he said the Odum brothers helped install as the cornerstone of modern ecology, was "a sledgehammer of an idea with which to change the world." And he sounded an alarm against "a growing cadre of political philosophers [who are] transforming the doctrine into political theory."(11)
In a Dark Wood identified the ecosystem concept as the foundation for the late twentieth-century environmentalist agenda. According to Chase, the ecosystem concept gave rise to the political ideology of "biocentrism," which he characterized as a "misanthropic ethic of nature": "If everything is dependent on everything else, . . . then all living things are of equal worth, and the health of the whole--the ecosystem--takes precedence over the needs and interests of individuals."(12) The two assumptions that he said radical environmentalists derive from the theory of interconnectivity--that "all living things are of equal worth" and that "the health of the whole . . . takes precedence over the needs and interests of individuals"--he associated with the Endangered Species Act, the resistance to the logging of old growth forests, and ecotage.(13) He cited the creed of the radical environmentalist group Earth First!--that humans have no divine right to subdue the earth or to take dominion over other species--as an example of the pernicious ramifications of ecosystem ecology.(14)
Every science has its enemies. Copernican physics aroused the ire of the Catholic Church for several centuries, until the accumulation of information about the universe antiquated any claim that the universe was geocentric. Darwinian biology, by discrediting the doctrine that humankind was specially created by God, antagonized and continues to antagonize believers in the Biblical account of the origin of species. Defenders of the faith in Creation have organized a nationwide political campaign to introduce "creation science" into the public schools to combat the teaching of evolution in classes of biology. Ecology, with its ecocentric view of nature, might be expected to have the Creationist movement as its primary enemy as well, but ecology has actually found its strongest opposition elsewhere, in the political sphere. Because in an ecosystem the constituent parts are interdependent and subordinate to the whole, ecosystem ecology offers a philosophical challenge to individualism and a political challenge to capitalism and free enterprise. The political opponents of the holistic model implicit in the ecosystem concept are thus the ideological individualists, like Chase, who fear that the acknowledgment of interconnectedness and the concern with the natural environment will bring about legal constraints on individuals'--and corporations'--freedom of action. In the dualist model in which nature and culture are opposites and therefore competitors for resources, to attend to the needs of nature is to neglect the needs of culture.
Ecosystem ecology breaks down the perceived barrier between science and politics. The inclusion of the human species in the ecosystem involves ecologists in the consideration of human influences on the natural environment. And the information acquired by ecologists about the impact of human civilization on the earth and the potential for destruction of human life-support systems stimulates political disagreement over solutions to environmental problems. The disagreement inevitably reflects a tension between attention to the individual and attention to the whole, between promotion of the individual good and promotion of the public good.(15) Since ecosystem ecologists concern themselves with the whole, they often meet resistance to their ideas from advocates for individual rights.
Capitalism grew out of both individualism and culture/nature dualism. In the Western model of culture, the treatment of nature as a repository of resources appears permissible for the individual or the corporation owning the resources and justifiable for cities, states, and nations seeking wealth, expansion, and technological improvement. It is deemed an exercise of freedom. Moreover, in the atomistic model of nature, the extraction of resources does not appear to be exploitation, because theoretically it is not disruptive of a whole. On the other hand, the depiction of nature as an ecosystem vulnerable to disruption presents such exploitation as dangerous to the well-being of humans, who are part of it, and thus jeopardizes public support for capitalists engaged in that behavior. The actions that were once applauded for the increased wealth they produced environmentalists condemn for the dangers they bring to the whole. The notion of individual freedom that was once unquestioned environmentalists debate in the context of land use. If human beings and non-human nature form a single interactive system, then any harm to part of the whole affects the whole and consequently the other parts. Environmentalists' efforts to preserve ecosystems are therefore politically threatening to capitalists. The very concept of the ecosystem undermines traditional capitalist values.
The ecosystem concept really did "change the world." It provided a perspective that complemented reductionism in biology and led to the development of methods to analyze large-scale systems. It allowed ecologists to assess more concretely than before the impact of human civilization on nonhuman nature. It became an instrument to curb the actions of capitalists. It begat a discipline capable of investigating large-scale socio-environmental problems. And it became a vision of interconnectedness that would motivate global environmentalism and influence the politics of nations.
The "growing cadre of environmental
philosophers" will of course explore the political implications of the
ecosystem concept, as well as the implications of other theories of nature. In
an age when globalization is turning the world into an interdependent global
system of nations and is dramatically increasing nations' cultural and racial
heterogeneity, the ecosystem concept provides a way to interpret shifting
geopolitical relationships. Because of its association of interdependence with
cooperation, it makes the establishment of more harmonious political
relationships among culturally and racially unlike peoples appear historically
inevitable. To those for whom international and intercultural cooperation
signifies the advent of world governance and an end to their nation's autonomy,
and to those afraid that the concern for the whole means restriction of the
individual's freedom of action, the ecosystem concept is indeed dangerous.
Eugene Odum, Environmentalist
In April 1969 Eugene Odum published in Science a paper that became a "citation classic" and provoked heated debate over one of ecology's most basic questions: how biotic communities change over time. Since the beginning of the twentieth century ecologists had made "succession" studies central to their discipline, because the determination of how species replace each other in areas undisturbed by technology would enable them to understand the way living nature worked.(16) In that paper, titled "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development," Odum replaced the word "succession" with the word "development" to argue that the interaction of organisms with one another and with their physical environment brought about the orderly evolution of ecosystems over time toward a state of equilibrium. Although he was not the first to conceive of succession as orderly development, Odum made the claim that all ecosystems, terrestrial and marine, have the same development "strategy," and he employed a formula for determining when an ecosystem was in its growth stages, producing more than it needed to maintain itself, and when it was in equilibrium. He was later to apply that formula-the ratio of energy production to energy expended on maintenance--to cities and other human institutions. Odum's scientific hypothesis was bold, but the plan for environmentalist action that he extrapolated from the science was equally bold. Repeating the observation he had made in his textbook that "the landscape is not just a supply depot but is also the oikos-the home-in which we must live,"(17) he proposed the creation of landscape zones, or compartments, to restrict the spread of human activity and ensure the preservation of the green space necessary for the health of the planetary ecosystem. Humankind would thereby live in harmony with the processes of nature. Odum had subtitled his essay, "An understanding of ecological succession provides a basis for resolving man's conflict with nature."
Although it attracted broader notice than any of his many other scientific papers, "The Strategy of Ecosystem Development" was typical of Odum's essays. He often converted what he learned about the function of nature into lessons for society and futuristic proposals for societal change. On occasion he joined political campaigns, such as the crusade to pass the Marshlands Protection Act to preserve the coastal wetlands, the first legislation of its kind in the United States. He and his colleagues convinced Georgia citizens and legislators that wetlands are the regulators of air and water quality, the nursery for marine animals important to the ecosystem, and the natural waste treatment systems for the planet. Odum assumed that the public could understand ecological principles if ecologists explained them well. And he believed, with perhaps unwarranted optimism, that knowledge of those principles would incline the public to behave in ways more protective of our "home." His colleague Judy Meyer observed that the use of ecology to inspire alternative patterns of human activity was part of the Odum legacy to the discipline.(18)
Throughout his life Odum had extended ecosystem ecology to society, turning ecological principles into an environmental ethic. Odum had never acknowledged disciplinary boundaries, such as the distinction many scientists see between basic science and applied science, or between ecology and environmentalism, having inherited from his father and his grandfather an imperative to use his learning to make a better world. In his ideal intellectual order, scientists, social scientists, and humanists work together to understand and solve problems, just as in his ideal community academic intellectuals, economists, politicians, journalists, and citizens with different interests all communicate with each other to make a more harmonious society. For Odum, the many parts of a system are interdependent, and for a society to function effectively, the many individuals who compose it must cooperate.
Because he considered his students and his readers to be not just scientists-in-the-making but "decision-makers," Odum would insert into many of his articles and all of his textbooks suggestions for improving the health of the natural environment.(19) Fundamentals of Ecology ends with a chapter on "Applications: Human Society," which warns against overpopulation and calls for birth control around the world.(20) The Epilogue to Basic Ecology proposes a "holoeconomics . . . that will include cultural and environmental values along with monetary ones."(21) Ecology and Our Endangered Life-Support Systems includes commentaries on the importance of recycling; the dangers of overpopulation; the interdependence of the city and the countryside; the preferability of natural, genetically engineered pesticides to chemical pesticides; the environmental utility of tax and zoning policies; and the habits of humans. His short Ecological Vignettes: An Ecological Approach to Dealing with Human Predicaments, which he wrote in his eighties for the general public, employs a set of aphorisms to show "what we learn from ecology about" growth, energy, organization, change, behavior, and diversity.
Ecological Vignettes concludes:
We must begin to devote more of our human
wealth, energy, and engineering skills to servicing and repairing our "big
house," the biosphere, which provides not only a place to live and enjoy
but also all of our life-support needs. In a very real sense, humanity is a
parasite on the biosphere, since as a non-green consumer organism we depend
among other things on green plants for food and oxygen and on microorganisms to
recycle nutrients. As we learn from studying parasite-host relations in nature,
a prudent parasite that has only one host does not kill off that host, since
that will result in its extinction. The prudent parasite moderates its demands
on the host, and in many cases actually does things to help its host prosper. .
. . In ecological language this is co-evolution for co-existence. . .
.(22)
In the course of his career, Odum won almost all the major honors and awards for achievement in ecology: the presidency of the Ecological Society of America; election to the National Academy of Sciences; election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America; the Prix d L'Institut de la Vie, which he shared with his brother H.T.; the John and Alice Tyler Award; and the Crafoord Prize for Ecology from the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, which he shared with H.T. But he also won numerous awards for his environmental activism: among them, the Georgia Wildlife Federation's Conservationist-of-the-Year Award; the Gold Seal Award of the National Council of the State Garden Clubs; the U.S. Department of the Interior's Conservation Service Award; the Georgia Ornithological Society's Earle R. Greene Memorial Award; the Chevron Conservation Award; the Silver Trout Award from "Trout Unlimited of Georgia"; the Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Award; the Georgia Conservancy's Distinguished Conservationist Award. At the University of Georgia, where he was instrumental in the founding of the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, the Institute of Ecology, and the Marine Institute on Sapelo Island, he received the University of Georgia Alumni Society's Faculty Service Award and was named Alumni Foundation Distinguished Professor of Zoology and Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Ecology. He was granted honorary doctorates from Hofstra University (1980), Ferum College (1986), University of North Carolina, Asheville (1990), Universidad del Valle, Guatemala (1996), Ohio State University (1999), and Universidad de San Francisco, Ecuador (1999).
Eugene Odum: Ecosystem Ecologist and Environmentalist is a portrait of the man who built out of the ecosystem concept a science for the investigation of large systems, explained the ecosystem concept to millions of students, employed it as a model of societal behavior, and through his long life used it as the foundation for his campaign to promote environmental health. It is also an account of the relationship of ecosystem ecology to environmentalism. Its theme is Eugene Odum's effort to influence human behavior, through science, toward "more cooperation and less confrontation, both within the human population and between the human population and nature."(23)
Chapter 1: Notes
1. " " - " " -
2. '
3. Fundamentals of Ecology was translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Swedish, German, French, Korean, Malaysian, and Czech.
4. '
5. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species,
Facsimile of 1st ed., edited by Ernst Mayr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1964), 489.
6. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), German biologist and proponent of Darwinian evolution, who was later to propose the Theory of Recapitulation, coined the word Oecologie in 1866 in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen. His description of the new discipline was translated and quoted in the preface to W.C. Allee, Alfred E. Emerson, Orlando Park, Thomas Park, and Karl P. Schmidt, Principles of Animal Ecology, (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1949). Quoted also in Frank Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More than the Sum of the Parts (New Haven: Yale U P, 1993), 207, and Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1994), 192.
The English word oecology
acquired its modern spelling of ecology after the International
Botanical Congress of 1893. Worster, Nature's Economy, 192.
7. Alfred George Tansley, "The Use and Abuse of
Vegetational Concepts and Terms," Ecology XVI (July 1935),
284-307.
8. Tansley, "The Use and Abuse of Vegetational
Concepts and Terms," 299-301.
9. " "
10. Although Tansley characterized the universe, the
solar system, the sugar molecule, and the ion or free atom as all
"organised wholes," he did not subscribe to the philosophy of
"holism" as defined in 1926 by Jan Christiaan Smuts in Holism and
Evolution (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926).
11. Alston Chase, In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over
Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology (New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1995), 120, 130.
12. Chase, In a Dark Wood, 6.
13. Ecotage,
according to the O.E.D., is "sabotage carried out for ecological
reasons." The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, ed. Leslie
Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993).
14. Quoted in Chase, In a Dark Wood, 189.
15. Odum calls the alternation of individualistic and
holistic philosophies, which he sees as a characteristic feature of politics,
"political zigzagging." Citing Cycles of American History by
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986), Odum writes,
"What usually happens is that excessive attention to one level leads to
neglect of the other level, which brings on a new political regime that
promises to deal with the neglected level. So, in a sort of zigzag fashion,
humanity strives to achieve a balance between what are viewed as individual
human rights and public needs." E. P. Odum, Ecology and Our Endangered
Life-Support Systems, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer, Inc., 1993), 29.
16. Robert McIntosh points out that Henry David Thoreau
coined the term succession to describe the changes in forest trees.
According to McIntosh, early ecologists "strove to identify and classify
communities in space, and the corollary was to examine change of a community in
time, determine what stages it went through, and if, and when, it became stable
or climax." Robert McIntosh, "The Succession of Succession: A Lexical
Chronology," Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 80.4
(Oct 1999): 256.
17. Eugene P. Odum, "The Strategy of the Ecosystem
Concept," Science 164 (18 April 1969), 266.
18. In her Past-President's Address for the Ecological
Society of America, Meyer suggested that a prize be given by the ESA for
"ecological research in the public interest." Judy L. Meyer,
"Beyond Gloom and Doom: Ecology for the Future," Past-President's
Address for the Ecological Society of America, 1996. Bulletin of the
Ecological Society of America 77 (1996):199-205.
19. Lucy Justus, "Eugene Odum: The Architect of
Modern Ecology," Outdoors in Georgia (May 1979), 4.
20. E. P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology, 2nd
ed., 494-496.
21. E.P. Odum, Basic Ecology (Philadelphia:
Saunders, 1983), 518.
22. E.P. Odum, Ecological Vignettes: Ecological
Approaches to Dealing with Human Predicaments (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic
Publishers, 1998), 58.
23. E.P. Odum, Ecological Vignettes, 58.
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