Howard T. Odum (1924-2002)
Howard T. Odum was one of the most creative minds in the fields of ecology,
environmental science, systems ecology, environmental policy, and energy
studies. The fact that it is so difficult to pin down his field is testimony
to his creative genius.
Odum served during World War II as a meteorology instructor in the U.S. Air Force at the Tropical Weather School in Panama. HT, as his close friends and associates called him, often said it was the time he spent in the tropics that initiated his intense interest in the energetics of systems. He left Panama upon completion of his term to earn his BS in zoology from the University of North Carolina and later a doctorate in zoology from Yale University.
In 1950, HT came to UF as an assistant professor in biology. He undertook his seminal research on Silver Springs in which he evaluated the energetics of the spring’s food web, publishing the results in Ecological Monographs. This study and a companion study of the coral reefs of Eniwetok Atoll in the Marshall Islands are now “standard” in most texts on ecology. The Ecological Society of America recognized his Silver Springs publication with the George Mercer Award. Additionally during the 1950s, he collaborated with his brother, Eugene Odum, also a distinguished ecologist at the University of Georgia, on the authoritative text Fundamentals of Ecology.
After spending four years at UF, in quick succession over the next 11 years, Odum was a faculty member at Duke University, the director of the University of Texas’ Marine Sciences Center, and chief scientist at the University of Puerto Rico’s Nuclear Sciences Center. It was during this time that he published an impressive quantity of research on whole ecosystem studies of the Texas Gulf Coast and the effects of radiation on tropical rainforests. Both collections of papers are widely quoted and considered some of the most important contributions to understanding the fundamental processes of these ecosystems.
Odum left Puerto Rico for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the late 1960s. While holding joint appointments and teaching in the departments of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Zoology, and Botany, he wrote Environment Power and Society. It was in this book where Odum first observed that all wealth stems from the environment and its myriad of systems and processes and that the value of services and commodities should be based on the energy and resources required to produce them, rather than on what someone is willing to pay for them.
HT returned to UF in 1971 and was appointed graduate research professor in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences. In 1973, he founded UF's Center for Wetlands and directed the center for nearly two decades. In 1991, he also founded and was director of UF’s Center for Environmental Policy.
It was at Florida during his 31-year tenure that the ideas generated from the study of many systems during his earlier career began to mature into a generalized theory of energy systems and the biosphere. He pioneered research on the recycling of wastewaters in wetlands, developed the concepts of “net energy” of renewable and non-renewable energy sources, and created the field of “emergy” analyses. He also initiated two separate academic fields of study – Ecological Economics and Ecological Engineering. In the late 1970s, HT and his graduate students embarked on a series of studies of south Florida, the Everglades, and Lake Okeechobee that resulted in recommendations for fixing many of the problems, nearly a quarter century prior to Congress allocating billions for the same tasks.
In 1983, HT published Systems Ecology his textbook introduction to ecological and general systems. Sometimes called the “Odum Bible” by his students, Systems Ecology was a tour de force of systems thinking focusing on bringing the concepts of systems into general education.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, he collaborated with Jacques Cousteau, participating as consulting scientist on numerous expeditions around the world aboard Calypso, the research vessel of the Cousteau Society.
While at UF, Odum was awarded numerous honors, including the 1976 Institute de la Vie Prize, Paris; the 1976 University of Florida Presidential Medal; distinguished service awards from the Universities of North Carolina and Puerto Rico; the Distinguished Service Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences; an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from The Ohio State University, election to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the prestigious Crafoord Prize – the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in ecological sciences – from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Odum published 14 books, 11 of which were written during his tenure at UF.
Throughout his career, HT took his examples and analogies from the ecological world, saying that since it had millions of years of selforganization and “testing” we could learn a lot about systems from observing nature. The concepts of steady state, pulsing, and hierarchical organization were never far from Odum’s lexicon of properties used to compare systems of widely different composition and function. His last paper outlined in some detail the concept of a cosmos composed of a hierarchy of processes connected in ever increasing cycles of convergence of energy and matter yet held together by recycle pathways. His view of the cosmos was conceived with the creative energy he brought to everything he addressed.
There is no telling what might have been in store in the coming years. Those of us who were lucky enough to have spent time with him and studied his concepts in more than a cursory way understand his genius and wish to pay tribute. HT, your creative genius and vision of how systems work will be sorely missed.
A Tribute in Memory of H.T. Odum
By Mark T. Brown, Ph.D.
