Howard T. Odum
Howard learned his early scientific lessons about (a) birds from his brother, (b) fish and the philosophy of biology while working after school for marine zoologist Robert Coker, and (c) electrical circuits from The Boy Electrician (1929) by Alfred Powell Morgan.
[1] Howard Thomas studied biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he published his first paper while still an undergraduate.
His education was interrupted for three years by his World War II service with the Army Air Force in Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal Zone, where he worked as a tropical meteorologist.
Odum's advice on how to manage a blended family was to be sure to keep talking[clarify]; Elisabeth's was to hold back on discipline and new rules.
He made a meteorological "analysis of the global circulation of strontium, [and] anticipated in the late 1940s the view of the earth as one great ecosystem".
He taught in the Department of Zoology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was one of the professors in the new curriculum of Marine Sciences until 1970.
He was supported by large contracts with the United States Atomic Energy Commission, resulting in participation by nearly 100 scientists, who conducted radiation studies of a tropical rainforest.
[7] Odum also received the French Prix de Vie, and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, considered the Nobel equivalent for bioscience.
[8] Hall noted that Odum, either alone or with his brother Eugene, received essentially all international prizes awarded to ecologists.
The only higher education institute to award honorary degrees to both Odum brothers was Ohio State University, which honored Howard in 1995 and Euene in 1999.
Kangas and his student, David Blersch, made significant contributions to the design of the waste water recycling system on the station.
In his 1950 Ph.D. thesis, Odum gave a novel definition of ecology as the study of large entities (ecosystems) at the "natural level of integration".
[12] In the traditional role of an ecologist, one of Odum's doctoral aims was to recognize and classify large cyclic entities (ecosystems).
While he was writing his thesis, Odum felt that the principle of natural selection was more than empirical, because it had a teleological, "stability over time" component.
[13] Odum also wanted to extend the scope and generality of natural selection to include large entities such as the world.
[27] These studies were early applications of energy concepts to ecological systems, and explored the implications of the laws of thermodynamics when used in these new settings.
[30] This reasoning appears to have followed that of Odum's doctoral supervisor, G. E. Hutchinson, who thought that if a community were an organism then it must have a form of metabolism.
[31] However, Golley notes that Odum attempted to go beyond the reporting of mere ratios, a move which resulted in the first serious disagreement in systems energetics.
In a controversial move, Odum and Richard Pinkerton (at the time physicist at the University of Florida) were motivated by Alfred J. Lotka's articles on the energetics of evolution, and subsequently proposed the theory that natural systems tend to operate at an efficiency that produces the maximum power output, not the maximum efficiency.
[32] By the end of the 1960s, Odum's electronic circuit ecological simulation models were replaced by a more general set of energy symbols.
When combined to form systems diagrams, these symbols were considered by Odum and others to be the language of the macroscope which could portray generalized patterns of energy flow: "Describing such patterns and reducing ecosystem complexities to flows of energy, Odum believed, would permit discovery of general ecosystem principles.
In Odum's work these concepts form part of what Hagen called an, "ambitious and idiosyncratic attempt to create a universal science of systems".
[40] Odum was a pioneer in his use of small closed and open ecosystems in classroom teaching, which were often constructed from fish tanks or bottles and have been called microcosms.
He therefore funded the research into the use of conventional economic approaches to quantify dollar values of ecological resources for recreational, treatment and other uses.
Ecological engineering, he wrote, is "those cases where the energy supplied by man is small relative to the natural sources but sufficient to produce large effects in the resulting patterns and processes.
Odum has been described as a "technocratic optimist",[49] and his approach was significantly influenced by his father, who was also an advocate of viewing the social world through the various lenses of physical science.
The publication included over 25 letters from distinguished scientists from all over the world including Mitsch (lead editorial), John Allen, Robert Ulanowitcz, Robert Beyers, Ariel Lugo, Marth Gilliland, Sandra Brown, Ramon Margalef, Paul Risser, Eugene Odum, Kathy Ewel, Kenneth Watt, Pat Kangas, Sven Jørgensen, Bob Knight, Rusong Wang, John Teal, Frank Golley, AnnMari and Bengt-Owe Jansson, Joan Browder, Carl Folke, Richard Wiegert, Scott Nixon, Gene Turner, John Todd, and James Zuchetto.
