Eugene Odum

Eugene Odum 1913-2002

Eugene Pleasant Odum is considered to have been one of the most influential figures in the science of ecology in the twentieth century. Eugene Odum is, in fact, often referred to as “the father of ecosystem ecology.”

The average schoolchild of today knows that humans (along with other life forms) depend on adequate conditions of food, water, and shelter from inclement elements, for instance, and also that weather, geological, and biological factors (among others) are involved in this supportive environment. Further, the average schoolchild of today has heard the word “ecology.” But back in the 1940s and ‘50s, this sort of knowledge had not been conveniently delineated in terms of a discipline of ecology, certainly not in up-to-date detail. Even professional biologists were generally under-educated in ecology in the sense of a general understanding of Earth’s organisms and their environments, and how these systems interact with one another. Eugene Odum brought forward the importance of ecology as a discipline, as one that should be a fundamental dimension of the training of a biologist.

Eugene Odum was born in 1913. He was the son of the sociologist Howard W. Odum, whom Eugene credited with conveying to him a holistic way of looking at things. Eugene Odum rejected both the University of Michigan and Cornell University when contemplating his education, due to the fact that he did not feel this holism was represented in their approaches. Instead, he chose the University of Illinois because holistic thinking was accepted in their Graduate Department of Zoology. It was here he earned his doctorate.

Dr. Odum took a teaching position in the University of Georgia. In the late 1940s, when Odum served on the University’s biology faculty committee, which was drawing up curriculum, and he found that his colleagues didn’t generally know what ecology (in its own right) might be. Dr. Odum peceived a need.

Eugene Odum adopted and developed further the term “ecosystem” coined by Raymond Lindeman in 1942. Before Odum, the ecology of specific organism/environments had been studied on a more limited scale within individual sub-disciplines of biology. Many scientists doubted that it could be studied on a large scale or as a discipline in itself. Eugene Odum wrote a textbook on ecology with his brother Howard, a graduate student at Yale. The Odum brothers’ book (first edition, 1953), Fundamentals of Ecology, was for about ten years the only textbook in the field. Among other things, the Odums explored how one natural system can interact with another. Their book has been revised and expanded in several editions since.

While Eugene Odum did wish to influence the knowledge base and thinking of fellow biologists, he was not a promoter of public environmentalism as we now know it. And yet, by 1970, when the first Earth Day was organized, Odum’s conception of the living Earth as a global set of interlaced ecosystems became one of the pillars of the environmental movement that has since spread through the world. Odum, the scientist, was, of course, an independent thinker – gently critical, at times, of the slogans and fashionable concepts of the environmental movement.