Odum, Eugene

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Odum, Eugene

American Ecologist 1913-

Eugene Odum is an American ecologist who has worked to advance ecological awareness and research. Born in 1913 to an academic family, he spent most of the twentieth century promoting the ecosystem concept and warning of the impact humans have on the ecosystems in which we live. One of his most important accomplishments was writing Fundamentals of Ecology in 1953, which he wrote partly in response to the zoology department at the University of Georgia rejecting ecology as an important area of study. His book was remarkably clear and concise, and it presented the important principles of ecology in a way that helped to define the science.

Fundamentals of Ecology also brought the idea of an ecosystem to a wider audience at a time when the concept was just beginning to gain recognition among ecological specialists and ways to study ecosystems were just being developed. Previously, ecology had focused on natural history and on the variety of species in the environment rather than on the details of physical and metabolic interactions among the species and nonliving material around them, as is done in the study of ecosystems. Odum placed the idea of the ecosystem at the beginning, as a fundamental concept of ecology. He explained that ecosystems are the largest functional unit in ecology, comprising both living and nonliving parts that exchange materials in cycles. These interactions and exchanges of nutrients could allow ecosystems to evolve as units over time. Ecosystems could be seen at many levels, from something as small as a lake to the entire Earth seen as a global ecosystem.

In emphasizing how the study of ecology needs to examine the way humans affect their ecosystems, Odum published ideas that became the focus of the environmental movement. Given the knowledge that humans were influential and often destructive components of ecosystems, it was especially important that Odum's book was clear and understandable by non-ecologists. Being at the time one of the only ecological textbooks, Fundamentals of Ecology was enormously important in driving the study of ecosystems.

Odum also wrote several other works while teaching and doing research at the University of Georgia. His work was funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, an institution that funded much early ecological research. He became a leading authority on ecosystem studies, defending the new discipline against its critics, and he also served as chair of a section of the International Biological Program. His leadership in the program helped guide research into landscape ecosystems, studying terrestrial and marine areas and the human influences on them. Remaining active into his late eighties by the turn of the twenty-first century, Eugene Odum still worked to promote the study of ecosystems. He has done much to encourage environmental study around the world, and especially where he works in Georgia.

see also Ecology; Ecology, Energy Flow; Ecology, History of; Ecosystem; Warming, Johannes.

Jessica P. Penney