Eugene P. Odum (1913-2002) 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 the web of life that affords this environment. Further, the average schoolchild of today has heard the word "ecology." But back in the 1940s and '50s, ecology was not yet a field of study in itself. 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 seemed to Odum to be generally under-educated about how Earth’s ecological systems interact with one another. Odum brought forward the importance of ecology as a discipline, as one that should be a fundamental dimension of the training of a biologist.

Life & Work

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

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

Eugene Odum adopted and developed further the term "ecosystem." Although sometimes said to have been coined by Raymond Lindeman in 1942, others assert that the term ecosystem first appeared in a 1935 publication by the British ecologist Arthur Tansley, and had previously (1930) been coined by Tansley's colleague Roy Clapham . 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 Odum (Howard Thomas Odum), 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, and college and university students, his historical role was not as a promoter of public environmentalism as we now know it. However, his dedication in his 1963 book, Ecology, expressed that his father had inspired him to "seek more harmonious relationships between man and nature." 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 key insights 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.

Books

• Fundamentals of Ecology (with Howard Odum)
• Ecology
• Basic Ecology
• Ecology and Our Endangered Life Support Systems
• Ecological Vignettes: Ecological Approaches to Dealing with Human Predicament