Columns:: Worth repeating

since 12/15/98

Columns::October 28, 2002

Worth repeating

On Oct. 16, 500 people gathered to celebrate the life of Eugene P. Odum, professor emeritus and former director of UGA’s Institute of Ecology, who died Aug. 10. Georgia Museum of Art director William U. Eiland closed the celebration by sharing his thoughts on what he called “the extraordinary love affair” between Odum and his wife, Martha, an artist who died in 1995.
“Luckily for us, Dr. Odum became nature’s voice. We have heard much here today of his accomplishments in his field, one to which he will be inextricably linked as its progenitor. But I would like to talk about the partnership with Martha that made him see anew those living, pulsing ecosystems about which he was so eloquent. Eugene and Martha Odum had an extraordinary love affair that lasted for over 50 years. Their marriage was an ongoing concert in which the melody of their shared interests was sustained by an attendant harmony of mutual respect. . . . [their] quest for the perfect expression through her art and through his distillation of scientific experience made them both at home, albeit briefly, in Big Sur and Venice and even the Far East. . . . The Odums’ marriage of science and art was an abiding romance, a daily expression of their belief that nature, as the creation of God, is eternal and surely the greatest work of art of all. . . .
“Eugene Odum told terrible truths gently. No less resolute in his opinions for all the sweetness with which he conveyed them . . . admonishing us all to do better by our Mother Earth, to embellish our humanity with the natural, the truthful and yes, even the sublime. . . . Eugene Odum taught us responsibility, not through anger or resentment, but through wonder and delight.”

--Kim Cretors

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