Bumpy Ride for Spaceship Earth

December 2004 • Vol. 83: No. 5 : Back Page

by Gary Barrett

A half-century has passed since Eugene Odum published the first edition of Fundamentals of Ecology in 1953. But it was actually the second edition, written in collaboration with Odum’s brother H. T. and published in 1959, that provided a new and incisive view of the natural world. Fundamentals of Ecology trained a generation of ecologists and helped pave the way for the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. I was fortunate to be trained by Dr. Odum himself, and, thus, I was honored to be asked to co-author the new fifth edition of this landmark book, which was recently published by Thomson Brooks/Cole.

Odum, who joined the faculty in 1940, was the first UGA professor elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He and his late brother, ecologist Howard T. Odum, shared two of ecology’s most prestigious international honors, including the Crafoord Prize in 1987. Awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Crafoord Prize is often considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize, which is not awarded in ecology.

The new edition of Fundamentals of Ecology appears at a critical time because problems such as world hunger, global climate change, invasion of exotic species, spread of disease, environmental illiteracy contamination are a greater threat to the planet than ever before.

Barrett was mentored by Odum, whose landmark book was judged by biological scientists to have had more impact than even Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

With global carbon dioxide increasing annually, with a billion humans without a safe water supply, with human activities having now doubled the rate of nitrogen entering land-based ecosystems, with finite energy resources increasing in price, and with world fisheries in decline, it is time for each citizen of spaceship Earth to understand ecological principles and to extend this knowledge on a global scale. In numerous instances, our current educational practices are as inadequate as our current management practices. The authors maintain that an informed and educated society will understand the virtues of preventative environmental management and likely conduct ecological functions based on an educational incentive rather than on a regulatory mandate.

Fundamentals of Ecology is based on the premise that we live both by a market capital, necessary for economic welfare, and by a natural capital, necessary for human existence in the long term. The integration of these “resource capitals” will likely determine the future of our Earth. Ecology, as an integrative science, must serve as a basis for addressing this challenge.

In the foreword to Fundamentals of Ecology, Pulitzer Prize-winning conservationist E. O. Wilson points out that ecology is now seen not as a biological science, but as a human science. He notes that the future of humankind depends on how well we manage natural resources—a mantra that Eugene Odum continued to preach until his death in 2002.

To grasp the significance of Fundamentals of Ecology, members of the American Institute of Biological Sciences were surveyed in 2002 to determine which book made the greatest impact on their career. Fundamentals of Ecology was ranked number one among such classics as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, and James Watson’s The Double Helix.