Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy (review)

The renowned sociologist Howard Washington Odum (1884–1954) fathered two sons who became pioneering ecologists: Eugene Pleasants Odum (1913–2002) and Howard Thomas Odum (1924–2002). The brothers proved to be exceptionally productive and influential scientists, and the younger Odum in particular established a reputation as a gifted consolidator of knowledge and a simplifier of ideas. Along with many of his contemporaries after World War II, Odum embraced systems analysis, and the posthumous edition of Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century represents his boldest attempt to use this approach to explain the intertwining of natural and human history. As Odum explained, if we want “to understand and predict what is possible for society and environment,” we must study the “systems of energy, materials, money, and information” (p. 1).

The book was first published in 1971 as Environment, Power, and Society, and it enjoyed widespread classroom adoptions during the heady days of the environmental movement. In addition to bridging the physical, life, and social sciences, Odum’s sweeping text anticipated the development of two new fields of study: ecological engineering and ecological economics. The 2007 edition from Columbia University Press is a thoroughly and dramatically revised version of the original volume. Odum incorporated thirty years of subsequent scholarship and reflection, but he left the work uncompleted at his death. His wife and collaborator, Elisabeth C. Odum, joined with Mark T. Brown and Daniel E. Campbell to finalize the manuscript and shepherd it into print.

Like many systems analysts, Odum believed deeply in the efficacy of visualizing ideas and explanations, and Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century is laced with diagrams and cartoons that cut through the enormity of detail to reveal and make comprehensible various interrelated and complex patterns. Odum forces us to contemplate the forest, not the trees. To understand the overarching systems, he emphasizes, we must first “draw pictures of networks that show components and relationships. Thereafter, we can carry these system images in our minds. In the process, we learn how energy, materials, and information interact” (p. 13).

Odum’s concept of ecological engineering was heavily informed by his own research with wetlands. Through an extended series of experiments, he used isolated marshes as receptacles for treated municipal wastewater, which was naturally filtered as it recharged groundwater supplies, ultimately to be reused by municipalities. The point was to manipulate nature minimally, in a fashion that would encourage ecological processes to provide wanted results for society. As he described it, “the light management of nature’s adaptive self-organization is the field ecological engineering, an endeavor that helps the environmental part of the interface to self-design. For example, runoff waters are allowed to recharge ground waters, a filtering process that restores water quality. Ecological engineering also guides the outputs of society and its technology to help environmental self-design” (p. 333).

Historians of technology studying and teaching energy history will find this a useful book. Odum points to the fallacy advanced by many energy policy discussions that look to replace fossil fuels with “solar technology, ethanol from intensive agriculture, and short-rotation forest plantations” (p. 207) yet fail to address the energy inputs needed to generate these “alternative” energy sources. Extracting oil from rock shale, for example, is highly inefficient, given the energy required to mine, transport, process, convert, and distribute the resulting oil. Substituting wood chips as a fuel source, given the processing steps required to cut, collect, chip, and transport the wood power (a poor net contributor), poses similar inefficiencies.

The complex and powerful technological system that has developed since the Industrial Revolution has produced a profound change in humankind’s ability to manipulate and manage nature. This level of human control, Odum reminds us, depends largely on the harnessing of fossil fuels—a rich but ultimately temporary fuel source. Without fundamental changes, the current system is unsustainable, and Odum...