Ecology: A Bridge Between Science and Society

by Eugene P. Odum

This is an introduction to the principles of modern ecology as they relate to today's threat to Earth's life-support systems. Themes examined include experimental life-support systems, hierarchies, ecosystems and landscapes, component physical factors, population, development and evolution.

Genres: Science

330 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Eugene Pleasants Odum was an American biologist at the University of Georgia known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology. He and his brother Howard T. Odum wrote the popular ecology textbook, Fundamentals of Ecology (1953).

Reviews

[Ily · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I debiti economici potranno dominare i titoli dei quotidiani, ma i debiti ambientali domineranno il nostro futuro." (Lester Brown et. all, 1986)

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is sort of an abstract of Odum's classic textbook Fundamentals of Ecology. Being brief yet dense with pertinent information, figures and tables makes this probably more impactful, bringing across the message that humans are inextricably tied to the environment and our societies governed by the same natural laws as all living things. The focus on energy as the unifying force behind life from the individual to the ecosystem is a critical perspective that seems to have been lost since the birth of environmentalism in the 1970s. Our urban and industrial economies enabled by fossil fuels require large areas of naturally productive lands to draw from and to process waste products. Here the concept of ecosystem services and valuation is introduced and modeled to show how leaving tracts of such undeveloped land results in an optimal outcome for us. Unfortunately we have squandered the intervening precious decades since and have continued to destroy nature, paying no heed to the warnings of an unsustainable developmental trajectory.

The basics of ecology as a field are aptly covered from the trophic food pyramid to population dynamics and ecological succession. This work is definitely worth rereading and reissued with updates on the energy and resource usage data given the undoubtedly more intense pressures we are exerting on the natural world and thus the heightened urgency today.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found a used old copy of this book and read it, not because I thought it would be the best basic book on the science of ecology, but because here's what I'd heard: 1) It was the first. 2) Previously, biologists hadn't been studying ecology per se as a field of knowledge in its own right. 3) Eugene Odum brought together basic understandings & principles of the scientific study of the organism/environment relationship, and thereby pointed important directions for deeper & more detailed study. So I bore these things in mind while reading the book as a historical landmark, even though I could have looked at the subject from today's more knowledgeable standpoint, and might have given the book just three stars.

[colleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

read 06.19.85

[Samsul Bahri]

Samsul bahri

[E O N · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would've given it 5 had I been reading in 1975. Prescient stuff, a shame we haven't taken much heed, his optimism is heartbreaking.