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Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century: The Hierarchy of Energy
Howard T. Odum possessed one of the most innovative minds of the twentieth century. He pioneered the fields of ecological engineering, ecological economics, and environmental accounting, working throughout his life to better understand the interrelationships of energy, environment, and society and their importance to the well-being of humanity and the planet.
This volume is a major modernization of Odum's classic work on the significance of power and its role in society, bringing his approach and insight to a whole new generation of students and scholars. For this edition Odum refines his original theories and introduces two new measures: emergy and transformity. These concepts can be used to evaluate and compare systems and their transformation and use of resources by accounting for all the energies and materials that flow in and out and expressing them in equivalent ability to do work. Natural energies such as solar radiation and the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are diagrammed in terms of energy and emergy flow. Through this method Odum reveals the similarities between human economic and social systems and the ecosystems of the natural world. In the process, we discover that our survival and prosperity are regulated as much by the laws of energetics as are systems of the physical and chemical world.
This volume is a major modernization of Odum's classic work on the significance of power and its role in society, bringing his approach and insight to a whole new generation of students and scholars. For this edition Odum refines his original theories and introduces two new measures: emergy and transformity. These concepts can be used to evaluate and compare systems and their transformation and use of resources by accounting for all the energies and materials that flow in and out and expressing them in equivalent ability to do work. Natural energies such as solar radiation and the cycling of water, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are diagrammed in terms of energy and emergy flow. Through this method Odum reveals the similarities between human economic and social systems and the ecosystems of the natural world. In the process, we discover that our survival and prosperity are regulated as much by the laws of energetics as are systems of the physical and chemical world.
432 pages, Paperback
First published February 17, 1971
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 13, 2023
I had pretty high hopes for "Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-first Century" (EPS) given how cited it is in other books I've enjoyed. The first three chapters really delivered, framing the whole endeavor, establishing a component language for material and energy circulation, and grounding those dynamics in physical laws about when energy can be directed to maximum power.
EPS does a great job in buttressing a key position, which is that progress in our industrial times has come not only from ingenuity, but tapping into power sources, and moreover power subsidies. Knowledge and ingenuity rely on applying power, with the development and retention of that knowledge also relying on power, and would be impossible without these energetic means.
EPS starts to stray a bit when it defines and starting working in empower, or embodied power, which includes all of the power required to bring about a particular state. Certainly, this is a worthwhile concept in itself, but it becomes conflated with the actual "value" of being in that state. It would be nice if what was spent is as valuable as the result, but there seems to be no guarantee of that from any subjective point of view. This is not to say that energy doesn't have a stronger role in valuation than it currently might (with money currently serving mainly human time), but arbitrary hierarchy seems like an odd way to get there.
As best as I can tell, there is not much to the hierarchy of energy. The only promises of one form of energy-powered storage and concentration being the source of power and materials for the next use seem to be that:
1) some notion of concentration must accrue at every stage; we see that this must happen for the next stage to follow at all, otherwise it would disperse from not having enough energy to overcome the frictions of reuse
2) that accrual will need to exert some kind of control over the energy systems it utilizes to be sustained and stable.
These are great insights, but they're also trivialities.
Really, the ironic thing about the later book is that, while many social hierarchies are demonstrated to have the same structure, it is though it is just taken as an analogy. In particular, I didn't catch anything said about how we can expect energy and information hierarchies to preserve themselves, i.e. what kinds of backforces can intrinsically be expected from attempting to change them. This is an odd omission that makes the policy recommendations seem a lot more naive.
Overall, despite my critiques, EPS is still an interesting and worthwhile book, with some great foundational ideas and some wide-ranging exploration that could have been better if the rigor of the former was brought more convincingly to the latter.
EPS does a great job in buttressing a key position, which is that progress in our industrial times has come not only from ingenuity, but tapping into power sources, and moreover power subsidies. Knowledge and ingenuity rely on applying power, with the development and retention of that knowledge also relying on power, and would be impossible without these energetic means.
EPS starts to stray a bit when it defines and starting working in empower, or embodied power, which includes all of the power required to bring about a particular state. Certainly, this is a worthwhile concept in itself, but it becomes conflated with the actual "value" of being in that state. It would be nice if what was spent is as valuable as the result, but there seems to be no guarantee of that from any subjective point of view. This is not to say that energy doesn't have a stronger role in valuation than it currently might (with money currently serving mainly human time), but arbitrary hierarchy seems like an odd way to get there.
As best as I can tell, there is not much to the hierarchy of energy. The only promises of one form of energy-powered storage and concentration being the source of power and materials for the next use seem to be that:
1) some notion of concentration must accrue at every stage; we see that this must happen for the next stage to follow at all, otherwise it would disperse from not having enough energy to overcome the frictions of reuse
2) that accrual will need to exert some kind of control over the energy systems it utilizes to be sustained and stable.
These are great insights, but they're also trivialities.
Really, the ironic thing about the later book is that, while many social hierarchies are demonstrated to have the same structure, it is though it is just taken as an analogy. In particular, I didn't catch anything said about how we can expect energy and information hierarchies to preserve themselves, i.e. what kinds of backforces can intrinsically be expected from attempting to change them. This is an odd omission that makes the policy recommendations seem a lot more naive.
Overall, despite my critiques, EPS is still an interesting and worthwhile book, with some great foundational ideas and some wide-ranging exploration that could have been better if the rigor of the former was brought more convincingly to the latter.
March 24, 2023
Not sure how to review and rate a textbook exactly....interesting material, I like the framework of analyzing everything via systems of energy flows and feedbacks, but at the end of the day its a damn textbook and a bit of a slog to read! And all the formulas and equations and numbers are hard to wrap your head around unless you have time and guidance on actually working them out yourself, comparing numbers, etc. But overall, a good textbook with useful frameworks on fundamental ways to think about ecology and energy and sustainability.
July 10, 2017
A stimulating book providing that can give you a fresh look and way of thinking on the roles of evolution, earth and society. The last chapters in particular are full of ideas and data that will hopefully help humanity transition to a post oil society that can thrives in the anthropocene.
March 29, 2025
This is an absolutely terrible, wonderful book! It is filled with horrible science and worse economics, but it is so preposterous that it's worth reading. It is a fun game to try to figure out the correct formulation of what Odum is trying to say, or should be trying to say. Best of all, the book gets progressively more unhinged.
I laughed out loud at this passage under the heading 'ENERGY TEST OF EVANGELISM': "Sexual behavior excesses," Odum explains, "which were seriously deterimental [sic] to the scarce energies of a primitive culture, become irrelevantly small in a power-rich system where the great sins are the wastes of enormous calories [as opposed to the verdant fields of microscopic calories?] in the destruction of the life-support system, in the useless worship of the false gods of the automobile, and the greed of power expansion" (p. 251). Oh, I understand, you're nuts.
Odum is nuts, but he is nuts in an interesting way and it gives you a springboard to be creative from.
For example, you might formulate his
Power = Flow x Force as
Power = (u/t) x (E/u)
You can then define u in whatever units you want. Set u to time and it reduces to the regular definition of power. Set u to charge and it becomes amperes force times electromotive force. Set u to grams and you can measure the flow of coal around the country. This is actually pretty cool.
Odum says wrong stuff all the time. For example, he says that water is a fuel (p. 47). What he means is that you can release energy by dissolving salts into water. This is true, but the energy comes from the energy of the bonds in the salts. Odum therefore proposes that we should dissolve huge quantities of salt in rivers to extract energy from the rivers instead of building hydroelectric dams–it harnesses the sun's energy through rain, because, you see, you can dissolve more salt into river water (from rain) than ocean water. Then he says things like there is no such thing as temperature differential potential energy–something which is required to try to extract any mechanical power from something as ridiculous as his pour-salt-in-the-river proposal. Odum is always wrong in an interesting way, and it's fun to think through exactly why he is wrong.
The economic thought in the book is fundamentally flawed for too many reasons to count. For one thing, he seems to think that the only scarce resources are energy, pure chemical elements, and dollars. Sometimes Odum seems to think there will be a constant conversion rate from mechanical work to wage in dollars–a rate that will be the same for every person in every market at every time across the entire society. Sometimes he writes as if there is a labor theory of value (the amount of energy to produce a thing), sometimes a just price in terms of an energy switch. He is so deliciously incoherent!
If you have even a modicum of experience in physics and economics, you will quickly see that these are the lunatic ravings of a highly educated neo-Mathusian. Maybe Odum is a genius, but it's up to you to spin a yarn out of this golden wool. If that sounds like fun, grab a copy of Environment, Power, and Society.
I laughed out loud at this passage under the heading 'ENERGY TEST OF EVANGELISM': "Sexual behavior excesses," Odum explains, "which were seriously deterimental [sic] to the scarce energies of a primitive culture, become irrelevantly small in a power-rich system where the great sins are the wastes of enormous calories [as opposed to the verdant fields of microscopic calories?] in the destruction of the life-support system, in the useless worship of the false gods of the automobile, and the greed of power expansion" (p. 251). Oh, I understand, you're nuts.
Odum is nuts, but he is nuts in an interesting way and it gives you a springboard to be creative from.
For example, you might formulate his
Power = Flow x Force as
Power = (u/t) x (E/u)
You can then define u in whatever units you want. Set u to time and it reduces to the regular definition of power. Set u to charge and it becomes amperes force times electromotive force. Set u to grams and you can measure the flow of coal around the country. This is actually pretty cool.
Odum says wrong stuff all the time. For example, he says that water is a fuel (p. 47). What he means is that you can release energy by dissolving salts into water. This is true, but the energy comes from the energy of the bonds in the salts. Odum therefore proposes that we should dissolve huge quantities of salt in rivers to extract energy from the rivers instead of building hydroelectric dams–it harnesses the sun's energy through rain, because, you see, you can dissolve more salt into river water (from rain) than ocean water. Then he says things like there is no such thing as temperature differential potential energy–something which is required to try to extract any mechanical power from something as ridiculous as his pour-salt-in-the-river proposal. Odum is always wrong in an interesting way, and it's fun to think through exactly why he is wrong.
The economic thought in the book is fundamentally flawed for too many reasons to count. For one thing, he seems to think that the only scarce resources are energy, pure chemical elements, and dollars. Sometimes Odum seems to think there will be a constant conversion rate from mechanical work to wage in dollars–a rate that will be the same for every person in every market at every time across the entire society. Sometimes he writes as if there is a labor theory of value (the amount of energy to produce a thing), sometimes a just price in terms of an energy switch. He is so deliciously incoherent!
If you have even a modicum of experience in physics and economics, you will quickly see that these are the lunatic ravings of a highly educated neo-Mathusian. Maybe Odum is a genius, but it's up to you to spin a yarn out of this golden wool. If that sounds like fun, grab a copy of Environment, Power, and Society.
May 9, 2017
amazing
November 22, 2012
Howard Odum wrote this book in the 1970's and then decided to republish in the early 2000's. His ecological studies emphasized the energy/material flows in ecosystems of all sizes, he uses electrical engineering flow diagrams to describe how nature works. I did not expect the chapter on religion but he is articulate about the limitations of our economic life and associated measurements. I gam glad I got around to reading something by the ecologist, Howard Odum, who died in 2007.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews