Near Encounters with a Southern Sage
/By Lenny Wells
Tifton, Georgia
When I was a graduate student at the University of Georgia in the late 1990s, I took a population-ecology class taught at the University’s Institute of Ecology, now named the Odum School of Ecology for the pioneering ecologist Eugene Odum. By this time, Dr. Odum had retired, but he still kept an office there, where he continued to study and write as Emeritus Professor.
As a biology major during my undergraduate years, I had a strong bent toward ecology, so I knew who Odum was. He was a living legend, known as the “Father of Modern Ecology.” Before Rachel Carson, before Earth Day, before we commercialized environmentalism, Odum was collecting data to show that the way we live on this planet, our relationship to it, and our role in nature mattered. Along the way, he also showed us that nature’s pattern was a good reflection of human society.
On my daily walks to and from class across the lush, tree-lined UGA campus in the spring of 1998, I traversed a regular route through South Campus, from the Biological Sciences Building where most of my classes where held, to the Ecology Building. I would enter, leaving the pungent aroma of spring trees and blooming flowers, walk past the bronze bust of Eugene Odum staring out at the students passing by, hang a left, and walk right past the glass-walled office of the man himself.
Many days I would see him, an elderly man, perpetually clad in a sweater, plaid shirt, and khakis, puttering away in his office, reading, writing, or talking to other faculty and students. He was like some folksy, scientific preacher. A Southern sage. It was like encountering Darwin or Newton. This was a man who had almost single-handedly created a new branch of science, or at least a new way of looking at the world. Yet, each day I simply walked by, gawking through the large pane of glass.
Eugene Odum was born into a wellspring of Southern enlightenment, a family that was far ahead of its time. His father, Howard W. Odum, was a pioneering sociologist, a professor and dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a distinguished scholar in his own right, who published extensively on Southern regionalism, social justice, and racial equality. He developed a broad approach to social planning, which included folklore, race relations, arts, and literature, combining each of these fields to better understand the South as a whole. According to Karen Rotabi, who wrote a Master’s Thesis on the Odums at UNC CHapel Hill, Howard W. Odum’s New York Times obituary read, “No man in our time then had done more than Odum to help the understanding of the South in the South, and of the South in the nation, too”.
As a scientist, Eugene Odum was a generalist. He used his broad interests to show how the field of ecology encompassed everything that takes place on this planet. Like his father, Eugene Odum’s grasp of the value of the whole was fueled by his intense interest in the pieces composing nature’s puzzle. He had a lifelong interest in birds, the study of which helped him earn a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He began his career there, studying the physiology and behavior of birds.
When UGA hired him in 1940, Odum’s bird studies broadened to include studies of mammals, coral reefs, the effects of nuclear waste on the environment, salt marshes, plants, insects, energy flow in nature, nutrient cycles, forests, fields, and agriculture. In 1953, he published a groundbreaking book called Fundamentals of Ecology, the first textbook devoted to the field.
But Odum’s road to becoming a legendary scientist was rough. Many academic colleagues shunned his ideas and refused his request to make ecology a required class for biology majors. Academics can be petty like that. But, with his father’s encouragement, Eugene Odum changed ecology from the simple study of natural history to a science whose principles took a longer view. Odum studied ecosystems, where energy is the currency linking living things to the physical world around them.
Eugene’s brother, Howard T. Odum, was the director of marine science at the University of Texas, and Howard worked closely with his brother in writing Fundamentals,reflecting the Odum principle of cooperation, a foundation of his ecological theory. He warned against underestimating the value of cooperation in nature, and argued stability was found only in interdependence. The theory itself took on an almost spiritual tone, which put off many of Odum’s scientific colleagues.
As an undergraduate, I was assigned to study one of Eugene Odum’s papers, “The Strategy of Ecosystem Development.” It was a landmark treatise on the idea of ecological succession — that a natural community, a forest for example, would develop in one fairly predictable direction, and that the parts of the community would direct its change. Odum boldly went further and suggested that there are many parallels between natural and human communities.
My life’s work has been in the field of agriculture as both a scientist and a farmer. Agriculture is the most direct link between human beings and nature. It affects each one of us. It allows the human species to manipulate the living and physical world for our own benefit. There is great power in that, but as is so often said, with great power comes great responsibility.
Perhaps no place in our country has borne witness to so much pain as the South. Amid this region’s lush beauty, man’s inhumanity to man — in the form of Native American removal, slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow laws — has been matched only by man’s cruelty to the land itself. Agriculture was directly and indirectly responsible for much of this abuse after cotton became both king and currency across the Southern landscape of the 1800s. The crop was propped up by an economic system that deprived the region’s people, black and white alike, and promoted spoilage of the land. The scars that remain on the land represent the subsequent struggles between black and white and rich and poor that linger today. The most striking example of that is Providence Canyon State Park in southwestern Georgia. It’s a “little Grand Canyon,” complete with vivid red, orange, and yellow horizons in the soil profiles on its walls, exposed only by erosion caused by the misuse of the land.
I would like to think the savagery inflicted upon this landscape and its people years ago were simply the growing pains of a poorly developed society and that we have matured beyond such actions. In Odum’s view of nature, early pioneering communities are marked by rapid growth, high birth rates, high productivity, and exploitation. But growth and exploitation can last for only so long. For the community or system to stay intact, stability must be reached. This can only happen through cooperation. In nature, this means that interactions among species become more complex. Thanks to Odum, no longer do we believe a natural community is a simple, linear food chain: plants fed upon by a rabbit, which is in turn fed upon by a hawk. As the diversity of a natural community increases with maturity, these simple food chains become food webs, and species interact at various levels. They become more dependent upon one another.
In short, they must learn to adapt and find ways to live together in a changing world to bring stability to the system.
Society, Odum taught, responded similarly, shifting from one based on an economy in which a few thrive off the exploitation of others and the resources around them, to a more complex society, where people live lives of interaction through law and order, education, responsibility, the acknowledgement of basic rights, and culture.
But has the South, as a culture, done this?
In the final section of that landmark paper I read as an undergraduate, Odum wrote, “A balance between youth and maturity … is the basic goal that must be achieved if man as a species is to successfully pass through the present rapid growth stage, to which he is clearly well adapted, to the ultimate equilibrium density stage, of which he, as yet, shows little understanding and to which he now shows little tendency to adapt.”
Odum wrote that in 1969, 50 years ago. We’ve improved in some areas, but I’m not sure we’ve made much progress. Some would say that in the past we didn’t have the knowledge or understanding we now do, that we weren’t enlightened enough. But today, we don’t have that excuse, and I’m not so sure it was a good one to begin with.
Eugene Odum passed away in 2002 while tending his garden in Athens, Georgia. I still regret that I was too shy and intimidated to engage Dr. Odum in conversation. By all accounts, he loved talking with students and sharing ideas. I can’t help but wonder how he would feel about the place we’ve arrived at today.
As for the South, we’re still searching for the stability Odum spoke of. It’s all about give and take. It’s about respecting each other enough to acknowledge that we have differences. It’s about our willingness to work through those differences, sharing and compromising and still treating each other with kindness and empathy. That’s how we heal the wounds we’ve inflicted upon one another and upon our Southern landscape.
Thanks to Eugene Odum’s work, we can no longer claim we don’t know how to heal the rifts in nature or society today. Cooperation, Odum established, is the natural order. We just have to choose it.
Lenny Wells is a professor of horticulture at the University of Georgia’s campus in Tifton, Georgia, where he conducts research on pecan production and helps pecan farmers with their problems. In addition, he grows pecans on his family's farm and writes when he can. He has published one book on the history of the pecan, entitled Pecan: America's Native Nut Tree. His other writing in the form of essays and poems on the everyday happenings of life from a rural perspective can be found on his site, Thoughts From the Orchard.