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OLD MAN WITH WORLD
AN ENCOUNTER WITH
THE FATHER OF MODERN ECOLOGY
|T1 TT T1 Father of Modem Ecology drove a white Ford Taurus.
X XIJJ He owned two of them: identical but for the wear.
The one he picked me up in the day we met was "the grocery-
getter," and he handled it as if its last trip to the supermarket was
quickly approaching. The other, he explained, was driven exclu
sively on the highway, for trips of 100 miles or more: to Atlanta
and back, for instance.
"That's very scientific," I said from the passenger's seat, and
regarded the consequent silence nervously, watching the bare limbs
of February trees pass over the windshield.
"It's practical," he answered after a minute. "And science should
always be practicaL"
ftTHE OLD MAN
I met Or. Odum in 2001, when he was 88 and a half.
I had done some reading beforehand, or tried to. I
checked a book out of the library: Fundamentals of
Ecology, by Eugene Pleasants Odum, a yellow, coffee-
stained volume emblazoned with the sort of geometric
emblem favored in the 1960s. I leafed through it the
night before our meeting and woke up the next morning
with my face lying in a figure entitled "A Compartment
Model of Biomass Change in a Grassland Ecosystem." As I
lifted my head from the book, I was confronted with a
mathematical equation, stark and meandering on the
page: triangles, fractions whose primary participants
were, to my knowledge, members of the alphabet, a
symbol I vaguely recognized as Pi.
That book I used as a pillow was the first ecology
text ever written. In it, the idea of the ecosystem was
pioneered; because of it, the concept of ecology gained
popularity with the scientific community and the public
with astonishing swiftness; and through it and various
other publications and international awards, Eugene
Odum became something of a legend.
I was without a background in the sciences, but also
without a job, the winter after I graduated college. The
former problem proved to be less of an obstacle to being
,. »i.»dered for employment in a scientific field than one
might expect I knew someone at the Institute of Ecology
at the University of Georgia whose compassion for my
condition led him to suggest me for the job of caretaker
of Dr. Odum's property in Ila, a little town just north of
Athens. This friend called me on a rainy morning.
"What would you think of managing a little research
station for the Institute's old director?" he asked. "The
rent's free and all you would have to do is open and
close a gate when scientists drop by."
I had just moved into my parents' house after five
years of college in a faraway state. It was morning, and
my father was in the kitchen blowing his nose and lis
tening to the robot in the weather radio: 'Mostly. Cloudy.
In. Dah-loon-ee-gah. Temperature. Thirty. Five. Degrees."
I sat on the edge of the bed in the guest room with the
phone to my ear and stared at my shoe collection. I
noticed it had been neatly Uned against the walL
"I would certainly consider it' I said.
"Great! How much do you know about Ecology?"
I made an uncertain noise. "I dunno... a little?"
'He pretty much invented it Get his book. He'll pick
you up at 11:30 Tuesday. And he likes to eat in the cafeteria—he's
very old."
On the appointed day, I watched from the window as the white
Taurus eased up the driveway and Eugene Odum levered himself out
of the driver's seat As he made his way around the car, I first
noticed that he was a small man, slightly Duilt by any standard, but
as I met him on the walk and shook his bent purplish hand, I real
ized that although he was thin and almost debilitatingly hunched,
he was unused to and impatient with his physical state. I heard
later that he had once been an accomplished athlete—taller,
stronger, more agile than he now was—and there were dues that
these vanities had been grudgingly surrendered. There was a good-
natured arrogance in his gaze and way of speaking, but he walked
with a painful, deliberate spryness, and in his voice was pitched a
battle: a great mind versus a tenacious waver. It was a strange
effect: a bent little man, walking stiffly, as an old dog walks, always
picking up his feet an inch higher than was comfortable, and con
stantly looking up sideways to catch me with pale, watery eyes and
a pithy word of instruction.
He told me as we drove that he was raised in Chape! Hill, North
Carolina, as we drove (he in the driver's seat, I in the passenger's.
My offer to drive had been flatly and almost scornfully refused). His
father had been a professor of sociology at the University of North
Carolina, and from a young age, Eugene was interested in birds. In
junior high school he and a friend wrote a naturalist's column
called "Bird Life in Chapel Hill* that ran in a local newspaper. In his
20s, he studied zoology at the University of North Carolina for his
Bachelors and Masters degrees and then went on to the University
of Illinois for his doctorate. Ecology was a young science in the
1930s and only a handful of scientists at that time were working
under the supposition that the ecosystem is the basic unit of
nature, and biological diversity makes these systems work. This was
the idea that compelled Eugene Odum, and Illinois was one of the
only schools in the country that would allow him to take this sort of
holistic approach to natural sciences.
ft THE WORLD
After taking a job at liGA as a zoology professor in 1940, Dr.
Odum fought to make ecology a required class for biology majors.
"When I was starting out at UGA, we were drawing up a cur
riculum of required courses for biology majors. I suggested ecology
be required, and I was laughed out of the room. Later, colleagues
started coming into my office wanting to know what this
"ecology" was!"
In 1951, the Atomic Energy Commission accepted his proposal to
monitor tlie Savannah River Site, a nuclear weapons plant in South
Carolina, just across the Savannah River from Georgia. The AEC
wanted to know whether the site affected the area's flora and fauna,
and they gave Dr. Odum 300 square miles of property to create a
laboratory, off-limits to the public and completely self-contained.
The Savannah River Ecology Laboratory was set up, and research
projects began, but if ecosystem ecology was to become a recog
nized science, something else was needed: a textbook. Dr. Odum and
his brother Howard, who was at Yale getting his Ph.D. in zoology,
began to set down the fundamentals of the science—not just for
students and professors, but for everybody. It was first published in
1953, and for lO^ears it was the only text in the field.
Driving to a cafeteria on the UGA campus, Dr. Odum talked about
his life. He was an active storyteller and spent long moments eyeing
me for dramatic effect. I spent most of my time nod
ding and pressing hard on my imaginary passenger's
brake pedaL
'Let's say, you're an ornithologist I'm a dendrolo
gist and that gentleman there is a soil entomologist"
He turned his head and gestured to the roadside where
a team of orange-clad prisoners were collecting
garbage. I glanced quickly, feeling sure he didn't notice
the traffic light appear over the rise of the hilL I didn't
know which gentleman he meant but none of them
looked particularly like the entomologists I knew.
"You could study birds for a lifetime and really
know something by the end. But you wouldn't know as
much about a bird or its place in the ecosystem as you
would if you had talked to us about what we knew."
He thumbed at the backseat to indicate the entomolo
gist we had left behind.
'Organisms cooperate in an ecosystem the way
humans cooperate in a community. What we need to
do is concentrate on understanding natural systems.
This planet is our supply depot, but it's also our home,
and you wouldn't know that by the way we're acting,
would you? "
I nodded and then shook my head, lost for an
answer and unsure of whethe. an answer was even
expected. I will admit I felt a bit feeble buckled into
the Taurus with the Father of Modem Ecology at the
wheel, telling me how things were. There was some
thing so different from, but not incommensurate with,
others I should have been able to compare him to. As
a result, I didn't know exactly how to act. He was old,
of course, and I was very young, but I was used to
being around elderly people: grandparents, neighbors,
family friends. He was Southern, too, as was most cf
my family. In many ways, he was like the other
Southern men: authoritative, polite, animated story
tellers. He was talking, however, about a science I
generally associated with long-haired professors in
running shoes or environmental non-profit employees
with Patagonia pro-deals.
Winston Churchill once said something about a
Conservative man under 30 having no heart and a
Liberal man over 30 having no brains. Dr. Odum was
both the brainiest and most liberal 88-year-old I had
ever met I couldn't imagine him having a conversa
tion with anyone even remotely like himself. Whether
it was his ideas, his self confidence or his frustration with the state
of things that had allowed him to transform a few people's tiny idea
into a movement I don't know, but it was the same thing that sepa
rated him from everyone else. Consequently, I was a student to
him—everybody was a student
This became all the more evident to me at the UGA cafeteria,
where we sat at a wide, round table, full of ecology graduate stu
dents and professors who listened with crumpled foreheads as Dr.
Odum spoke of the University's misguided attempts to bring* ecology
to the people through landscaping. We had parked on campus in
front of a faded sign reading "ODUM* and walked to the cafeteria,
on our way passing a small grove of scruffy pines recently erected
between two parking lots in a patch of coarse, yellow grass. A sign
on a pressure-treated post stood near the sidewalk: 'Longleaf Pine/
Wi regrass Ecosystem Native to the coastal plain of Georgia, these
“us PRACTICAL, axd SCIENCE
SHOULD ALWAYS BE PRACTICAL.I’
8 FLAGPOLE.COM • JUNE 15,2005