Reading Environment, Power, and Society

I've been reading Howard Odum's Environment Power and Society. I don't read technical stuff well. Odum says that it's a work for popular consumption. I see how it could be more difficult, but a lot of new concepts come at you on each page.

Odum's goal for the book is to communicate a "macroscopic" -- as opposed to reductionist -- view of the world. He discusses the flows of power in ecosystems -- of which human economy is an example -- and suggests that human survival depends upon understanding the energetics of systems. He writes, "Since decisions on such matters in the arena of public affairs are ultimately made according to the beliefs of the citizens, it is the citizens who must somehow include the energetics of systems in their education."

I'll bite. I'm happy to be able to run my eyes over Odum's discussions of the power flows in various ecosystems. I'm grateful to him for providing a vocabulary of symbols used in network diagrams, such as the one above, which illustrates the flows of carbon in a microcosm. P=gross photosynthesis. R=respiration. Hexagons are self reproducing systems, either organisms or populations. The bulge on the left indicates plants as labeled. The things with roof are supposed to look like tanks, and stand for storage.

Howard Odum

A whole generation of citizens thought that the carrying capacity of the earth was proportional to the amount of land under cultivation and that higher efficiencies in using the energy of the sun had arrived. This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longe eats potatoes made from solar energy, now he eats potatoes partly made of oil.

                                                                                                      Howard Odum

I got two ideas from Howard Odum, an ecologist and member of the World War II generation who died in 2002.

If an energy source -- be it fossil fuel, nuclear, or solar -- produces a calorie of energy, that calorie isn't its yield, because of all the energy costs of obtaining, transporting, storing and using it. The yield is what it makes, minus what it takes to get it.

Embodied energy is the energy available to us, or that we can use to obtain other energy in some resource: oil, the sun, wind, gravity, manure, water, and so on.

Hippie Survivalism

Another picture of the New Alchemists, circa 1973. It had fallen out of its own book, and I just found it tucked into one of my art books.

The text on the rest of the page reads: We find that there are resources, often in the strangest places, as we become less concerned with high energy and more concerned with diverse wholes. If we are willing to change the way we live, tghen we can begin to restore and reconstruct. By passing through the portals of nature, we can begin to work with or through her so that the scares begin to heal. The path will involve the three strands of practicality, science, and a wisdom that is philosophical, even mystical. Separately change cannot come about, but perhaps... and this is only perhaps, together the world will begin to sing.

It is easy to begin. The Ark and the Backyard Fish Farms reflect wholistic and small-scale thinking, and although they are early explorations into man in nature, they will help give confidence and directions.

Time is not on our side. Hence the urgency and tone of the "Journal" (The Journal of the New Alchemists). To some, like Odum (Howard Odum, a biologist and one of the few sensible members of the WWII generation), our survival is at stake; should they be proved wrong, we will stand to gain. If they are right, there can be virtually no alternative that is not hell, until the living order of the earth's mantle is restored.