Net Energy, Ecology and Economics

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Howard T. Odum, PhD has many environmental credits to his name and offers a consideration of energy as a net product that incorporates the biosystem, humanity and our inventions, and our efforts to produce more conventional forms of energy, such as electricity and gasoline. PHOTO: ROYAL SWEDISH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

A Note from MOTHER: In early November of 1973 — during a visit to MOTHER's new home in the mountains of western North Carolina — New Alchemist John Todd gave the magazine's editors about the 14th-generation Xerox copy of what can conservatively be described as a dynamite paper.

We had only to glance at this extraordinary document to realize that the paper (originally written at the request of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) is one of the most concise — yet most sweeping — examinations yet made of the real problems of the world. Read it and see for yourself. The paper which follows — written by the same author for a press conference held in January 1974— is more of the same. 

The man who produced this work is Howard T. Odum, PhD, Director of the Center for Wetlands and a Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. In the past, he has been Professor of Ecology at the University of North Carolina, Chief Scientist for the Puerto Rico Nuclear Center and Director of the Institute of Marine Science of the University of Texas at Port Aransas. Professor Odum has many other environmental credits to his name including the book, Environment, Power and Society (John Wiley, 1972). 

We feel that Dr. Odum's papers, presented here with his permission and the permission of The Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden, are important enough to replace the Plowboy Interview usually found in this section of the magazine. 

As long-predicted energy shortages appear, as questions about the interaction of energy and environment are raised in legislatures and parliaments, and as energy-related inflation dominates public concern, many are beginning to see that there is a unity of the single system of energy, ecology, and economics. The world's leadership, however, is mainly advised by specialists who study only a part of the system at a time.

Instead of a single system's understanding, we have adversary arguments dangerous to the welfare of nations and the role of man as the earth's information bearer and programmatic custodian. Many economic models ignore the changing force of energy, regarding effects of energy sources as an external constant; ecoactivists cause governments to waste energy in unnecessary technology; and the false gods of growth and medical ethics make famine, disease, and catalytic collapse more and more likely for much of the world. Some energy specialists consider the environment as an antagonist instead of a major energy ally in supporting the biosphere.

Instead of the confusion that comes from the western civilization's characteristic educational approach of isolating variables in tunnel-vision thinking, let us here seek common sense overview which comes from overall energetics. Very simple overall energy diagrams clarify issues quantitatively, indicating what is possible. The diagrams and symbols are explained further in a recent book (Reference 1). (See the end of this piece for a reference list and an explanation of the symbols used in the diagrams accompanying this article.)