By: Robert Lee Knight, Ph.D.
In several ways, Dr. Howard T. Odum was the most influential mentor in my professional and personal life. Referred to as Tom by his friends and family, HT by many of his colleagues, and Dr. Odum by most of his students, Howard Tom Odum was truly one of the greatest thinkers and doers of applied theoretical science in the world. I can hardly believe that I had the good fortune to study and work with him.
As an undergraduate student majoring in zoology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1968 I was assigned to Dr. Elizabeth McMahon as an advisee. Dr. McMahon was an entomologist who concentrated on termite behavior. She was also a close friend to Howard T. Odum on his tropical rainforest study. While I enjoyed my entomology class with her, especially an insect collecting trip to coastal South Carolina, I was somewhat bored by the biological sciences, including genetics, taxonomy, and ecology.
Through the advice of a friend and the support of Dr. McMahon, I enrolled in Dr. Odum’s Systems Ecology course during the spring semester of 1970. Finally, in my last undergraduate semester, I found what I had been looking for from education – a detailed and plausible explanation of how the world/universe works and the role of humanity and individuals in that grand ecological system. Instead of the imagined world of random chaos accepted as dogma by so many scientists, Dr. Odum saw the world as highly organized and predictable, and developed from plain cloth the mathematic and visual tools needed to explain and convince both scientists and laypersons how to understand the meaning of life.
In June 1970 Dr. McMahon hired me and another of her advisees, Alan Camp, to work with her and Dr. Odum at the Morehead City Marine Laboratory for the summer. Dr. Odum and several of his graduate students were studying the use of brackish ponds to process and purify human waste waters before they were released to the natural marine environment. Their study included a systems overview of the complete physical, chemical, and biological functions of those marine ponds. A small part of that study was Dr. McMahon’s work to document the insect and spider fauna in an adjacent spartina salt marsh receiving municipal waste water.
In the fall of 1970 Dr. Odum left his childhood home of Chapel Hill and moved his family to Gainesville, Florida, where in 1950 he had started his academic working career previously as an assistant professor. In 1970 he was hired by UF as a full professor in the department of Environmental Engineering Sciences. I presume that Dr. Odum was expecting this applied engineering department to be more receptive to Odum’s expanding academic journey in studying universal systems of organization, literally from the atoms to the universe.
I followed Dr. Odum to Gainesville in September 1970 and enrolled for a graduate degree in the department. Because Dr. Odum temporarily left more than a dozen graduate students behind at Chapel Hill, I was his only graduate student during the fall semester of 1970. That was a time of discovery in my life, both academically and spiritually. Dr. Odum supported me with an assistantship to model the United States economy. I continues to study the classical aspects of aquatic ecology, mathematics, and economics. But my most memorable part of that semester was figuratively at Dr. Odum’s knee discussing the meaning of life and the physical/biological world. Perhaps I asked too many questions because he handed me his new book, Energy, Power and Society, and instructed me to read it. From atomic physics to human religion, that book captures the essence of human life and experience. I have never found a better guide to the galaxy.
