cades after his crawl-space studies, Gene Odum published his revolutionary
textbook in ecosystem ecology,The Fundamentals of Ecology(), which
was illustrated with diagrams of energy transfers bearing no little resem-
blance to large, complex plumbing systems. The historian Donald Worster
reacted to Odum’s famous ecosystem ‘‘flow charts’’ in amazement: ‘‘All the
energy lines move smartly along, converging here and shooting off there,
looping back to where they began and following the thermodynamic arrows
in a mannerly march toward the exit points. A traffic controller or ware-
house superintendent could not ask for a more well-programmed world.’’^50
Worster understands well that Odum did not share his alarm at the charts’
calibrated, automaton-like schematics. Rather the opposite, indeed: Gene
called his ecosystem home. Had he never retreated to crawl spaces as a boy
in Chapel Hill, the young Odum could not have escaped serious talk about
systems and homeostasis as ideal, from his father and other Regionalists.
Later, by the time Gene repeated his plumbing tale, he proudly and forth-
rightly acknowledged the generational continuity.
Young Odum studied other systems, too. He followed streams in and
around Chapel Hill from their sources to their outlets. Along the way he be-
came an expert birder and began a typewritten ornithological newsletter,
finally contributing well-written bird columns to the town’s newspaper. He
was patient, observant, and interested more in animal behavior than tax-
onomy. His sister, Mary Francis, six years his junior, declared him a good
teacher. This he would always be, plus an academic empire-builder to rival
if not exceed his father.
After earning his degree in zoology at Chapel Hill, Gene Odum moved to
the Midwest for graduate study—first at Western Reserve in Cleveland, then
the University of Illinois, where he devised a clever mechanism to record
birds’ heart rates, and where he met and married his mate for life. After a
field research appointment in the frigid Northeast, he landed his first and
last academic job at the University of Georgia. An Odum had returned to
the old sod.
During the s, Georgia was only beginning to aspire to North Caro-
lina’s standards of faculty research and graduate education. The produc-
tive Gene was something of a star there from the beginning of his career,
but he was also a frustrated one. Not only were teaching loads heavy, but
Gene’s crusty senior colleagues in zoology resisted his hope to instruct
undergraduates in ecosystem ecology. Ecology was hardly a new scientific
discipline (or interdiscipline), but the old boys believed that undergradu-
ates must begin studies at the bottom, as it were, and labor toward the