edge[d] the shared effort toward this aim with my brother Eugene P. Odum,
University of Georgia.’’^52
tBy the mid-s, with the brothers Odum at the height of their influ-
ence, what now seems an inevitable scientific reaction against their para-
digm had begun, soon mounting to a veritable onslaught against the notion
that homeostasis was nature’s own goal and norm. In the influential
Journal of the Arnold Arboretumpublished an article with the disarmingly
simple title ‘‘Succession,’’ by William Drury and Ian Nisbet, scientists who
worked with the Massachusetts Audubon Society. Frederic Clements, cre-
ator of ‘‘succession’’ as theory and model, was long gone but, as any smart
reader knew in , immortal within the concept of ecosystem ecology,
which was crowned with Gene Odum’s clever substitution of ‘‘mature eco-
system’’ for succession’s ‘‘climax.’’ Shockingly, wrote Drury and Nisbet, suc-
cession actually led, simply, nowhere at all. There is no purpose to change
in the world, that is, simply unending change itself. Nor was there progress,
only randomness, and no system but competing individuals.^53
By the mid-s, it would appear,oikoshad lost any metaphoric rele-
vance to science whatsoever—except, of course, the gloomy news that
American households were dissolving at an alarming rate, divorces were
as frequent as weddings, the young had become wary of intimate commit-
ment, and many homes were scenes of spousal and child abuse. Home,
in other words, could be more chaotic and disharmonious than the oppo-
site. By unhappy coincidence, in the scientists S. T. A. Pickett and P. S.
White collected an anthology they titledThe Ecology of Natural Disturbance
and Patch Dynamics. Collectively, the essayists found ‘‘disturbance,’’ or ‘‘per-
turbation,’’ the signal constant of the natural world. Even without human
mischief, other agents—fire, storms, drought, digging varmints, and ants,
for example—kept the earth in perpetual turmoil. Systems and climaxes
being ephemeral or nonexistent, then, the only legitimate ecological peda-
gogy and research program must concentrate on dynamic, erratic patches
of landscape. And this is, indeed, something approaching scientific con-
sensus today. In , meanwhile, Joel Hagen, a historian, published a criti-
cal book on the ecosystem concept and practice.^54
Throughout the crash of their paradigm, Gene andOdum persisted
as long-lived and long-working men. (They died a few weeks apart, late in
.) Neither wavered in his devotion to ecosystem ecology, nature-as-
(ideal-)home. Both were assured, lucid, and confident to the end. One of
Gene’s longtime colleagues at Georgia’s Institute for Ecology, Frank Golley,