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Howard Thomas Odum (1924-2002) was the son of the noted sociologist Howard W. Odum, and brother of the seminal American ecologist, educator, and author Eugene Pleasants Odum.

Howard T. Odum earned his B.S. in zoology (Phi Beta Kappa) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1948. He earned his Ph.D. in zoology at Yale, 1951.

Like his older brother Eugene Odum, Howard was profoundly interested in the emerging field of ecology, or more precisely, ecology at the systems level. He is known for his work in "Emergy" and energy flows in ecosystems and economics, and for aquatic and estuarine research. Also, he was known as an avid "birder" in both his professional and personal life.

His collaborations with his brother Eugene began before the end of Howard’s studies at Yale. At that time, they started the first English-language textbook on systems ecology, Fundamentals of Ecology, which was published in 1953 and had very broad influence. Their collaborations after that, in research as well as writing, were frequent.

In their first book, the Odum bothers adopted the term "ecosystem." (While some have believed the term was by Raymond Lindeman in 1942, others assert that the term ecosystem first appeared in a 1935 publication by the British ecologist Arthur Tansley, and had previously (1930) been coined by Tansley's colleague Roy Clapham. Before the Odums, the ecology of specific organism/environments had been studied on a more limited scale within individual sub-disciplines of biology, rather than as a discipline in itself.

One of Howard Odum’s important contributions is the concept of "Emergy" - sometimes briefly defined as "energy memory." Odum looked at natural systems as having been formed by the use of various forms of energy in the past. Odum elaborated that "emergy is a measure of energy used in the past and thus is different from a measure of energy now. The unit of emergy (past available energy use) is the emjoule to distinguish it from joules used for available energy remaining now."

Howard Odum founded the Center for Wetlands at the University of Florida in 1973. By the end of his life, Odum was Graduate Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, and Director of its Center for Environmental Policy. He wrote some 15 books and 300 papers.

Books

Co-authored with Elisabeth C. Odum The Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies, 2001

Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Environmental Decision Making, 1996

Energy, Power and Society, 1971

Co-authored with Eugene P. Odum Fundamentals of Ecology (first edition, 1953)