H.T. Odum and sustainable development

Abstract

H.T. Odum did not use explicitly the concepts of sustainability or sustainable development in his writings to any large extent. This is not surprising since the concepts were not established until late in his career. When he explicitly used the concepts, his focus was mainly on pulsing patterns, where oscillations can form a quasi-steady state when considered over a longer period. For humanity Odum showed special interest in the descent phase of the current extraordinary fossil fuel pulse, and used the concept ”a prosperous way down” to address the possibilities alongside the challenges in this phase. Not using the concepts did not mean that Odum was not interested in the concepts. On the contrary, Odum’s legacy does include features that are important to other parts of the sustainability debate beyond just a possible descent. Of high interest is the normalization procedure that merge natural science based flows of energy, matter, and information, with flows of money, and present them all in the same unit: solar emjoules (sej). This aspect and the strong network focus aspect in Odum’s publications render his analyses as highly relevant to sustainability questions. Two main aspects of sustainable development and sustainability not addressed by Odum were considered and addressed in this paper with H.T. Odum’s Energy Systems Language: 1) economic capital substitution connected to the paradigms strong and weak sustainability, and 2) limits or no limits. Of them only the paradigm of limits was found to have been addressed by H.T. Odum.