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on the situation, concluded: “Geography, sociology, and other disciplines concerned
with humans, their cultures, and their relations to the environment sometimes
adopted the name but rarely the substance of ecology. . . . The several efforts to bring
together ecologists and social scientists failed to integrate them or to produce really
significant moves toward interdisciplinary approaches” (McIntosh 1986, 308).
But the postwar era did produce, often for military purposes, a strong interest in the
study of systems and the quantification of energy flows and functions within them. In
ecology, this effort was led by Eugene Odum and his brother, Howard, as they took
Tansley's concept of ecosystem and Raymond Lindeman's landmark work (Lindeman
1942), and put their own stamp on holistic-type studies under the banner of ecosystem
ecology or systems ecology. As important as their ecological studies and the systems
studies of others (e.g., Liken and Bormann at the Hubbard Experimental Forest), was
Eugene Odum's insistence on interdisciplinary studies that placed humans within the
ecosystem. He indicated this viewpoint in the following:
Until recently mankind has more or less taken for granted the gas-exchange,
water purification, nutrient-cycling, and other productive functions of self-
maintaining ecosystems, chiefly because neither his number nor his environ-
mental manipulations have been great enough to affect regional and global
balances. Now, however, it is painfully evident that such balances are being af-
fected, often detrimentally. The “one problem, one solution approach” is no
longer adequate and must be replaced by some form of ecosystem analysis that
considers man as part of, not apart from, the environment. (Odum 1969,
266-67)
Reflecting back on the emergence and growth of ecosystem ecology, Eugene
Odum wrote: “[D]uring the environmental awareness decade, 1968 to 1981, a school
of ecosystem ecology emerged that considers ecology to be not just a subdivision of bi-
ology, but a new discipline that integrates biological, physical, and social science as-
pects of man-in-nature interdependence” (E. P. Odum 1986, cited in McIntosh 1986,
202). In the minds of many ecologists, Odum's perspective was a radical departure
from traditional ecological science (de Laplante 2005), even if the reality of Odum's
work did little to push the actual study of humans within ecosystems.
On the international stage, UNESCO initiated the Man and the Biosphere
(MAB) Program in 1971. The program was viewed as an upgrade from the Interna-
tional Biological Program (IBP), which Eugene Odum chaired in the United States,
in that it was less academically oriented and more pragmatic. It also placed a greater
emphasis on developing countries and their ecosystems (e.g., tropical forests received
a very high priority) than did the IBP. Ecosystem ecologist Frank Golley (1993), in his
history of the ecosystem concept, writes: “MAB studied systems in which humans
were an integral part, including cities, agricultural systems, and nature reserves (162).
. . . The MAB extended ecosystem studies from natural landscapes to the human-built
environment, leading to the revitalization of the subject of human ecology on ecosys-
tem principles” (164). The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Envi-
ronment (also known as the Stockholm Conference) endorsed the MAB Program.
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