the late environmentalist, author, & philosopher
A previously unpublished book review of Ecology: A Bridge Between Science and Society, by Eugene Odum (third edition, published by Sennar Associates, Sunderland, Mass., USA, 1997). Eugene Odum, who was Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia, was probably the most distinguished ecologist of his day. His principal textbooks Basic Ecology (1983) and its [...]
An obituary for the world’s most respected ecologist, Dr. Eugene Odum, who passed away on August 10, 2002. It is a summary of an obituary that appeared in the Athens Banner-Herald. Eugene Odum was born September 17, 1913. He grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his father, Howard W. Odum, was a professor [...]
The science of Ecology has been taken over by the cult of scientific reductionism and has become a weapon in the war on the living world being waged by industrial man. This article of July 2002 is a greatly extended and updated version of the article “Whatever happened to ecology?” first published in The Ecologist [...]
Judith Elliston interviews Teddy Goldsmith for Pataphysics. The article may also be found on their previous website here. Judith Elliston: Do you think there is a heightening happening in late-capitalist development, before the end – a speeding up of bio-destruction and growing inequalities, failure of democracies, etc . . . ? Teddy Goldsmith: We have [...]
Published in A Sacred Trust: Ecology and Spritual Vision, edited by David Cadman and John Carey. Tenemos Academy Papers No. 17, 2002. In this essay, Edward Goldsmith argues that the original role of art is to express mankind’s relationship with the cosmos. * * * Original note: Towards the beginning of his remarks, Edward Goldsmith related an [...]
There is an increasing tendency to blame human ills – physical and psychological – on ‘defective’ genes. But is it our genes that are defective? Or is it rather the pathological environment in which we live? Deprived of community, eating nutritionally impoverished foods, surrounded by industrial pollution . . . the raw conditions of life [...]
“It should be obvious to most people, though it is rarely stated, especially in academic circles, that the environment most friendly to the needs of living things, that within which their behaviour is most fulfilling and adaptive, can only be that to which they have been adapted by their evolution and upbringing … There is no reason for supposing that man is in any way exempt from the operation of this fundamental principle. But what is man’s natural environment?”
Following the articles in The Ecologist of April 2000 examining the independence of the scientific world, developmental biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert of University College London debates the neutrality of science with environmentalist and Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith. Published in The Ecologist Vol. 30 No. 3, May 2000. Dear Professor Wolpert, One thing that modern science [...]
