WEDNESDAY, JAN 5, 2022: NOTE TO FILE
H.T. Odum Transcript
Interview from 1981 & Commencement 1978
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: ODUM, FROM THE WIRES, LIFE'S WORK, FUTURE
Abstract: In December 2021 an interview spread among former students of H.T. Odum, systems ecologist. When I learned of it, I downloaded it from Vimeo, uploaded it to YouTube and hosted a local copy. I spent two days making corrected subtitles for the YouTube version, and turning them into a readable transcript. And a Commencement Address at the University of Florida, 1978, offers information and advice for those living through the cresting of modern techno-industrial society.
COOS BAY (A-P) — I didn't know I was an Odumite until a few years ago when I read: "In the world of science that we live in there are two kinds of people: Odumites and others." I knew immediately what they (the Emergy Society) were referring to. I uploaded an interview to YouTube (1/4/2022) from 1981, the year I graduated from CalPoly. I had considered going to the University of Florida as a graduate student. I forgot, or never knew, H.T. was teaching there, and I didn't go. About the only cause for regret in my life I can think of is that I didn't seek him out, as I'm sure I would have soon ended up studying under him, and that would have changed everything. For better or worse? I don't know. Systems are complex, more than we know or can know. I consider H.T. my mentor by proxy via his books. This is the first video I've seen of him, first time I've heard his voice. So far as I know his hobby was vivisecting puppies and eating their liver for breakfast (raw). But he did good science.
From the video below: "When I went to graduate school I was going to study 'the secret of life'.... The secret of life is it's a system, and there is no secret. It's just a darn good system with very good self-regulating mechanisms, and so if you're going to study the principles of a theory of systems, let's go back to one where you can see the parts, and we don't have to work so hard to get the data, and so we [I] went back to the ecosystem..." and so H.T. came to include systems ecology among his interests.
Interview courtesy of College of Exploration and the ISSS.
Transcript:
[James G. Miller] J.M.: We have with us today Dr. H.T. Odum. And Dr. Odum we're delighted to welcome you and to have this opportunity to talk with you about the development of your scientific and professional interests, and of your intellectual career and what you're thinking about now, and where your work is going in the future, and I wonder if we could start by telling me a little bit about where you were born and raised.
[Howard T. Odum, or H.T. to his students] H.T.: I was born and raised in the university town of Chapel Hill North Carolina, and my father was a sociologist and....
J.M.: Yes indeed he was a very well-known sociologist.
H.T.: And he was a pioneer and I think he had some kind of overall concept of system, although in those days they called it social institutions.
J.M.: Do you think that he influenced you in becoming a system scientist or a general system scientist as you are today?
H.T.: Obviously, I was pretty much dedicated to him and he used to say go out and get some new techniques from the sciences and bring him back to the problem of humanity in nature.
J.M.: Well now, you were interested in systems of various social systems as well as biological. I know, but your interest, fairly young, turned toward ecological systems. How did that happen, what was the influence that brought you into that.
H.T.: Well, another important influence from my elder brother [Eugene] who's years older and as he began to go into the brand new field of ecology, he'd teach his younger brother, who was still in high school, and so I go around studying birds and things like this as he did.
J.M.: And later on when you got trained as a biologist, I suppose you probably helped him out a little bit in return as years went by.
H.T.: When I went to Yale, and we taught him some new things that he hadn't learned at Illinois and so on, vice versa.
J.M.: Now where did you get your formal education?
H.T.: Well I took the A/B at North Carolina and then the Second World War came on, and I was very fortunate getting in the meteorology training in which with its engineering, mathematics, and so three years in this.
J.M.: Military life can be an education in itself, and in addition if you have a specialty like that it could help a lot.
H.T.: And also you learned with meteorology that what happens here locally is not a function of anything you can see, it's a function of a next larger system, and so you get used to looking to the next larger pattern to understand what is local.
J.M.: And so you think in those days you are beginning to think in terms of hierarchies of systems in some sense.
H.T.: Yes, and of course biology has a rich tradition of hierarchical teaching in a verbal language, and so it became obvious that there was some possibility here to combine these fields, and that, of course, Yale was rich with the concepts of theory, and that there must be theoretical understanding.
J.M.: When did you go to Yale and receive your doctorate?
H.T.: That was after the war and I went there and married, things like that, and we had Evelyn Hutchinson, was a great teacher and taught you at many levels and you learn to think that it's all right to make calculations about the world when the data is slim.
J.M.: I remember after that you went to Florida. Is that correct?
H.T.: Yes, at the university.
J.M.: Now tell me how your original scientific studies developed and sort of trace them for me.
H.T.: So we've found ourselves in an area of marvelous environments and the question was what is, how does, the ecological system work? And we started looking at the great, the Silver Springs River, and began to look at it and try to understand it, and begin to develop diagrams and try to ask how the new concepts of energetics and information could help us to understand.
J.M.: Get interested in the Okefenokee swamp too.
H.T.: We have done that, later, and we have a center for wetlands now, which is doing research in swamps.
J.M.: What sorts of principles did you get out of your studies and emphasize?
H.T.: Well the big question soon was, with the new ideas of irreversible thermodynamics coming along, was at what rate does the world go? And you begin to realize, then, there's a possibility there's one rate it runs at, and that's the one that maximizes power, and there's an inverse between the power and efficiency, so we systems survive, the ones that survive are those that maximize their energies, and that theory, we then discovered, has already been stated many times by Lotka and Boltzmann. Anytime you discover a theory on your own first, and then cite it in the literature, you really do believe it [laughs].
J.M.: Well, I believed it too because in my earliest systematic papers on system science, I referred to the classical article of Odum and Pinkerton. I understand that Pinkerton died at some time after that, and so he did not continue in the field, but you did, and that article of yours, which I've often made use of, indicated a range of different situations in which systems maximize power. Now can you give us a little description of the sorts of systems that you think about that are good illustrations of this principle.
H.T.: Well, we began to formulate a series of corollaries, and that this applied to muscles and physiology and ecosystems and then we began to look larger to systems of man and nature, into those of economics, and the predictions agree in large measure with what people in these fields, but gave a second reason for things and, for example, in economics the tradition has been to take value from what an individual wants, but we began to realize that the individuals and their free choices are the way by which the larger system of society finds the energy pattern that works, so in fact we began to realize that we had an energy theory of value, and so this has been also a way to predict what the national system will do and to relate it to war and to peace and history and so on.
J.M.: You have very wide-ranging applications in your mind then and I can see you're dealing with the question of freedom and determinism. Perhaps your father's interest in sociology had something to do with concentrating your thinking about that. Now actually this principle applies, as you indicated in that original article, to non-living systems of various sorts as well.
H.T.: Quite right.
J.M.: For example, can you give some examples of that?
H.T.: Certainly, the beach also builds structure with which to improve its ability to catch the wave energy. And a fire builds a concentration of heat and feeds it back as its kindling temperature to catch more energy. So we began to realize that the essence of life, if you like, is in fact in the design of the system and when you go to planets you shouldn't be looking for microbes, you should be looking for things which have all the catalytic structure and process energy in these ways. In fact, when I went to graduate school I was going to study the secret of life, you know, and then I soon found, in the midst of a biochemistry course, that says, my goodness, the secret of life is it's a system, and there's no secret. It's just a darn good system with very good self-regulating mechanisms, and so if you're going to study the principles of a theory of systems, let's go back to one where you can see the parts, and we don't have to work so hard to get the data, and so we went back to the ecosystem then, rather than biochemical one where it's so difficult.
J.M.: Well, I begin to see that you're thinking of associating these biological and non-living systems with economic systems. I think that's very important personally, and that perhaps is part of the way of the future, but there was a famous economist, by the name of Adam Smith, who, when he asked himself what was the nature of the economic system, talked about the unseen hand. In other words there was nobody that was arranging it. It arranged itself, but that's another way of saying what you just said.
H.T.: In fact, one of the principles of the unseen hand is maximum power principle.
J.M.: Oh really [laughs]? Did Adam Smith talk about that?
H.T.: No, I'm substituting....
J.M.: Well, I thought you're going to tell me something.
H.T.: But there's so many things in economics. The Pareto income distribution is really an energy hierarchy principle, and so the relationship of, it helps to indicate the balance between the political right and political left, and many things that can come from understanding the way systems survive.
J.M.: Well, now I have referred, on my own authority, and I don't know whether you would agree or not, to your use of this principle as a cross-level hypothesis which you have tested and found evidence for at various levels of living systems. Exactly. Would you accept that?
H.T.: Oh, yes, we have graphs from quantum chemistry and from the stars and almost the levels in between, and I suspect that if, when we get around to looking inside the physical nucleus, we may find that there's a hierarchy in there also. And you know, if you could take an ecosystem and shoot it with a shotgun, you'll get a bird flying here and a fish there, and that's the way the physicists are dealing with their world in there. I think they need to put it, look at it, as a network.
J.M.: Now, are there quantitative differences at different levels, which you can demonstrate by empirical observations, or measurements, about in this process of power maximization.
H.T.: One of the correlators that we're excited about. and discussed at this meeting, is the property that systems that separate their production from their consumption and pulse their consumption, are the ones that maximize power, so that produces oscillations, and it's those oscillations, then, that have a period that's proportional to size. So big things have long periods and little things have small things and so this may even explain what we call noise and randomness, and so we're not so sure that randomness is the way the universe works, but you get patterns that fit statistical distributions, because of of way maximum power principle causes hierarchies to form.
J.M.: You've also studied the pulsing at these different levels?
H.T.: Yes, of course, one of the most interesting ideas is that the great production of geological process, bringing fuels and minerals to the surface, is followed by an intensive consumption period by humanity. Humanity can do anything because it can be reprogrammed to do anything, so it is programming itself, as in the order of things, to be a giant consumer, and so if it consumes its way past what we might think is good common sense, it may be serving the biosphere by getting the fuels out of the ground, circulating them, being a better geological process, back into so as to set up the next cycle of production. And so that our immediate future, which is to consume ourselves up and then all the way to the bottom, maybe the pattern of things. And so we're having to consider that that hypothesis, because it's symmetrical with other systems, that ecology systems that have a pulsing of spruce, bud worms, and grasshoppers and fire and the spread of Genghis Khan is an example on a larger scale, things like this.
J.M.: How do these orders of magnitude, of these measurements, progress from lower less complex levels to higher complex levels? How do the magnitudes change?
H.T.: We don't believe there's any difference in complexity at any level. I think I learned that doing some spectroscopy. The percent error is always the same at every concentration, and so this matters. We see too much. That's why we have so much trouble at the social and ecological level. We see too much, so backing off and learning to simplify. And so we invented this energy circuit language to help do this.
J.M.: Now what do you mean by energy circuit?
H.T.: It's an attempt to make network diagrams that put all kinds of fields together, that combine kinetics and energetics and economics and other fields, so and we take, try to draw, from other people's systems languages and take the best, so we're trying to get a common language so that everybody can speak, and we've been doing that in triple A [S topics?] for example where we'll have historians and mathematicians who normally can't talk meaningfully to each other, but the historian what follows our diagram of culture and that diagram is automatically a differential equation and so the mathematician is reading it also.
J.M.: But again to get back to this question of magnitudes and the actual observations and measurements. Is there a way that the higher level systems, the social systems, differ in terms of the any quantify or balance effect of this?
H.T.: Yes.
J.M.: What direction is that, what are the, how do the magnitudes differ?
H.T.: We use this concept of embodied energy, the energy one level it takes to make something at the higher level, so as the actual energy goes down as one goes up a food chain from the grass, to the sheep, to people, to cities, to our great leaders, and to culture and things. When we get in that area people say, well there's such a tiny amount of calories there, obviously calories aren't correlated with value. But the energy took at the lower level to make it is greater. The higher the value the less energy, the more energy it took to make it, so we have this lovely paradox which mixes the public up. The more energy the less energy, the more energy it takes, the less actual energy there is.
J.M.: Well, now I know that you have been interested in the concepts of entropy and information in all of this, and how do you see that these two concepts fit into your overall approach?
H.T.: Well, the flow of energy is required to build these hierarchies, and these hierarchies are measurable by information theory, or information quantities, so there is, since there's an energy requirement for information, and it goes up very fast as the permutations of the books in the library become more numerous. The not only retrieval, but the maintenance goes up, so the Bucky Fuller's great idea of doing more with less by just putting everything in form of information has a limit because the ecosystem as we've learned just by going and studying DNA, for example, does not continually build up information. It only carries a certain amount, so we're going, if we have a lower energy period, we're going to have to choose about how much information we can carry forward.
J.M.: Well, now you have said that you see the current trend to combine the concept of entropy with basic concepts in economics as a potentially promising and interesting one. Tell me what you think about this now and about the various people that are thinking in these terms.
H.T.: Well, I think we, the energetics, is going to be added to economics, in due time, as the ultimate determination of value explains why the market system makes the system effective, because it's making power maximize, and so we can do a lot with energy to combine the values of the externalities. That is, the non-economy part of man, of nature, and the word entropy is, it's a difficult concept, and it's easier just to talk about potential energy being used in maximizing the flow of energy, although you can divide through the temperature and call it the flow, and generation of entropy, and so either way it's all right, but there's no magic in that word, and there's a lot of confusion because the word 'order' sometimes refers to simple things of low entropy and other times refers to complex things which have a big difference of entropy from the surroundings. So they use 'order' for near equilibrium and for far away from equilibrium, and the same person may do it in the same lecture.
J.M.: Do you think it's true that if you look at the problem of energy from the point of view of the entire earth, that the economic issue of the future, perhaps the primary economic issue, is going to be the increasing shortage of available energy?
H.T.: Well, I think there's a shortage of this stored energy, and we are pulsing it and bring it down, and then we'll come back to running on a steady pattern of renewable energy, so I'm not at all gloomy. I think it's a beautiful thing to look forward to, leading the way down. We call it the Green Way Down, but it does mean, if you want the same standard living, we're going to have to cut our population in the U.S. [230 million in 1981], for example, certainly to one-fourth, but that we have so many wasteful things, that won't be hard and I think the U.S. can do a great job leading the world, but not leading them up, leading them down.
J.M.: You say it won't be hard to cut the population by [to?] one-fourth?
H.T.: I think there are all sorts of ways in which the great system operates, and as long as energy is expanding the world, the population system keeps spreading with it. It doesn't really start to respond, to turn down it, until the energy is turned down and it does so through various mechanisms, so i think it will, though in some places consciously, and in a few places because they get the message through local famines and whatever I think, it will turn, it just takes one generation to get a population down if nobody bred for one generation.
J.M.: What is the role of living systems, biological and social systems, ecological systems, and so on in the utilization of energy. Is there presence on this particular earth affecting the rate of energy consumption. In what way do you think it's doing it?
H.T.: Well, there's means by which stored evolution and progress of the past is stored, so that they act as great catalysts to make processes maximize power more effectively, so there's also the memory, the earth's surface and the living systems, both of the two memory sources of the biosphere. But the biosphere works as a unit and the human pattern is there only so long as it serves the biosphere's needs. We don't know this always, but we'll fit the pattern. If you handle the biosphere well, you'll have jobs, not vice versa.
J.M.: Well, I know that Voyager and the other exploratory satellites that are going out into space keep sending back reports as to what we are finding on other planets, and perhaps someday they'll get farther out than the solar system, but as of now they've found lots of interesting things on other planets, but they haven't found clouds of pollution, at least of our particular kind of pollution elsewhere. Isn't it the fact that the particular problems that we have, relation to energy utilization like pollution, are problems that relate to the presence of the biosphere on this particular planet?
H.T.: I see that as a problem in scale. Things that are smaller than the world we look about us, are called noise, and things that pulsing and spreading, that are part of a larger system, they come at infrequent intervals, and infrequent places, and so they seem unexpected. We call them catastrophes, or pollution, so I'm not sure, but they aren't in the pattern of things. That is to say that humanity first took over the metabolism of the forest, and then the farms, and the land, and now it's taken over the minerals, and it's become a major geologic... the output of our stacks is greater than that of the volcanoes as far as acid, so we're a better, we're doing a better job at being a volcano, and so some, when we come dumping these acids down, locally the effect is severe as it is on a volcano, but the ultimate effect is to improve the circulation of the minerals in the biosphere.
J.M.: Your name has been associated primarily with this principle of power maximization, but I'm sure that you've been concerned with many other principles. You certainly don't limit your thoughts to that one particular principle.
H.T.: No, the real, our real thrust is that as there's a uniformity of systems, of nature, and as in your work we have the same aims, and particularly in this matter of hierarchy, and that so, that we use energy only as one very effective common denominator, and helping to combine all of the things that we recognize as important.
J.M.: Well, I do think now that you mentioned, that we have the same aims in a number of directions, that's one. I think another one is you say you're trying to get a common language for these different fields. I don't insist on my language and I'm perfectly happy to take somebody else's, but I do think it's important that we get a common language.
H.T.: That's right, and we must quit being reductionist, and saying you do kinetics here in economics, there energetics, and they must all be in the same language.
J.M.: And I do not like to have approaches to problems that leave out whole important areas of human knowledge, such as the biological sciences or economics or the law, or physical science for that matter, and I think you're the same way, and so there are a lot of commonalities in addition to the fact that we both call, we each call ourselves system scientists. Well, now what do you see in the future? Where is your own personal research going to go, from here on. and where do you think this type of research is going to go?
H.T.: Well, we're in an academic scene of course. We keep our students coming and we try to make sure they get some funding through what we know best, the ecological system, but then in each case we try to have a general principle, such as new questions, like are high quality energy is more easily transportable? Or is this pulsing, can that be used to predict the future of the economy? I think we, of energy and foreign trade, we've discovered that dollars are not a measure of the value of foreign trade. It's the embodied energies and there's different and the countries are tipping themselves as much as a hundred to one sometimes when they make a dollar exchange.
J.M.: Is that really so? Can you give an example?
H.T.: That would be phosphates sales from Florida. The embodied energy, the work that nature did in generating phosphorus, and we'll have to do when it's gone. No storages is twenty nine times more than the dollars we see for it in the energy equivalent, so if you keep it, put it on your own soils, you'll stimulate your economy twenty nine times more than if you sell somebody else and buy their dollars, and get fuel with it.
J.M.: Well, are you making recommendations to the appropriate government officials that they do....
H.T.: We do and DOA cut us off from our, they supported the AC, and DOE supported us for years, and then they started making these kind of recommendations, which against their policies, they cut us off.
J.M.: This disturbs the bureaucrats in the department of energy, then does well.
H.T.: I think then, the way that works is, but then the next round, bureaucrats are more willing to look and I think they're ready now to realize that there's a real world of energy controlling their future.
J.M.: What other major future scientific approaches do you think are going to be promising and valuable?
H.T.: Well, I think we ought to join in with some of the cosmologists and check, see if through, we think the equilibrium and open steady state. I mean open system systems are not as different as people have made them out to be in that this, their hierarchy is in closed systems as well, and in the universe, and they, and the pulsing of stars in the universe, is another special case in the hierarchies. Then we also need to get with physicists and looking inside the physical nucleus to see if we can't help them make sense out of that.
J.M.: Well, nobody could accuse you of having less than fully ambitious goals. If you go the whole way from the nucleus of the atom, and cells, ecological systems, to the entire cosmos, but I think that's justified, at least in the light of the people that I find referring to your work, because there certainly are a wide range of disciplines that are now referring to your work, far beyond ecology, and obviously your mind is moving into many of these other areas. Have you had long discussions with Carl Sagan about this, for example?
H.T.: No, I've never met him.
J.M.: Well, thank you, that he would have an interesting opportunity to talk about what he calls these 'billions and billions' of light years you know, and so on, and whether they pulse at the right rates and so on.
H.T.: I think that's right, I think maybe their faith in that of NASA is yet, yet to be seen whether we have enough net energy to do very much with this current cycle of fuels. I think we will not be able to, and we better, some of the nonsense about energy processing through satellites, and so on. Our net energy concept, by the way, is one of the practical things that has been picked up by the federal government. There's a law written, Senator Hatfield, based on our work.
J.M.: Well, Dr. Odum, it's been a pleasure to talk to you and it's really fascinating. I'm sorry we have to stop now, but we've gone over a very wide gamut of things and it's interesting to see that you are just not talking in terms of theory. Far from it, you found hard data to indicate the fact that there are these cross level formal identities or similarities, which are significant.
H.T.: It's the real world accounts and we, our idea, is just to help us understand it, the real facts are out there. We have to always check.
J.M.: Right, we're glad to have you with us, thank you.
I have played many roles sometimes with the majority, but more often attempting to shock the scientific establishment into a better view. — Howard T. Odum
Money and market values cannot be used to evaluate real wealth from the environment. — Howard T. Odum
The great conceit of Industrial man imagined that his progress in agricultural yields was due to new know-how... A whole generation … thought that the carrying capacity of the earth was proportional to the amount of land under cultivation and that higher efficiencies in using the energy of the sun had arrived. This is a sad hoax, for industrial man no longer eats potatoes made from solar energy; now he eats potatoes partly made of oil. — Howard T. OdumWhen the resources are scarce, obtaining costs are higher… and the market puts a high value on the product. … Market values are inverse to real wealth … and cannot be used to evaluate environmental contributions or environmental impact. — Howard T. Odum
Understanding the economy requires that both money circulation and the pathways of real wealth be represented together but separately. Money is only paid to people and never to the environment for its work… Therefore, money and market values cannot be used to evaluate the real wealth from the environment. When the resources from the environment are abundant, little work is required from the economy. — Howard T. Odum
Energy is measured by calories, BTUs, kilowatt-hours ... but energy has a scale of quality which is not indicated by these measures. The ability to do work ... depends on the energy quality … measurable by the amount of energy of a lower quality grade required to develop the higher grade. — Howard T. Odum
Seek out the condition now that will come anyway. —Howard T. Odum
H.T. Odum Commencement Address 1978
Howard T. Odum was a systems ecologist and systems thinker about life, the universe, and everything. In this audio only record, what he told the class of 1978 at the University of Florida may be as or more important today to understand. At one point he held up a stuffed T. rex dinosaur, and advised the students to not end up like them. No image of the event is known and the one used below is fake. The body is his brother's, Eugene, with T. rex puppet added. The head is from the above video.
Introduction by University of Florida President:
An internationally known research scientist, he is also well known to many in the graduating class, he's a respected member of the faculty of the University of Florida. We're continuing a practice to take advantage, at least once each year, of the abundant talent that exists here, rather than to go off campus for every commencement speaker. Our speaker joined the University of Florida faculty in 1950. After four years in the department of biology, he moved to Duke University. He has served as director of the University of Texas's Institute of Marine Science, as chief scientist and professor at the Nuclear Center at the University of Puerto Rico, as a member of the faculty at North Carolina Chapel Hill. He returned here in 1970 and is currently the Director of the Center for Wetlands, a multi-disciplined research effort established in 1973 with significant grants from the Rockefeller and the National Science Foundation.[inaudible, referring to H.T. Odum] is one of the most penetrating holistic thinkers alive today. His complex net energy theory has focused national attention on him, and is attracting worldwide support among energy experts. With his brother Eugene, our speaker received the International Prize by outstanding research from the Institute De La Vie in Paris. An international jury, including many Nobel laureates from 29 countries, chose the brothers for the honor based on quotation, "the global impact of their work." Just earlier this week, day before yesterday, he was honored by the American Institute of Biological Sciences by being made a distinguished, by receiving the Distinguished Service Award at that time. He's recently been named the 1978-79 Teacher Scholar of the Year, the highest annual honor the University of Florida bestows on a faculty member. He is the respected author of two major books and over 170 scientific papers and articles. It's my great personal pleasure to present to you Dr. Howard T. Odum, distinguished research professor of Environmental Engineering Sciences. Doctor Odum: [Applause]
Graduating students, parents, faculty, Mr. President, leaders of Florida and the nation. Today let us consider the energy basis for the future and the way you graduates, as individuals, can stay adapted to the changes ahead.
Maybe it was Pogo or Charlie Brown who was asked why he walked along looking backwards. He says, "how can I see where I'm going if I can't see where I've been?" Charlie Brown's uncertainty is ours. How do we know which way to lead? Often we prepare for the battles of yesteryear with plans that worked last time. New conditions arriving unannounced, often caused failure.
In 1860, the Southern Region in the War Between the States, tried to match agrarian economy against one newly powered by water, fuels, and city-based industries. Because of this changing energy pattern, the South was preordained to lose. The graduates in the 1840s had learned classics, but not enough about the way energy supports civilizations. Few people understood the meaning of the outcome.
In 1945, the U.S. was using half the world's energy flow. The graduating classes in those days formed an opinion about how much geography the U.S. power could dominate. But by 1965, the relative use of world's energy had dropped to one-third for the US, two-thirds for the rest of the world. The leaders with attitudes formed earlier, attempted actions in Vietnam that may have been possible in 1945, but not in 1965. After the base of energy had shrunk, there were failures for lack of understanding of our energy basis.
As we have to dig deeper and deeper to get oil and coal, and go further and further away at sea in Alaska, a greater and greater part of the economy goes into getting and processing of energy. There is less net energy to run the rest of the economy. The price of energy, and all things derived from it, rises disproportionately. For the same amount of circulating money, real work done is less. Part of inflation is due to decreasing net energy. So growth slows down and economy levels. The price we have to pay for imported energy depends on the debt energy at home, as we have to pay more to dig deeper. Those abroad can raise their prices accordingly.
To attempt energy dependence and use up our own fuels now, only hastens the rise of prices. The productivity that would have gone for growth, goes abroad to balance our payments for oil. Underdeveloped countries, with more unused land, water, labor, and minerals, can now track capital away from us, and they can grow until about 1995, along with the OPEC countries, when the world's assets as a whole began to decline because its energies are no longer rich, and because it has so much assets to maintain already the U.S. growth stopped sooner.
In the 1940s, we tried to keep Americans on the family farm while great flows of coal, oil, and gas came to the cities, fueling growth and jobs. Everyone moved to the city in spite of government policies and programs to keep them on the farm. Soon now, however, fuel flows will be declining and once again the renewable rural energies will be proportionately more valuable.
Opportunities will track people out, decentralizing the cities. It may have already begun. Will we try to keep the city subsidized against the real trends? The US's immediate energy position hinges on its foreign policy. Going almost unnoticed is Carter's brilliant success in bringing Saudi Arabia under the American perimeter, so that its oils are available at a lower price. The real price of oil has dropped 21% in the last three years, causing the American economy to ripple upward. With Saudi Arabia part of the US, our economy crests later. Without, its economy crests now. However, fighting a major war during declining energies is to be avoided at all costs even if the war is over energy.
The demise of ancient Greece has been attributed to major war during a time of exhausted soils and forests. It is correct that an economy, to be vital, must grow if there are energies to support growth, but the corresponding principle is also correct, that economies cannot be vital if growth is attempted when energy flows are diminishing.
Some fear this regression, but those in ecology are used to observing the growth of forests, followed by a leveling stage called climax, which is more harmonious than growth, with better characteristics of cleanliness and cycling, and an even distribution of wealth and quality of life.
Now these matters are controversial and many have honest differences opinion, thinking there are alternative energies, invested interests with billion dollar, government contracts gained by making promises they probably cannot keep. And you graduates to stay adapted, have to consider the possibility, and in my view the probability, that the assets of the industrial nations, their energy flows and real gross national product, will soon crest and decline, and that of the rest of the world, slightly later.
This is a stuffed dinosaur, tyrannosaurus [laughter]. Oh, in the years to come, I want you to remember. Will you be like tyrannosaurus when changing energy conditions change the rules? Will you be ready or go extinct? [Applause.]
What about solar and nuclear energies? Because sunlight is so dilute, only one calorie remains after 2,000 calories of sunlight are processed and concentrated into fuel. The nation can be supported on renewable solar energy using forest, agriculture, and fisheries for food and fiber, but not at the present level. Either the population must be reduced one-third, or the standard of living one-third.
Green plants have already maximized conversion of solar energy to useful work using the same process that those who are developing photocells offer as a new substitution. Solar technology is inferior to green plants and is not net energy, for it requires four calories to yield one. Solar technology done in conjunction with necessity, such as building homes, can save heating energy. It conserves energy, but it does not yield net energy with which to run the economy.
Present nuclear energy, with five thousand degrees of heat in its core, has proved to be a disappointment with less net energy than coal because so much of its energy is too hot and has to be injected to the environment in cooling waters. Now the proposed fusion, with 40 million degrees temperature at its core will surely take more energy to contain and cool than it yields. That's an opinion.
Although we can expect the economy to crest and regress, it is nothing to fear since the transition can be gradual because of coal reserves that give the U.S. a preferred position after the 1990s. As the nation tightens its belt, its tourists will spend less, its retirees bring less money and less luxury products will be bought.
Florida agriculture will have to diversify and substitute local sales for luxury orange juice and winter vegetables as transportation costs rise. Luxury air conditioning will decrease and electricity per person will be less as more coal is used to heat houses directly, perhaps coming over from the West in pipeline slurry with Mississippi River water.
There are things not to do in a cresting economy, like building great capital costing central facilities. Based on an assumption of growth, such as power plants, regional tertiary sewage facilities, more shopping centers, big highways, high energy mass transit, all this does is raise taxes and utility rates causing industry and jobs to go elsewhere.
There are things to do like retaining and connecting our wetlands in a web for water conservation, waste recycling, wildlife corridors, and aesthetic buffers. Our center for wetlands and experiments at Gainesville has shown that wetlands absorb microbes, heavy minerals, nutrients, and recharge groundwater. The swamp, acting is nature's filter.
In a dissertation for a PhD awarded today, Sandra Brown shows 30% to 50% of the water saved for the Green Swamp, as compared to Florida plans to drain and substitute reservoirs. Cypress trees conserve water. Growth, available cypress wood, is accelerated four times by waste waters.
To the south, a new river of grass from Lake Okeechobee south to the everglades, can process water in a strip three miles wide, taking all the nutrients and agricultural back pumping, but providing water to lands on either side. The mud lands will be rebuilt by the plants and later this trip can be farmed again. An adjacent strip, then carrying the waters.
Regression means more jobs because less high energy machines are used. More miniaturized machines will use smaller buses, trucks, computers, and farm implements.
What will be the pattern of life and economy with declining energies? Agriculture and forestry have to use more land, more labor, and less energy intensive tractors, pesticides, fertilizer. For Florida, with its sandy soils, this means getting the water table back up to help hold its [PD? peat?] content that holds nutrients.
In a doctoral dissertation, awarded today, Burt Smith found typical Florida forest, grazing lands, so depleted of phosphorus due to removal of nutrients with tree harvesting, that regrowth of trees or cattle was hardly possible, based on only the tiny nutrients coming in from the rain. And yet 25 feet underground are rich phosphate deposits from millions of years of leaching.
We may need to broadcast this phosphate over the entire state instead of selling it to the Soviets so we can run sports cars a little longer. The urban city mess of unemployed youth and crime will start to be solved as a mechanism is found to start a new homesteading. Helping these youth to leave the declining cities, build their own cabins, develop new farming communities of a subsistence nature, learning to be proud and versatile like a black man named Quince under whom I worked on a farm as a boy.
In understanding energy, we learned that high quality things require much energy to make or replace them. Four coal units are required to make one of electricity. Hundreds of calories of coal to make one calorie of technological service, and thousands of calories converge in support of one calorie of educated human service. Labor is high embodied energy.
Now rationing, or artificially pricing fuels, will hurt the economy's ability to compete. The place to save energy is in the embodied energy of the luxuries mainly in the middle and upper income groups, therefore energy conservation is best brought about, democratically, by a nationwide, get this, cutting of salaries, or letting inflation do it. Those funds to unemployed for work, increasing productivity.
Minimum wage needs to be eliminated for those under 21 and over 65 to ensure they are proportionate participation in the workforce. Women in the workforce will continue to increase since less children are needed in the time of decreasing population in a regressing economy. Now, high quality services such as government and higher education will feel the pinch first as energies become expensive, because they are at the end of this energy chain. We already feel them.
In higher education, we're already starting to plan for lowered resources. For economy, our graduate programs have to be clustered so that each program's courses reinforce the others and exceed the minimum critical size. The state cannot support non-graduate universities, but may have to learn this the hard way with a collapse of quality with students going out of state as they once did.
The larger universities, such as this one, can be gradually reduced from their oversized and their playboy roles by diverting those students who are not yet committed to higher education. Grades are the best proof of classroom motivation, not machine graded tests.
To teach more with less requires general education with principals. For example, an introductory freshman course combining energy economics, environments, and systems could precede other courses, helping everyone to understand changing times and to see the unity of knowledge better.
For example, of a principle of broad application, a dissertation from a PhD work today, John Alexander, shows the pattern common to many situations of the biosphere with a gradual storing of energy, which is then consumed in a burst of frenzy consumption. Examples are earthquakes, storms, volcanoes, forest fires, locust epidemics, war. We regard such surges of energy as a disaster, although the pulse usually serves to make the process of the biosphere recycle better and compete. Depends on your perspective.
A fascinating question then is raised from this, that you graduates must think about. Will the magnificent accumulation of world assets of our civilization, at its crest, be consumed in a frenzied surge of final consumption, returning us, catastrophically, to the base level of renewable energies as in the time of Genghis Khan or the spread of Islam? Or is there a better, gradual way to regress?
During the Civil War, one regiment was observed to be retreating, and the commander was asked, "why are you going in that direction?" The answer was "Lee's advanc'n backwards." Apparently the facts of energetics require us eventually to advance by regression. America is always talking about leading the world. My message to the graduates of 1978 is that you have the marvelous opportunity and adventure, like Moses, to lead the world's way over the hill down to a new promised land.
God speed.
