THIRTY YEARS have passed since the original edition of Environment, Power, and Society was published. Since that time the world has had a taste of living with global fuel shortage, high prices, and the ensuing inflation of 1973–1983. Accelerated economic growth resumed aided by new discoveries of natural gas. The Persian Gulf wars have been fought, in part, to keep global fuel reserves on the free market. With the spread of computers and the internet, many authors wrote of the “unlimited potentials of information,” just as they wrote of the potentials of nuclear energy four decades ago. But a look at nature shows limits to information. Belief spread in the paradigm that all systems pulse, and many writers warned of the downturns ahead in the global pulse of affluence in developed countries, based on converging resources from the rest of the world.
People with knowledge of the details of our planet have mixed feelings when much of the detail is aggregated in order to develop simple views from a larger scale. In the quest for knowledge and in the practicality of earth management, all scales are of importance, each in its place. What has been missing in much of the past century in science and public education is teaching an imperative to view each scale in aggregated simplicity from the next one larger. Science has become conservatively rigid by overemphasizing the half right cliché that to be basic is to look smaller to the fundamental parts.
The new title, like the original book of some thirty years ago, is based on energy systems synthesis of the parts and processes of systems, a diagrammatic way of showing important relationships constrained by the limitations of materials, energy, money, and information. Whereas many inferences in 1970 were made by qualitative study of systems diagrams, simulation of models has since become a general practice. Models like those previously diagrammed, and thousands of others like it, have been published widely by a generation of systems thinkers. The energy systems language has been widely used to show main parts, pathways, and relationships of systems.
In the original volume, published when simulation was new, there was a chapter on concepts for analog and digital simulation of energy models over time. In the intervening years we have simulated most of our overview minimodels, and these are included where relevant in this book rather than in a separate chapter. Details on simulation methods are given in our recent book: Modeling for All Scales (Academic Press, 2000).
For the progress in developing and applying concepts over these intervening years since the publication of the first volume, I gratefully acknowledge the shared mission with students and faculty associates at the University of Florida. Elisabeth Chase Odum was a partner in our efforts to develop energy systems concepts for global education. Joan Breeze was editorial assistant.
Howard T. Odum,
Gainesville, Florida
November 2000