Elisabeth C. Odum

Energy Systems and Environmental Education

An overall systems view of energy flows can be used to teach the important basic principles for understanding the environment. One way of teaching energy, systems, environment, and economics as a unified whole uses energy symbols (Fig. 1). The method can be taught in a single college course, as part of more traditional courses, or in a special short course. It includes methods of energy evaluation of the environment, so the environment is given an economic value which can be compared to the values of other parts of the economic system. The textbook used is Energy Basis for Man and Nature with an Instructor’s Manual by H. T. and E. C. Odum, McGraw-Hill Publ., 1976. The following are some of the points we make using energy language in our course.

Energy Systems Education.

ENERGY IS THE SOURCE and control of all things, all value, and all the actions of humans and nature. This article introduces a way of teaching energy, systems, environment and economics in a unified whole using new symbols. Everything is based on energy. We think of sun and fuel as being energy. Materials like rain, soil nutrients, food and information also contain energy. A system is a regularly interacting, interdependent group of items that form a unified whole. A forest is a system consisting of interactions of trees, soils, chemical cycles, wildlife, and microorganisms. Galaxies are systems of stars that interact through their exchanges of matter, energy, and forces of gravity. The parts and processes of systems can be shown by energy language (figs. 1 and 2). The farm diagram is an example of a system shown with energy symbols. You can see the flows of sun and rain (outside natural energy sources), the flow of work and machines (outside paid-for energy sources) and the flow of soil nutrients going into the production work of the farm. These flows interact to produce the storage of structure, barns, and plants, which feeds back into the production to make more storage. The farm also produces food to sell. The money for the food sold pays for the human and machine work. The heat sink is the waste from the work process and the depreciation of the storage.