Odum Quotes

The future belongs, not to those who have the most, but to those who do the most with what they have.

He was able to prove that the South had surrendered ninety-seven million acres to erosion (an area larger than the two Carolinas and Georgia); it had squandered the chances of millions of people by tolerating poverty and illiteracy; and it had ignored human potential by refusing to provide technological training, or even basic services, to its people. The overwhelming power of Odum’s data undercut (what Odum himself called) Gone with the Wind nostalgia—the collective self-image elite southerners had cultivated.

She handed Mrs. Hines, the librarian, a list of college textbooks. “Could you please help me find The Principles of Organic Chemistry by Geissman, Invertebrate Zoology of the Coastal Marsh by Jones, and Fundamentals of Ecology by Odum . . .” She’d seen these titles referenced in the last of the books Tate had given before he left her for college.

We are able to breathe, drink, and eat in comfort because millions of organisms and hundreds of processes are operating to maintain a liveable environment, but we tend to take nature’s services for granted because we don’t pay money for most of them.

Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, that had been published in 1910, the same fateful and charged year in which she had been born. In it, a white sociologist named Howard W. Odum argued that “the migratory or roving tendency seems to be a natural one to [Black people], perhaps the outcome of an easy-going indolence seeking freedom to indulge itself and seeking to avoid all circumstances which would tend to restrict its freedom.” Odum believed that a Black person’s desire for autonomy and mobility was the byproduct of a self-indulgent lifestyle, that the Negro had no pride in their ancestry, no ideals, and no lasting adherence to an aspiration of worth. In her memoir, Pauli reflects on how the discovery of the paper helped her see her father’s refusal to rest in a new light. Her father had fought against these stereotypes and pseudoscientific beliefs through his personal and professional devotion to excellence.