This is a part of the Howard T. Odum Collection The work of
Howard Odum generated an entire lexicon of terms that helped
communicate his ideas to the world. Some terms, like energy and
power, were drawn from existing disciplines but were used in new
ways. Other terms such as emergy, energy hierarchy, net energy,
and maximum power were new terms that Odum, his students, and
his colleagues defined. This glossary defines the most important
of these terms and provides some context for how they were used.
-- Cutler J. Cleveland An expression of all the energy and
material resources used in the work processes that generate a
product or service, calculated in units of one form of energy.
In the early 1970’s Odum argued that traditional methods of
measuring energy did not account for the “quality” of different
forms of energy (e.g. sunlight, versus fossil fuels or
electricity). Odum and his colleagues began using sunlight as
the base to evaluate all other forms of energy, reasoning that,
all other forms are nothing m