Howard Thomas Odum (September 1, 1924 – September 11, 2002), usually cited as H. T. Odum, was an American ecologist. He is known for his pioneering work on ecosystem ecology, and for his provocative proposals for additional laws of thermodynamics, informed by his work on general systems theory. Biography Odum was the third child of Howard W. Odum, an American sociologist, and his wife, Anna Louise (née Kranz) Odum (1888–1965). He was the younger brother of Eugene Odum. Their father "encouraged his sons to go into science and to develop new techniques to contribute to social progress". Howard learned his early scientific lessons about birds from his brother, fish and the philosophy of biology while working after school for marine zoologist Robert Coker, and electrical circuits from The Boy Electrician by Alfred Powell Morgan. Howard Thomas studied biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he published his first paper while still an undergraduate. His education was interrupted for three years by his World War II service with the Army Air Force in Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal Zone, where he worked as a tropical meteorologist. After the war, he returned to the University of North Carolina and completed his B.S. in zoology (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1947. In 1947, Odum married Virginia Wood, and they later had two children. After Wood's death in 1973, he married Elisabeth C. Odum (who had four children from her previous marriage) in 1974. Odum's advice on how to manage a blended family was ; Elisabeth's was to hold back on discipline and new rules. In 1950, Odum earned his Ph.D. in zoology at Yale University, under the guidance of G. Evelyn Hutchinson. His dissertation was titled The Biogeochemistry of Strontium: With Discussion on the Ecological Integration of Elements, which brought him into the emerging field of systems ecology. He made a meteorological "analysis of the global circulation of strontium, [and] anticipated in the late 1940s the view of the earth as one great ecosystem". While at Yale, Howard began his lifelong collaborations with his brother Eugene. In 1953, they published the first English-language textbook on systems ecology, Fundamentals of Ecology. Howard wrote the chapter on energetics, which introduced his energy circuit language. They continued to collaborate in research as well as writing for the rest of their lives. For Howard, his energy systems language (which he called "energese") was