Citation:

Cai, T, T. W. Olsen, AND D E. Campbell. MAXIMUM (EM) POWER: A FOUNDATION PRINCIPLE LINKING MAN AND NATURE. , 2004.

Description:

The fruitfulness of H.T. Odum?s commitment to a systems-based understanding of our biosphere, its dynamics, and the potential role of humans within it is indicated by his extensive and seminal contributions to the many branches of environmental science and socioeconomic policy studies. A unifying theme supporting all these branches of his work is the capacity for self-organization possessed by all systems?socioeconomic, environmental, and ecological?subject to processes of selection operating on alternative system designs and thus on alternative self-reinforcing patterns of energy flow. Such alternative designs correspond to the differing configurations of the energy flow networks possessed by any given system or systems. Network configurations differ with respect to their component structures and pathways of energy flow; the parameters that govern the dynamics of storage, transformation, and flow within the network; and composite traits such as network power acquisition and energy dissipation rate (Odum, 1975, 1983). Along with related principles of energy network dynamics, selection for maximum power provides a fundamental thermodynamic determinant for the properties of all self-organizing systems that extends the principles of classical thermodynamics to systems and processes maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium (Lotka, 1922a; Odum, 1975, 1995a). Odum (1991, 1994, 1995a) summarized the foundational role of this maximum power principle (MPP) in the development of his hypotheses about self-organization in all systems and consequently of his emergy-based method of environmental accounting. In this paper we provide a brief synthesis of Odum?s half century of published explanations and refinements of the principle and indicate major hypotheses and methods of systems analysis that have been (or might be) derived from it.

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