A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies [Hardcover]

Howard T. Odum (Author), Elisabeth C. Odum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 13, 2001

Consider the future with less fossil fuel and no new natural or technological energy sources. How can it be peaceful and prosperous? More and more leaders concerned with the global future are warning of the impending crisis as the surge of unsustainable growth exceeds the capability of the earth's resources to support our civilisation. But while history records the collapse of countless civilisations, some societies and ecosystems have managed to descend in orderly stages, reducing demands and selecting and saving what is most important. Although some scientists predict disaster, this book shows how our world can still thrive and prosper in a future where we live with less and charts a way for our modern civilisation to descend to sustainable levels. The authors make recommendations for a more equitable and co-operative world society, with specific suggestions based upon their evaluations of trends in global population, wealth distribution, energy sources, conservation, urban development, capitalism and international trade, information technology, and education. This thoughtful and provocative book will force us to confront our assumptions and beliefs about our world's future, which is all too often taken for granted.<

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Howard T Odum and Elisabeth C Odu

Product Details

• Hardcover: 348 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado (June 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870816101
• ISBN-13: 978-0870816109
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,077,544 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Taking the shock out of the future, March 22, 2002

By 

Thomas A. Robertson (Washington, DC United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Prosperous Way Down: Principles and Policies (Hardcover)

From Enron to the September 11, 2001 disasters, it is apparent things are changing in our world, much as we would like to keep things as they were.

In "The Prosperous Way Down" H.T. Odum does not give us feel-good babble.

Instead, he delivers to us a coherent and timely way to do the hard work of knowing how our world works, the changes that are already upon us, and some of the things we may do to increase our opportunity for security and satisfaction in a world that may be very different from what we know today.

There is a lot of contention about Odum and his eMergy methodology. This is to be expected. Odum brings things together, where others are content to be expert with parts.

The bottom line is that with the intellectual tools Odum lets us discover, we can learn to manage far more complexity than any would normally think possible. He lets us first recognize the problems we have with the signals our society sends out through economic and other circumstances of social behavior. And then the tools he provides let us clean up those signals, so we may make better use of the energy and other resources, the environment, and all the benefits (and problems) inherent in our diverse cultures.

The difficulty in all this is indicated by the fact that there is no Nobel prize for looking at the whole of our world. Those fabulous awards go to those who are very good at knowing parts, with very little idea of how the parts come together.

Instead, there is the very quiet Crafoord Prize for those who try to let us know more about the systems of our world--which of course H.T. Odum and his brother Eugene won back in the early 1980s.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book (even if you don't agree with Odum's ideas), February 24, 2011

By 

C. Tenreiro Leiva "book lover" (Chile and South Korea) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Prosperous Way Down (pbk) (Paperback)

This book is excellent, in many ways, starting from the fact that Odum's presents you with a positive and optimistic idea to handle the analysis of today's problems (or many of them). After that he clearly say that there is a way to do this, which is based on "cutting off" the excess in an clever manner, but keeping the standards, rather than been pessimistic, so you get into his model of analysis quite easily. Of course, you can disagree with some of the ideas but as a whole you will have to admit that his proposal is to study the integrated systems, including economy, and for that he construct a tool to analyze nowadays problems related with the excess of demand for energy, and on the top of this, to study the impact (as is naturally expected from the second law of thermodynamics) of man's intervention on the planet. The latter is due to the fact that energy is, at any level you want to analyze it, the source and the driving force of life for the mammal called human. In this book you find the basic definition of his idea, based on the modular concept derived from circuitry design in electronics, so you can have the notion of a complex systems (including interactions) in clear and brief picture.
Of course if you want to calculate some quantities and do some modeling by yourself, you will need to go into the other more technical books on the subject and/or also to go in some of the web sites dedicated to emergy analysis and modeling.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Changed my world view, November 12, 2011

By 

Pamela Lesh (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: A Prosperous Way Down (pbk) (Paperback)

I ran across this book in a library by chance and checked it out because the title intrigued me. About 20 pages in, I decided to purchase the book because I knew I would go back to it time and time again. Howard Odum's ability to explain why things are the way they are because that is how ecosystems operate is masterful and the work he did to place energy sources on a comparable basis (the sun) is unique so far as I am aware. The concepts presented in the first part of the book have stayed with me for months now. The solutions he offers toward the end of the book are just that -- ideas on possible solutions. They are interesting but not as compelling and memorable as the first part of the book. Ultimately, each community, at whatever level in the system, will need to develop strategies to move toward their visions in an ever-changing world. Static solutions will not do much good. But read the first part of this book to understand those very dynamics.