eLearning

the energy hierarchy, was introduced in a response
at a ceremony in Paris awarding the prize of the
Institute De La Vie to the Odum brothers (HT Odum
1975).
In the Gosselink and others (1974) monograph
‘‘The value of the tidal marsh,’’ total energy flow or
gross production was used as the basis for valuation
on the assumption that all the work going on in the
marsh estuary provides nonmarket life-supporting
goods and services as well as products such as
shrimp. Because it takes energy to make money in
the market economy, the ratio of gross national
product (GNP) and energy consumptionwas used to
convert gross production calories to dollars. The
total nonmarket values of the ecosystem in its
natural state estimated by these methods were
several times greater than value-added market val-
ues for fish, shrimp, and oysters.
Dollar values for wetlands calculated in this way
(up to $80,000/acre for productive Georgia or Lousi-
anamarsh estuaries) were impressive enough to the
general public to play a major role in coastal marsh
protection legislation in the early 1970s. However,
economists of that day objected strenuously to the
energetic approach. They contended that value and
price were determined by people’s ‘‘willingness to
pay’’ and not by the amount of energy required to
produce a product or service. We and economists
Shabman and Batie engaged in a point–counter-
point discussion of this difference in the pages of the
Coastal Zone Management Journal (Shabman and
Batie 1978; EP Odum 1979; HT Odum 1979).
In a two-year study of a 50-year ecological history
of the Georgia, USA landscape (EP Odum and
Turner 1990), Turner and others (1988) used energy
analysis in a subproject to compare market and
nonmarket values for the entire state. Annual non-