Howard Odum, interviewed December 7, 1984, discusses the Institute of Ecology, including its origins, its approaches to research, its relationship with colleges and universities, its structural and funding challenges, and its demise. Dr. Odum was an influential ecologist who made pioneering contributions to systems theory, ecosystem ecology, ecological engineering, environmental science, and ecological economics. Odum began his formal education as a student of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He suspended his education during World War II to serve with the Army Air Force in Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal Zone where he worked as a tropical meterology. He later returned to North Carolina where he completed his B.S. in zoology in 1947. In 1950 Odum earned his Ph.D. in zoology at Yale University. He was a professor at the University of Florida from 1970 until his death in 2002. Over the course of his career Odum would write fifteen books, nearly 300 articles and would chair nearly 100 doctoral dissertations. He was the son of sociologist Howard W. Odum, and the brother of the ecologist Eugene Odum, with whom he would write the popular ecology textbook Fundamentals of Ecology.