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The Energy Systems Language (right), also referred to as Energese, Energy Circuit Language and Generic Systems Symbols, was developed by the ecologist Howard T. Odum and colleagues in the 1950s during studies of the tropical forests funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. They are used to compose energy flow diagrams in the field of systems ecology.

I was looking at the Systems Modeling Language page on Wikipedia, and noticed this link to Energy Systems Language, by Howard Odum. It's an interesting idea ... although it brings questions to the choice of modeling languages and approaches. No model is value-free.

I watched the first video, and it made the U.S. social security system (mismanagement) easy to understand. Note the references: Odum, Basteson, Jantsch.

Ecolanguage introduces a few new things: (1) the use of regular motion as a part of standard grammar, and (2) the use of a visual symmetry -- the hexagonal snowflake -- to stand for an organization of any kind, at any level of nature and society. In the center, we put the ruler. Everything else is based on things which came before. By using old and new things, Ecolanguage comprises: (A) an international systems language, (B) an accelerated learning strategy, (C) an integration of important and crucial topics, and (D) a scientific philosophy, emerging from many thinkers and writers over the last century, that brings the life, social, and cognitive sciences into the same picture as the physical sciences. We put the new basics of INFORMATION and ORGANIZATION alongside the established basics of MATTER and ENERGY. Now we can represent purposiveness, intention, relationship, agreement, and belief. We can locate the position of mathematical and physical deduction within a larger picture of communication and exchange. We can indicate both analysis and synthesis, including the redundancy of parts and their transcendence into wholes. It is a picture of our perceptual framework, no matter where we look. For a fun primer on this philosophy, please watch: New Chart, for Descartes. (For the old pointers, see the following bibliography.)

This 4-minute video is worth watching. It introduces a language for modeling the ecology. At http://www.youtube.com/user/leearnold , it states "the symbols were drawn in Adobe Illustrator, then animated in Adobe After Effects", which means that there isn't good tool support for Ecolanguage, and thus takes a lot of work to construct and maintain these videos.

Video (4 minutes) by Lee Arnold that introduces Ecolanguage. At 0:50, the voiceover and slide say that Ecolanguage was inspired by Howard T. Odum's book, "Environment, Power and Society", 1971.