The beautiful summer weather in Northern California reminds me to recommend a smart and charming new documentary called Rebels with a Cause, about how Marin became Marin. Narrated by Francis McDormand, it tells the story of how a small group of rebellious Marinites worked to save the entire Marin Coast and more from development. You can see it on demand at http://krcb.org/video-on-demand/rebels-with-a-cause.
In celebration of what would have been Buckminster Fuller’s 118th birthday, this summer is a great time to ride a bike, hang your clothes to dry in the sun, and check out installing solar panels on your house. They even make solar installations now that double as shade structures and car parks. The financial side of solar is even starting to work. People (like me!) are waking up to the realization that we must fully harness the sun, the wind and the waves soon, so that we can leave two thirds of all fossil fuels in the ground, just as the United Nations says we must do. This, as Bucky said, is our “energy savings account” for emergencies.
We should be 100% clean energy by now. 
Having clean, free energy will change the way we live in so many ways. Just imagine, if we don’t have to labor so hard for our daily energy supply (driving our car to a job so that we can afford to drive a car to our job) we’d have more time to read, to think, to understand, and maybe even plant a garden. We’ve simply “got to get back to the garden”…
Have you seen the brilliant “foodscaping” programs in Switzerland, where neighbors get together to plan their gardens so they can trade with each other? Even their front lawns are planted with healthy food. Maybe this will come to towns in America soon.
Bucky would hate to see the ongoing climate change denial (as in the GOP Congress) even now that extreme weather events and rising temperatures have become the new normal. This is one reason Bucky said women must take over the world. I think he’s right. Women surely won’t be such easy sellouts to corporations as our male leaders have been. Bucky’s idea was that “good governance is nurturance”, a feminine idea, right? So you don’t have to be woman, but just think like one. If we simply start to focus on “providing for the needs of 100% of humanity without ecological damage to anyone”, we might actually accomplish it. And we’ll certainly never know unless we try.
Here’s a great question for your climate denier friends: What would be the harm in improving the world? Worse case scenario, we switch to clean energy and in doing so we create a ton of new jobs and green economic activity and end up with a healthier, more sustainable world. What’s so wrong with that?
If you’re looking for more green fun this summer, hop on your bike! You might even arrive sooner than some people in cars, since small town summer traffic can be maddening. Ride to the outdoor music concerts where people bring their picnics and listen to music while watching the children and dogs play. Or to the farmer’s market, or to the beach or river. A clean fresh “swimming hole” is my idea of a miraculous summertime event! And stop and enjoy the birds wherever you live. Here in Marin we have rare White Pelicans that stop in at Shorebird Marsh, next to Nordstrom. They are migrating early this year. When my daughters were about 2 and 4, we watched one day as they shot off like canons and spiraled into the sky, their white bodies creating a perfect corkscrew to infinity against the blue sky. If you ever are lucky enough to see this, you’ll never forget it.
Do stop to smell the flowers! Oh wait, that is if you can find any that still smell. GMOs have modified many flowers to create bigger blossoms, and in doing so traded off the scent instead. I was recently at Home Depot and hardly any flowers had any scent; the geraniums and petunias have stopped smelling!
One more thing to add to our list of things to do:
1) Stop Monsanto from ruining our world and food supply,
2) No fracking,
3) No tar sands or massive new pipelines,
4) End fossil fuel subsidies,
5) Invest in alternatives,
6) Gun control,
7) Bank control,
8) Health rights for women,
9) Help women take over the world, and
10) Most importantly, everybody, go on vacation, relax and breathe, and get recharged so you can come back and be a great “trim tab” to help steer the world onto a better course this fall.
As more of us are realizing every day, Bucky was right: Humanity has a choice between utopian and oblivion. We’re all in this together. Either war is obsolete or man is. It’s Bucky World or bust. Let’s do this!
Have a great summer.
See it for yourself. In a May 2001 report from then President George W Bush’s special task force on Energy and the Environment (researched and reported by the James Baker Institute) there are dire warnings about climate change, and the conclusion is, that in order to prevent catastrophic climate events, all branches of our government must come together to address the critical problem of excessive greenhouse gasses. 
Our government says it’s our duty to keep shopping, when that is the very thing killing our planet. It is time for a spending strike to show that we can turn on and off the precious spending spigot at will. Could we choose certain days on which to exit the economy as a demonstration of that power? On Black Friday? Thanksgiving? Every first day of the month? On these days we would do and spend nothing. We would not stock up before or after, but just make do with less. A sacrifice for the planet. We could refuse to buy anything made from fossil fuels, which is almost everything. Drive as little as possible. Eat no meat (which is the number one thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint). Turn off the lights. Light the candles. Pray.
BUCKYIDEAS 
