Tag: Buckminster Fuller

Bucky your ideas up to save the world.

urban-farming-01_eV22M_7071Surely we are not just going to sit back watching as the natural world turns against our species of greedy, thoughtless humans, and prepares to sweep us right off the planet, so that she can learn from her mistakes and begin again?

The world cries out for a new, more feminine brand of leadership, a new paradigm in which “governance is nurturance” as Bucky put it.  “Livingry” must replace weaponry.  This very idea, that we must work together to make the world work for everybody is not communism or socialism, but something relatively new: COMMON SENSE.

Haven’t we all poured too much energy into these human lives of ours to sit back and do nothing? Isn’t it about time for pitchforks and torches in the street, figuratively speaking  at least?

A Herculean effort is required.

It is long past time for a clean, green, free energy revolution.  The “free” is the problem part, of course.  How can we expect the existing energy industry to let this happen?  The answer is they have no choice — because we, as a species, may have no choice.   So, even if there is a huge ransom for our freedom, wouldn’t it be worth it?  Could we lease the sun back to the fossil fuel industry, maybe in exchange for development of the clean energy technology they could have given us over thirty years ago?

Where the heck are our solar powered cars already? What’s taking them so long?

Bucky would ask each of us to man our keyboards — the world’s most mighty swords — and speak truth to power.  Speak as a mother, a daughter, a sister, a human being.  Be a “trim tab” and demand more of our elected officials.   Show up.   Speak up.  Sign petitions.  Post on Facebook, Twitter, Email friends.

As Bucky said, the only thing that really matters is the truth.  And when you know the truth, you have a responsibility to speak it.

Whether or not humanity passes its final examination is an individual decision.

Getting it right means doing it now.

Buck your ideas up while there’s still time.

And never forget, where there is a will there is no other way.

 

The world is going Bucky!

Bucky would be dancing in the street today for the people in Egypt and the women in Texas who are revolting beautifully, just days after President Obama revealed just how hard he’s been working on climate change, and and the Supreme Court decides it’s okay to love the person we love. So many good things are happening aboard Spaceship Earth these days!

Obama’s climate change plan, which was not reported on by a single national television network, is “all of the above”, except it does not include a carbon tax or anything equally effective, or politically combustible. These omissions may help slip the initial measures through more quietly. Obama must have been stealthily at this task for years now, figuring out how to use his executive power through the EPA rather than waiting for “another meeting of the flat earth society”.

Count me among the thousands (millions?) of American women who dreamt about Obama the night of that glorious climate change speech. (Barry and I were buying a condo in Manhattan. I have no idea where Michelle was. My husband gave me away for the good of the country, good man that he is.)

Doesn’t it make perfect sense now that climate change wasn’t even mentioned in last year’s presidential debates? Obama was too smart to let it come up, knowing he would only mobilize his opposition. With this action, Obama has thrown his enemies a great sucker punch, and possibly a lifesaver to the rest of us. And to think the GOP was already a wailing and failing beast. How far they have fallen,

The women putting their foot down in Texas are amazing — 100% Bucky women. Part of Bucky’s recipe for a better world was to consider “Nurturance AS Governance”. Once women take over leadership the world, which is exactly what we are already doing, we will be on a better path. Bucky’s idea would then be to begin to transform our military bases into heath and human services centers, using our soldiers as warriors of good, which might actually help us win some “hearts and minds”.

Women can be the “trim tabs” to make this kind of “world that works for everyone” happen. It’s time for everyone to recognize that humanity’s choice is utopia or oblivion. “There is not likely to be a middle ground,”said Bucky. If we make the right moves, we can create a beautiful clean energy world where we humans won’t have to toil so hard and long for our daily energy supply. As Bucky said “Grass doesn’t pay for the rain.” So why is it, he said, that nature’s more sophisticated species has to work so hard? Bucky suggested that “we should all go back to doing whatever it was we were doing before someone told us to go out and get a job.”

You could almost feel the cosmic gears turning this week. As I sat down to the computer on the day Bucky died, something clicked, like a reverse earthquake. Everything felt more solidly in place somehow. It was thirty years ago this week that Bucky died on his wife’s death bed. Anne always said she was afraid to go alone into death, so Bucky tidied up his desk and affairs, left a completed manuscript behind, and returned to Anne’s hospital room. They were married 67 years; she was nearly 90 and had dropped into a coma. Witnesses say that after sitting with Anne for several hours, Bucky called out “She’s squeezing my hand!” and had a massive heart attack. Despite the best attempts by doctors, Bucky died as intentionally as he lived.

Today, Bucky’s ideas and integrities hold great promise. My book specifically relays Bucky’s ideas for saving humanity. Some of them are already happening but many are not. I’m hard at work on the rewrite this summer and fall, but will definitely be taking a nice celebratory break this Thursday, July 4, to give thanks for our continually emerging freedom from stupidity and denial.

Time for some excellent summer reading? Tackle at least part ofBucky’s Synergetic Geometry, now available free online, as Bucky specified in his will of 1983. Happy Independence Day!

TARSANDS.002

Humanity’s Race Against Time

Photo credit: www.metalsucks.net
Photo credit: http://www.metalsucks.net
Humanity is engaged in a dramatic race against time to secure its future on planet earth, according to a report from Stanislav Grof entitled “The Current Global Crisis and Future of Humanity” Echoing the ideas of Buckminster Fuller, Grof calls on humans to evolve consciously by expanding our own consciousness. He sets forth our predicament, for which there is no precedent in all of history, in clear and simple terms:

The resources clearly exist to solve our problems.
The only remaining problem is the human personality.
A radical inner transformation of human consciousness is needed.

The question is whether or not this will come about quickly enough to reverse the current self destructive trend of humanity. We need greater emotional maturity, spiritual (not religious) awareness, and profoundly improved ethical values. And we need them all soon.

Our Western Capitalist Society, says Grof, glorifies personal success at the expense of others. We have thus far been unable to appreciate the critical importance of cooperation and peaceful coexistence, necessary for our survival. He calls for a new guiding myth, a new vision which will combine the best of science and spirituality. He doesn’t really spell out this vision, but what he’s getting at is 100% Bucky: We need to develop a deep sense of being planetary citizens first, rather than members of any country, race or religious group. We must drastically expand our understanding of the human psyche and mobilize deep inner intelligence to guide our own healing and transformation. Grof sets forth that we are all damaged, that our experience in the birth canal symbolizes and begins our constant striving to reach a better reality, but that, in Joseph’s Campbell’s words, is like “Getting to the top of the ladder to find it is leaning against the wrong wall”.

Grof stresses the need, as Bucky did, for a unity with nature, as the primary path to this needed enlightenment. We must intuit that every act against nature is an act against ourselves. And just as Bucky said, it all comes down to energy and the environment. Grof calls for massive commitment to the development of alternative energies, saying it deserves the concerted efforts of our best minds, just as the (diabolical) Manhattan Project received in the 1940’s.

The evolutionary progress that is necessary may indeed be Utopian, but it is nonetheless essential, Grof writes. At stake is the future of life on planet earth. “A sufficient number of people must undergo a process of deep inner transformation,” and if we do, Grof says, we might reach a level of consciousness evolution which will allow us to live up the the proud name we gave our species, “HOMO SAPIENS”.

Or as Terrance McKenna said in 1992, “The history of the silly monkey is over, one way or another.”

The Second American Revolution

A story of what could be, inspired by Buckminster Fuller.

“Middle Americans held their own economy hostage, then came together and created a clean energy world. It was brilliant!”

large-antique-brown-duracord-rope-hammock-xx2035 – America’s second revolution was painful, but worth it. It began about twenty years ago, in 2015, with a series of events that today’s historians  call The Middle American Movement (MAM), which is also a play on the fact that this was a movement led mostly by women; females of all ages, nationalities, and political leanings came together and led with common sense, compassion and a global sense of community.

There was wide sweeping social and political upheaval, which resulted in the successful transference away from fossil fuels and the long-awaited creation of a clean energy world. Bucky started calling for this in the early 1940’s, just as World War II was starting.

A clean energy world held magic for humanity.  Because carbon levels dropped and everything green flourished, United Spaceship Planet Earth became a healthier and more relaxed place. We gave up the specious notion that everyone had to “earn a living”, and came to understand that we could thrive if we only paid a little more attention to nature, and her needs.  This was another part of the new feminine paradigm of leadership that came to pass in the early 2020s.

The opening of the Second American Revolution is traced to a small neighborhood’s show of solidarity for a popular Midwestern family. The family was losing their home. Armed guards showed up at the door one unusually warm evening in early summer. The family had posted on Facebook and Twitter that they were not going to answer the door, that they would rather die than be forced out of their home of 20 years, and would kill themselves if guards forced their way in.

When bank guards arrived, friends and neighbors were waiting, many of them also armed. After a long standoff on a warm summer evening which eventually involved a group of neighbors showing up with fresh margaritas and grilled burritos.  Faced with the burritos, the guards, who were also marginalized middle Americans, sympathized with the family, relaxed and enjoyed dinner and a margarita and they all went home to think things over.

Not a single shot was ever fired. There was a celebration in the street that warm night and the next, and became the “not-a-shot” heard round the world.

Americans everywhere, all recruited through the new digital democracy of social media, took to the streets to protect their neighbors like it was their job.

The line “we’d rather die than lose our home” ended up symbolizing much more than a fight against the banks. It was also overthrowing corporate rule of the American government, focused on big oil’s environmental degradation and our complicit government. People knew development of solar, wind and other technologies was being sabotaged by the fossil fuel industry. They struck in protest.

The very idea of  “home” grew to be about planet Earth itself. Herself.  A highly educated generation of humanity rose to a more highly evolved conscience, through which they placed Earth’s needs first.

In this simple peaceful revolution, Middle Americans learned how to create a new and sustainable world. We traded for things, shopped at second hand stores, stayed close to home and learned how to grow our own food, create our own energy, and share our resources.  In cities, neighbors come together to build high rise greenhouses, and even floating community gardens. Cooperative farms popped up all over the country. Seeds became more valuable than money for awhile, especially ones that were clean and not genetically modified. (People finally figured out it was not such a good idea to eat grains that were engineered to blow up inside an insect’s stomach.)

Wind, solar, geothermal and wireless electromagnetic energy are now everywhere.  The fossil fuel reserves are in safely in the ground, our nature’s saving account, in case of planetary emergency, just where Buckminster Fuller always said we should put them.

The whole world has been intentionally greened up like a Chia Pet. Lush green carbon sinks installed in all the big cities help immensely. Even China is all greened up these days. Huge storms, droughts and rising oceans are still happening, but the carbon numbers are dropping and things are starting to settle down. as we drop to a record low 250 ppm. Oil spills and water contamination from fracking are gone for good. The world is a much healthier place now that women’s ideas about governance and nurturance are now in place.

The most remarkable result of this revolution is how many people never had to go back to their meaningless jobs. Our high unemployment rate is now something we brag about – 38% and climbing, and soon, no one will have to “work” unless they really want to, otherwise it is no longer necessary to “earn a living”  since energy is now free, and we have learned how to sustain ourselves even without money.

Creating a good life and raising happy families is what humans were always meant to do. In the new world, we all pitch in to educate our children through cooperative schools. We can turn out creative thinkers, not just non-thinking robots like we used to do.

Now people have more time to read and write and think, and there’s a renaissance of thought underway, a homespun enlightenment of mind and spirit.

Thank Nature we woke up in time! Oh, that was the other big change: Religion evolved when it dawned on humanity that God is Nature and Nature is God. In every area of life, once we learned to play by Nature’s rules, everything fell in place and Nature supported us.

“In Nature we Trust!” was the proclamation that officially acknowledged the revolutionary Middle American Movement. That’s exactly how it’s written on the new one dollar bill. Right under President Chelsea’s picture.  Life is sure good in 2035!

Watch a quick video on saving the human race.

Photo credit: www.metalsucks.net
Photo credit: http://www.metalsucks.net

How to start a revolution

youth of humanity.003

My self appointed task is to bring back Buckminster Fuller’s important ideas and serve them up in meaningful bite size pieces, so that average individuals can use them to help change the world. I believe this is do-able, because true genius is actually quite simple. Take Einstein’s E = mc2 for example. It’s easy to understand if explained simply: E represents units of energy, m represents units of mass, and c2 is the speed of light squared, or multiplied by itself. Because the speed of light is a very large number and is multiplied by itself, this equation points out how a small amount of matter can release a huge amount of energy, as in a nuclear reaction. The core of Bucky’s genius is even more simple. It’s all about triangles. Bucky’s Synergetic Geometry explains that a triangle is the fundamental building block of the universe, the strongest structure in existence. Modern science is proving him right. But what difference does this big scientific idea make to “ordinary little individuals” like you and me? Can a basic understanding of the physical realities of the universe actually affect our daily life? The answer is yes, if, that is, we want to survive as a species.

Bucky knew that if we understood how nature worked, we could use that knowledge to design a world that’s livable for humans and also works for nature. Nature is, after all, the perfect designer. She has been on the job for billions of years. Any living thing that doesn’t abide by nature’s rules becomes extinct. This is the pathway that many scientists fear the human race is on right now. To change that path, Bucky called for an “Anticipatory Design Science Revolution.” It sounds like an monster of an idea, but breaking it down makes it much more simple:
Anticipatory – Figuring out which way things are headed.
Design – Creating technologies and artifacts that work with that future.
Science – Accepting the absolute truth and priority of nature’s principles.
Revolution – Turning things upside down if necessary to make it happen.

The good news is that Bucky’s Design Science is happening. Designers all over the world are using nature’s design principles to inspire breakthrough inventions. Solar powered butterfly wings are teaching us how to make more efficient solar panels. Shark skins inspire better bathing suits. Velcro imitated prickly burrs. It’s become a whole new exciting field of design science, called Biomimicry. The question is whether or not the “revolution” part is happening. Is it scaling up quickly enough? There is no longer a question as to whether or not fossil fuels are contributing to our increasingly precarious relationship with mother nature. As Bucky put it so simply, using fossil fuels is “like burning up the house to keep the family warm.” The fact that we are currently allowing, even subsidizing, more and more desperate measures to extract fossil fuels (through fracking and Tar Sands and building huge new pipelines across continents) is surely evidence that the revolution has not yet begun. As Bucky put it in a myriad of ways, because tax-hungry government and money hungry corporations have not figured out how to place a meter between us and the sun, we are not allowed to enjoy the vast supplies of free (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc) energy that could be powering the world.

A recent study by the Nature Conservancy shows that the older generation still puts the economy first, ahead of the environment. Younger people are smarter. Young people instinctively know that economic cycles come and go, but that environmental change is forever. Nearly 70% of teens say the needs of the environment should come first, ahead of the economy. If our leaders were listening to them, the revolution would be well under way.

Another of Bucky’s favorite rules of nature is leverage, which explains how even a little individual can have great power. No matter what your age or station in life, you have power to influence others. Even if you cannot vote, you can post, you can tweet, you can speak and you can influence those who can and do vote. Bucky would have loved Facebook. In fact, Bucky knew the democratization of media technology was coming. When I met with Bucky in 1982, he explained a couple of times that in the future “We would be able to vote just by thinking.” I gave him my stupid blank look, thinking he meant we would all soon become psychic and that government would read our minds and carry out our will. Social media brings us pretty darn close to realizing the same objective of communicating instantly with each other and the world. Now if we could only figure out how to get people in power to listen to the will of the people. But wait, there are signs that this is also starting to happen. There was the whole Arab Spring thing, where students used social media to spread the word about when and why and how to gather in Tahrir Square in Egypt. In the 2011 elections in Nigeria, Africa, an estimated one million young people on smart phones connected with one another, even in areas where there is still no electricity. When Planned Parenthood let the world know that the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s had withdrawn their funding, the outcry on Facebook and Twitter was so great it only took four days for the Komen Foundation to reverse its decision. The anti-slavery You-tube video called KONY2012, aiming to stop a brutal man named Kony, got a million views faster than either Gaga or Justin Bieber ever had. If Facebook users were a country, it would be the third largest, behind China and India. The United Nations, which provided that statistic, also predicts that virtually everyone on the planet will have access to mobile technology by the year 2015.

This is affecting media too. People don’t just tweet and post about what’s going on, we comment about how the media is covering it. This is creating a whole new check on our government. These kinds of ‘checks and balances’ were the whole idea behind America’s new government back in 1776. The three branches: Legislative, Executive and Judicial, would keep checks on each other. And the fourth estate, the Media, would keep checks on it all. But then the other great power, the corporations, took over the reigns. By using their dollars to buy legislative representatives who would pass the right (wrong) laws and appoint the right (wrong) executives and judges, the checks and balances have been weakened. Social media can help build them back up. We can be the fifth estate. We can take power into our hands every time we pick up our phones. We can voice our opinions louder, quicker and easier than ever before. We can demand that government support technologies to create a clean energy world. We can demand a focus on the environment to create a better working relationship with our undeniable boss, mother nature. And guess what? All this will also create real jobs and a better economy.

If Bucky were alive today, I think he would ask us all to make political expression part of our daily routine. Twice a day: Brush your teeth, comb your hair, and speak your mind. Speak out about something you care about. Put some of that time you spend on digital media to work for the planet and the future and your fellow humans. Focus on the environment, peace and justice, whatever you care most about. If even a small percentage of the (seven plus billion) of us started doing this, the revolution would be underway in no time. Just like Einstein’s law, such a big concentration of something very small could release a huge amount of energy. Let’s get this revolution started.

Let’s give away the sun to the fossil fuel industry.

Since everyone except the fossil fuel industry seems to agree about the need to phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible, and  the industry, understandably, has no interest in committing suicide, it is probably time for some big crazy ideas.

Here’s one, inspired by my attendance at the amazing Fuller Future Festival at Southern Illinois University: Let’s use some carrots in addition to the sticks and incentivize the fossil fuel industry to develop solar.

Let’s wrap the sun in a big petroleum plastic bow, and give it to them, at least for a while.

We would offer them a free, long-term lease, of, say, fifty years, in exchange for their leaving fossil fuels in the ground; and instead developing solar, wind and other clean energy technologies.

Of course, it sounds crazy. Most good ideas do at first. But how hard would it be really? We could craft an agreement that requires outstanding performance by the industry in developing clean energy technologies. In exchange, we would continue to pay for all of this new energy, and keep giving them the billions (now trillions?) in subsidies which taxpayers are now paying in order to subsidize our own demise.

The industry would be required to commit to developing solar and wind with the same reckless abandon they are now putting behind fracking and tar sands and other desperate measures. Those ridiculously risky activities would of course cease at once.

The industry gets the profits it needs. The rest of us get  to survive. It’s a win win.

As Bucky said, “We can’t keep burning up the house to keep the family warm.”

Let’s give away the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind, anything it takes to buy our way out.

If anyone’s got a better idea, please share it. Time’s a wasting.

BUCKY IS DANCING TODAY!

BUCKY IS DANCING TODAY!

The world is waking up! A letter from Climate Progress, signed by an impressive group of environmental scientists, urges President Obama to take immediate and decisive action on the climate. The United Nations, the World Bank, and important groups of investors are now recognizing what environmentalists have known all along: a collapsing environment is a serious economic problem. The letter, sent today, basically demands that the president treat climate change as what it is: Public Enemy Number One. Here’s the letter. Read it, share it, and pray that President Obama will have the courage to respond.

Another easy way to support clean energy.

Bucky called them “readily available cosmic energies” —  sun, wind, wave, geothermal, magnetic, gravity. These are the clean energies that must be developed quickly and extensively if humanity is to exist beyond the climate crisis that is now underway.

Here’s a link where you can demand your government invest more in clean energy technologies. www.onemillioncalls.org  Check it out, then come back and scroll down for more things you can do.  For inspiration, here are Buckminster Fuller’s own words about the insanity of burning up the planet in order to energize it:

 “We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all the human passengers
aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship … provided that we are not so foolish as to burn up our ship … by powering our prime operations exclusively on fossil fuels and atomic reactor generated energy.  We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are “recharging our battery,” which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth’s spherical crust…The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at ever more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun radiation’s and Moon pull gravity’s tidal, wind, and rainfall generated pulsating and therefore harnessable energies.”

Silver lining of hurricane Sandy is awareness of climate change

In life after Sandy, it seems everyone from Michael Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo to Chris Hayes and NJ Governor Christie are talking about climate change, and wondering if there might actually be some meaningful solutions.  It’s an exciting time for those of us who have been waiting for decades for the world to change.

The late Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) started waiting in the middle of the last century. He urgently called for a “design science revolution” that would help free the planet from the grip of fossil fuels, and would provide sufficient “livingry, rather than weaponry” for all human beings on earth.

Bucky (the name he preferred) said that nature’s rules must be adhered to by humankind,  if we were to survive and thrive as a species. He wrote that because of environmental issues, humanity was approaching its “critical test” as a species, in which it would be determined “whether or not man was a mistake of nature, or its greatest accomplishment.”

This subject is covered extensively in both “Critical Path” and “Uptopia or Oblivion”: From the introduction by Jaime Snyder, Fuller’s grandson: “A comprehensive global crisis is now clearly dawning in humanity’s collective awareness, interweaving dramatic climate change and massive environmental destruction as we hover closer to “points of no return” — not to mention the ongoing hazard of nuclear weaponry, and persistent large-scale extreme poverty. It has become harder and harder to avoid the recognition that we are in a full-scale planetary emergency. . . it can be very difficult to move out of denial about our predicament, without the cognition that there is a future scenario where we can turn this emergency into an emergence of sustainability for all life on earth.”

And thus Buckminster Fuller called for an anticipatory Design Science Revolution. “Fuller held that modern science was too encumbered by rigid ideas to solve the world’s great problems, and that the governing principles of nature — which even the layman could intuit and harness — would yield the essential creative solutions.” This is from Fuller’s (self-proclaimed) seminal posthumously published work entitled “Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity” with Adjuvant Kiyoshi Kuromiya. This contains Bucky’s geometry lessons for understanding the functioning of the universe, which he said would lead to the knowledge necessary to manifest results that would allow all humanity to thrive. Fuller said that by simply shifting focus “from weaponry to livingry” all of humanity could thrive. Fuller first called for this revolution in 1965. It was to be a ten-year turn about. We are nearly fifty years late.

In the recent SFMOMA Show “Utopian Impulse” Fuller states that he believes in humanity’s chances of accomplishing this necessary revolution, and he explains that a Utopian type of impulse is a necessary component of human evolution; that “humanity must embrace the best of itself, living lives of conscious evolution.”

Bucky wrote at length about energy, and “the need to stop burning up the planet in order to energize it”. He worried that fossil fuels could rob humanity of its future by poisoning the environment, but that deeply entrenched economic powers would make the transference to alternative sources of energy difficult. In Critical Path, Fuller explains the absurdity of having the same interests that are heavily vested in opposing such developments also in charge of making them happen.

Buckminster Fuller’s Design Science Revolution was about gaining the maximum value from the minimum resources. He coined the term “synergy” to explain how design science could create rich returns, such as how “energy income” could be harvested from the environment.

From Cosmography: “The Dark Ages still reign over all humanity, and the depth and persistence of this domination are only now becoming clear. This prison has no steel bards, chains, or locks. Instead, it is locked by misorientation and built of misinformation. We are powerfully imprisoned … by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.”

Hurricane Sandy, while being a truly devastating event for all those involved, may also be a important catalyst to break us out of our prison of denial. We can only hope.