Tag: end fossil fuel subsidies

On Buckminster Fuller’s last day on Spaceship Earth, July 1, 1983, he tidied his always cluttered desk and left the office to visit his dying wife at Pacific Palisades Hospital. There, while holding her hand, he had a massive heart attack and died. On his desk, next to a neatly stacked manuscript for a book called called Cosmography, and a fourteen page typewritten document entitled “World Livingry Service Industry”.

This was Bucky’s plan, which he had written about in several of his books, to transform “weaponry into livingry.”  It calls for each of us to demand that we convert our energies spent warring into those which would support life, instead of death. Bucky’s Livingry Services Industry would convert our military bases into life and health support facilities, all over the world, providing clean water, food, whatever is needed to help sustain life.

Here’s an overview and summary of this document, mostly in Bucky’s words:

“I was convinced in 1927 that humanity’s most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics. That was the year when a human first flew alone across an ocean in one day.  It was obviously the beginning of the swift integration of all humanity . . . It was obvious that this integration would require enormous amounts of energy and that fossil fuels were exhaustible. It was also obvious that a minority of selfish humans would organize themselves to exploit the many transitional dilemmas.”

To overcome this multi-pronged problem, Bucky called for the development of “human-circumstance-advantaging-technology” and for this technology to be distributed to the world. This would lead to a higher standard of living for all humanity. “It can be a standard of living more advanced, pleasing and inspiring than any ever experienced or dreamed by anyone is all history.”

Bucky called for “a complete family of inter-complementary life-supporting and enhancing artifacts to be designed and built using our best technologies – the same resources currently used in the development of weapons and war technologies.”

This, he said, “Would make it eminently feasible and practicable to provide a sustainably high standard of living for all humanity.”

How do we make this happen?  It won’t be easy, because we cannot rely on capitalism to do what’s right. “Great private enterprises are capital gambles whose “ships must come in” within a reasonable short time of their backers will go bankrupt,” Bucky wrote, in sentences often crossed out and rewritten.  “Enterprise is too narrowly focused and shortsighted – too narrowly focused on moneymaking to be concerned with its side effects…

“As a U.S. Navy officer in World War I, I saw there was nothing to stop me from thinking comprehensively about our total planet Earth… Nor was there anything to stop me from thinking realistically about how to operate this magnificent Spaceship Earth on a sustained basis for all passengers on board.”

“Through foresight and design, it is possible to phase out all further use of fossil fuels and atomic energy, which comprise nature’s cosmic energy savings account.

 “An advanced standard of living could be entirely sustained by our daily income of Sun energy. In 1982 the total energy consumed daily by all humanity amounts to less that 1/500,000ths of 1 percent of our planet’s daily Sun energy income.”

The document lists several of Bucky’s inventions, or artifacts, as examples of ideas worthy of further exploration as livingry.

1.     The Dymaxion House

2.    Tensegrity

3.    The Dymaxion Bathroom

4.    Synergetics

5.     Dymaxion World Map

6.    World Game

7.     Trends and Transformations Charts

8.     The Dymaxion Omnitransport (travels on land, air and water)

9.    Geodesic Dome

10.  Octet Truss

11.  The Fog Gun

12.  Compact, odorless toilet equipment

13.  Floating breakwater (also harvests wave energy)

14.  Water wavepower machine

15.  Integrated world-around energy grid

16.  Windmill systems

17.  Floating Cities

“Having committed ourselves to solving humanity’s problems with artifacts designed to work within nature’s design science principals … we can get Spaceship Earth operating omnicooperatively on behalf of us all,” Bucky wrote.

To Bucky, it was conclusively possible, and not even that difficult to accomplish, if only we would actually try.

“All the evolutionary events requisite to the Livingry Industry have now taken place or are about to take place in the very near future,” Bucky said. “If the political systems do not eliminate humanity with their weapons, the half-century-gestating, World-around Livingry Service Industry will be born.”

Bucky wrote these ideas over thirty five years ago. He would no doubt be disappointed at where we are today, but Bucky had great faith in humanity.  He believed we were capable of miraculous accomplishments; that we would achieve an “emergence through emergency”.

So don’t give up.  Lean into a world that works for everyone. Share Buckyworld.