Big Gav
Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller was an American architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor and visionary who devoted his life to answering the question “Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?”
Critical Path was the last of Buckminster Fuller’s books, published shortly before his death in 1983 and summing up his lifetime of work. …
Critical Path covers a wide range of topics, ranging from an unorthodox history of human development since the dawn of recorded history to his views on the purpose of humanity, a review of how Wall Street lawyers undid the New Deal, a history of his own personal development and ‘self disciplines”, discussions of some of his key ideas like the “geoscope” and the “world game”, a chronology of scientific discoveries and artifacts and finally his recipe (critical path) for solving our key problems. Fuller explains in the following excerpt from Critical Path:
First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.
Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also irrevocably intent upon making omni-integrated humanity omnisuccessful, able to live sustainingly at an unprecedentedly higher standard of living for all Earthians than has ever been experienced by any; able to live entirely within its cosmic-energy income instead of spending its cosmic energy savings account (i.e., the fossil fuels) or spending its cosmic-capital plant and equipment account (i.e., atomic energy)-the atoms with which our Spaceship Earth and its biosphere are structured and equipped-a spending folly no less illogical than burning your house-and-home to keep the family warm on an unprecedentedly cold midwinter night.
Humanity’s cosmic-energy income account consists entirely of our gravity-and star (99 percent Sun)-distributed cosmic dividends of water power, tidal power, wave power, wind power, vegetation-produced alcohols, methane gas, vulcanism, and so on. Humanity’s present rate of total energy consumption amounts to only one four-millionth of one percent of the rate of its energy income.
Tax-hungry government and profit-hungry business, for the moment, find it insurmountably difficult to arrange to put meters between humanity and its cosmic energy income, and thus they do nothing realistic to help humanity enjoy its fabulous energy-income wealth.
Bucky believed in a transformation of our economic and political systems, via what he called a “design science revolution”, which will result in the “conversion of all humanity into an integrated, omniharmonious, economically successful, one-world family”, rather than the confrontational political action favoured by other would be transformers of society of his era.