Faint glimmerings of hope exist that corporations will begin to invest in projects which yield less profit in the short term yet reap long-term benefits for the health of the earth. I am waiting for Buckminster's vision of an interconnected grid of wind turbines, yet fear that nuclear power will revive itself. BP claims to be seeking alternative solutions, while Exxon remains focused on oil and huge profits. Maybe attitudes are more progressive in Europe. America, for all its talk of progress, remains stuck in the non-metric system (as one example of how resistant to change this country really is). Does anyone see a hopeful future for this poor old planet?
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BFI Community Content | Who is R. Buckminster Fuller?
This site © 2005-7 Buckminster Fuller Institute | Built and designed by Quilted | Powered by drupal.
BFI Community Content | Who is R. Buckminster Fuller?
This site © 2005-7 Buckminster Fuller Institute | Built and designed by Quilted | Powered by drupal.
"Maybe attitudes are more progressive in Europe."
Hey, don't forget about Canada!
Canada can lead the way for freer trade
by Neil Reynolds, May 26, 2006
Excerpt:
Mr. Fuller thus came to regard governments not as engines of economic growth but as brakes to it. Governments couldn't induce economic growth; they could only inhibit it. Governments couldn't foster synergy; they could only restrain it.
Without these barriers, wealth would increase at a rate much faster than economists generally assume. Governments needed, therefore, voluntarily to forgo traditional uses of sovereignty, to give away in order to get, to hold back in order to move ahead. Since he held that all governments should abandon much of their authority to restrict, he scarcely bothered to distinguish between capitalist and communist states. Widely celebrated as an innovative mechanic, he was dismissed as an economic philosopher. He was not, after all, an economist. Yet, looking back, he was remarkably prophetic in his assertion of warp-speed economic development.
Here and there, phenomenal economic progress has taken place in the 40 years that peoples and governments have started to integrate economies. Growth rates have accelerated. Inflationary pressures have abated. Millions more people have jobs. Millions more people have better health care, better educations. Millions more people have experienced a relative prosperity, a standard of living higher than they had ever known. Millions more people aspire to it. Spaceship Earth is flying higher, further, faster than it has ever flown before. Millions more people are on board. Millions more people are flying first class. And Canada's in the cockpit.
rsjacobson,
.
Yes, I see a hopeful future, but it will require the full and proper use of Buckys ideas. Please send me an email and we can discuss strategic planning.
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Sincerely,
Andrew Owens
The metric standard base is easily as arbitrary as that derived from human scale and quality. The difference of 10 or 12 evaporates with ensuing calculation. There is some orqanic precedent for twelveness despite my typing fingers. There is also mergence within 3, 4, 5 edge and angle relations. I'm not sure of an interconnected wind turbine grid as much as RBF's idea for an interconnected electrical grid (documentation available from known reference that depict land connections in accordance with one land mass version of the Dymaxion Map). Cross oceans connections present several other possibilities for unified world electrical grids.
Foerd Ames, OWECO Ocean Wave Energy Company