In February 1971, LIFE Magazine journalist Barry Farrell interviewed American neo-futuristic architect, systems theorist, author, designer, philosopher, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller a man who had by that time held his utopian vision for the future for nearly fifty years. He was most highly regarded, however, for his inventions and designs including domes, 3D world map, rear-steered cars, mass-producible ‘dwelling machines,’ schemes for floating cities, sunken cities and metropolises that drift in the air. The word ‘dymaxion’ was coined by store advertisers and trademarked in Fuller's name. Based on the words ‘dynamic,’ ‘maximum,’ and ‘ion,’ it became a part of the name of many of Fuller's subsequent inventions. The word became synonymous with his design philosophy of doing more with less, a phrase he later coined to reflect his growing recognition of the accelerating global trend toward the development of more efficient technology.
His utopian view of the future certainly flew in the face of conventional wisdom. He insisted that unless mindless political contriving makes oblivion unavoidable, the next 10 or 15 years (1980 to 1995) would see mankind at large attain complete freedom from the struggle to survive. In his view, technology would eliminate scarcity, and nations and classes will disappear as the new era of awareness creates a race of World Men whose allegiance is universal. Personally, as a passenger on Spaceship Earth, he found the idea of ‘putting down roots’ so outrageous as to constitute a crime against evolution. In fact, he often stated in lectures and in his books that if people are still concerned with such matters by the year 2000, life on the spaceship will be doomed.
A the age of 33, Fuller predicted the present environmental crisis – more than 85 years ago and well before World War Two began – he foresaw the great technological leap that would follow it.
When asked if there was still time to rescue the earth from pollution and whether or not ecology played a part, and what could be done to end racism, he told the reporter he would answer in philosophical terms rather than get mired down in the ‘macro-micro irrelevancies’ of the mundane. His response was unequivocal:
“A lot of what you’re hearing today is absolute nonsense. The population bomb. There is no population bomb! Industrialization is the answer to the population problem. In colonial times, the average American family had 13 children, but now that we can count on the little ones growing up healthy, the average is about two. That’s evolution working – where industrialization occurs, the birth rate simply goes down. Now, of course you have the environmentalists telling you that you can’t industrialize any further because of pollution, which is more nonsense. Pollution is nothing more than resources we’re not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value. But if we got onto a planning basis, the government could trap pollutants in the stacks and spillages and get back more money than this would cost out of the stockpiled chemistries they’d be collecting.
“Margaret Mead* gets quite cross with me when I talk like this because she says people are doing some very important things because they’re so worried and excited and I’m going to make them relax and stop doing these things. But we’re dealing with something much bigger than we’re accustomed to understanding, we’re on a very large course, indeed. You speak of racism, for example, and I tell you that there’s no such thing as race. The point is that racism is the product of tribalism and ignorance and both are falling victim to communications and world-around literacy.
“These social adjustments we’re witnessing are very big. They are marvelous, the most marvelous part of the whole show. They don’t get done overnight, but they’re actually happening so fast I can’t believe it. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a fantastic amount of change, and I know we’re going through something very extraordinary in the history of the world. We’re going through some great flume, and if we only hold on and have patience and respect the integrity of the universe itself, we’ll make it beautifully together.”1
Nearly all of Fuller’s inventions and discoveries centred on his studies in experimental mathematics. While attempting to construct a system of coordinates for a world map based on his octahedron (the first whole-earth projection ever drawn to include no distortions of sizes or shapes and no breaks in the continental contours), he discovered the geometric relationships that gave him the geodesic dome. But the quest for nature’s own geometry had preoccupied him incessantly for nearly 50 years. Beginning with Einstein’s concept of energy as the nature of all matter, Fuller chose not to work with the abstractions of plane geometry, which have no objective existence, but instead with vectors, or lines of force, such as skid marks or a boat’s wake, which are the aftermath of actual events. The study of vectors led him to conclude that nature’s geometry must be based on triangles. He reasoned that the triangle represented ‘the minimum self-stabilizing energy event’ possible in the universe.
Fuller continued,
“Nature never works in ways you can’t model. So I said science is wrong in telling us that advanced study requires special codes and abstractions. I’m sure that full conceptuality is going to return to the scientific method, and that will expedite the closure of science and the humanities. The most important and useful work I’ve been able to do will be achieving this return to model ability.”
The earth, to the global thinker, is a ‘contracting phase’ of the universe, a low-pressure zone in the cosmos where energy is collected and stored. The sun’s radiation warms the oceans, and the oceans feed the earth. Processes that conserve energy aspects of ‘synergy’ (more with less) technologies will accomplish the defeat of scarcity. The highest expression of synergy is man’s intuition, his ability to see comprehensive patterns in random events, which has led him from near helplessness to the point where he can now take control of his own evolution. Technology gives man a continually expanding capacity to do more with less, bringing him to the threshold of a new philosophical era where the historical assumptions of scarcity and survival of only the fittest no longer apply.
But will we, in the 21st Century, use our intuition to take control of global warming and climate change? Too bad Dr. Fuller isn’t here in person to help us understand.
“I’m just telling you that it was a beautiful day today,” Fuller once said. “And nature intends for us to have quite a few more beautiful days in the next couple of million years and everybody can be right there with her if they want to be.”2
*Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 to November 15, 1978) was an American Cultural Anthropologist, author, and popularizer of life in the U.S. She was frequently featured as a speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
1 Farrell, B. “The View from the Year 2000.” LIFE 70, 7 (February 26, 1971): 47-58
2 Ibid.
