What Bucky Fuller Taught Me

As the current regime continues to destroy our federal government and yank away long-established protections for our air and water, I recall a lesson I learned from R. Buckminster Fuller a half-century ago: Don’t let fear of being considered unrealistic hold you back from demanding what’s right.

In the early 1970, I had spent several months learning about Fuller, the architect, engineer, designer, philosopher and futurist who is known most widely as the inventor of the geodesic dome, a hemispheric structure built on a framework of triangles (often of aluminum or steel) that could be seen in many of the communes founded during that decade.

He also originated the metaphor Spaceship Earth. Like the crew of a ship traveling through deep water, he explained, we must work together to maintain our planet as it moves through space, or perish. Instead of thinking that we must compete for scarce resources—a zero sum game—he tried to demonstrate that there is plenty for all if resources and technology are managed intelligently and shared. He believed that humanity would veer away from its destructive course if we understood our relationship to our planet. A shift of perception was required.

Traveling across the world almost nonstop, speaking to business and government leaders, other pioneering thinkers, and to children, Fuller promoted his insights and inventions. He was one of the brilliant visionaries I met while researching my book Wholly Round (1973), a report on the beginnings of the ecology movement.

After talking with some of his collaborators, aides, and students, I flew to Los Angeles to interview Bucky Fuller himself, at the home of his daughter. It was a Sunday afternoon. I found him at a dinette table, in kimono and moccasins, with a teapot beside him and the morning’s Los Angeles Times in front of him, scribbling something on a yellow pad.

When he stood up, I was surprised to see how short he was—shorter than my five feet five; very straight, a bit gnarled, a no-nonsense New Englander who seemed both stern and kindly. He looked at me sharply through his spectacles, made a few polite remarks about the view out the window—boats on the bay beyond terraced roofs and gardens—then escorted me to a chair and table arrangement and sat down facing the window. I set up my tape recorder.

During the two and a half hours that followed, he responded to many of my questions. He did not harangue, as I feared he might. He had a reputation for being long-winded. When he talked he looked toward the bay. The light reflected in his glasses. But when I spoke he looked at me. Here I quote from the interview:

“I find that unless people see things move they don’t pay much attention to them,” he said. “We have a very limited motion spectrum. You don’t even see the hands of the clock move…You don’t see the tree grow and you don’t see the child grow. “….We can expand our capacity to see with technology. “It’s possible to take a moving picture and accelerate the process [as has been done in Walt Disney nature films with flowers opening] or to decelerate” as has been done with atoms that are moving so fast that you don’t see them in motion at all … It’s possible to slow that whole thing down so that you can comprehend it.” It’s also essential to be able to see movement from different perspectives. “Being a sailor, mechanic, a scientist, I can visualize my boat in motion ….I can think of the different angles of keel. I can look at trends, I can look at figures. There’s a case of that this morning.”

Fuller stood up, walked to the dinette table, and returned with a clipping and the yellow tablet on which he had been scribbling.

“Read it,” he said, handing the newspaper story to me, “then I’ll show you what kind of things I get out of it.”

I read a story on increased quantities of various toxic chemicals in the air of Los Angeles. Bad news. But Fuller saw good news: sulphur was decreasing. Sulphur and large particles , mixing with moisture, blanketed the city, and kept automobile fumes and other pollutants from dispersing in the atmosphere and drifting over the mountains.

“I’ve been fighting—many of us have—to stop having sulphur going into the sky,” Fuller said. “The Edison electric generating stations all around the country are bad culprits. ….While talking with engineers and research men I found that the equipment exists and is highly perfected to take all of the sulphur out. The cost it would add to the production of electricity would be only thirty percent and you’d have no fumes in the sky.”

“Thirty percent?”

“Yes, practically nothing.”

“Isn’t that kind of high?”

Fuller had been looking out toward the bay. But at this he snapped around, clapped his hands together sharply, and glared at me.

“High for what, dah’lin’, high for what?” he shouted. There was fury in his face.

“The company would think it high,” I stumbled.

“High for death or high for life?”

“I understand you, Dr. Fuller, but….”

“The Edison men think it’s so high that the industrial companies that could generate their own electricity but buy it from them would start generating their own. So they don’t want to put the price up.”

What I had meant was that under current conditions a thirty percent price increase was not politically feasible. But later, when I reflected on that exchange, I decided that he was the realist, not I. Fuller assumed that people had a right to expect industry to stop poisoning them. That right would be recognized only when enough citizens stopped believing industry’s propaganda about what was feasible. The kind of timidity of expectation I had shown was an obstacle in the battle against air pollution. I was buying industry’s allegation, and that narrowed the political framework within which progress was possible.

This valuable lesson is especially important to remember today.

The air quality in Los Angeles has improved greatly because citizens pressed for government action and Washington responded. The pollution was sickening and even killing people, especially vulnerable children and old people. The Clean Air Act of 1970 and subsequent amendments established national air quality standards. At about the same time, Congress passed and President Richard Nixon signed legislation creating the Environmental Protection Agency to implement the Act’s various requirements.

Now, however, the man in the White House is seeking to abolish long-established environmental protections. He has declared that automobile emissions do not pollute the air and is promoting coal as “clean” fuel. Even as wind energy has become economically competitive, Trump is trying to bring back coal. Spaceship Earth is on a deadly course. We need Bucky Fuller’s perceptions more than ever.

What Bucky Fuller Taught Me

We the Very Old