May 26, 2020

How To Be on Earth

TEXT CASEY PARSONS

VISUAL ADAM HUTSELL


Has technology replaced divinity? Does Western Civilization’s absence of organized religion omit connection to the mysticism of nature? Do the technological advancements that increasingly mediate our perceptions of natural phenomena create new possibilities for a collective consciousness?

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) predicted that the computer would be a super-specialist to which scientists and politicians would defer authority, and by which Earth’s natural resources could be protected. His work attempted to reconcile the contradictions of the world using science rather than a dependence on a divine authority. Nearly half a century later, his paradigm for using technological innovations to conserve natural resources seems not only to be a rational hypothesis, but the only viable solution.

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHT TO ELIMINATE YOURSELF

Fuller lived through the influenza pandemic of 1918 known as the Spanish Flu, which infected about a quarter of the world’s population between 1918 and 1920. During this time, he served in the US Navy, where he learned to understand the powers of nature and witnessed the increasing mechanical and technical advancements of humankind.

In the Navy, Fuller demonstrated a strong aptitude for engineering—he invented a winch for rescue boats that could remove downed airplanes from the water in time to save pilots’ lives. After graduating from the US Naval Academy in 1919, Fuller married and had his first daughter. He then began working with his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, helping develop a new method to produce reinforced concrete buildings. In 1926, Hewlett and Fuller patented their invention, which would be the first of Fuller’s subsequent twenty-five patents.

The construction company failed in 1927, and Fuller was left unemployed. Soon after, he lost his daughter to polio and spinal meningitis, and became severely depressed. Struggling to find a sense of purpose and unable to provide for his wife, Fuller could not reconcile the void he felt between himself and the rest of the world. Agnostic and disconnected from any spiritual community, he made a plan to end his life. The accuracy of what came next is up for debate, but, years later, Fuller wrote about an epiphany he experienced. A voice came to him on the day he’d planned to commit suicide and said:

From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You don’t have the right to eliminate the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experience to the highest advantage of others.

YOU DO NOT BELONG TO YOU

This awakening disrupted Fuller’s engagement with his surroundings, imparting a sense of purpose that stretched beyond himself. The innate connection between all aspects of sentient existence on Earth would motivate the rest of his life’s work, particularly his desire to revolutionize construction through technology. Fuller wrote in the age of modernism and amidst the hyperrealism of the twentieth century, an era that took pride in dispelling religious cultural institutions as touchstones of daily life. His work was undeniably scientific, however, the motivation behind his work went further than mathematics, biology, and physics; his designs were based on creating regenerative and sustainable models, spatializing theories of interdependence between energy cycles. Fuller’s writing and theoretical frameworks live in the cross-section of systems-based design and something less tangible: he appealed to a metaphysical sense of connection between all living beings on Earth. In his writing, human desire for connection and support is inscribed in our relationship and dependence on nature.

Fuller’s most famous invention was the geodesic dome, a lightweight, cost-effective, easily assembled structure that was based on “synergetic” geometry, a term he coined to describe the methods and models of nature’s interrelated systems. Structural beams dispersed weight equally, using gravity to solidify the framework with significantly fewer materials than any other type of construction of the same volume. After Fuller obtained a patent in 1954, the US military became one of his biggest clients, using the innovative domes to cover radar stations. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, there are now more than three hundred thousand geodesic domes around the world.

Dymaxion houses, another of Fuller’s trademark inventions, responded to a pressing need of the era: wartime rationing of goods. Dymaxion was Fuller’s term to describe designs that maximized gained output from minimal energy input, including houses, cars, and maps. Dymaxion houses were delivered as factory-made kits to be assembled on site. The grain-silo-inspired structure, complete with a greywater system, was minimally polluting and fit for even the most extreme climates.

YOU ARE FULFILLING YOUR ROLE

Outside of built structures, Fuller is best known for the theories and concepts in his book Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth: A Bold Blueprint For Survival That Diagnoses the Causes of the Environment (1969). This was the first comprehensive written account of Earth’s finite natural resources, outlining a framework for understanding and protecting the systems of interconnected energy cycles of our home planet, which he called “Spaceship Earth.”

The energetic feedback loops that generate biological systems solidified Fuller’s thesis that choices made now have ramifications years down the line. Fuller was correct about the parabolic increase in technological development that boomed throughout the twentieth and into the twenty- first centuries. He believed that these advancements would make way for design and buildings motivated by “ephemeralization,” i.e., technological advancements that mimicked the fleetingness and structural impermanence of nature. In short, Fuller was proposing that designers get out of the way of their own innovations. Technology could decrease the amount of materials used and the complications of construction so that there was less disruption to the environment. Ephemeralization motivated Fuller’s approach to design: whether the geodesic dome or dymaxion map, his structures contradicted the goal of permanence at the heart of architecture as a practice.

YOU DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT TO ELIMINATE THE TRUTH

Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth cleared the way for the “Hippie Holism” movement of the twentieth century. The Whole Earth Catalog publication, spearheaded by radical scientist Stewart Brand and in print from 1968 to 1972, was part of a movement to reshape the extent to which humans could impact their own fate through self-realization, science, and engineering. The catalog reviewed new tools and products and showcased essays and articles about self- sufficiency and sustainability. Hippie Holism refers to the ideas of “connectedness” that came out of the Bay Area’s bohemian interests in Eastern religion, myth, and mysticism in the 1960s. “Hippies” would be able to intuit a universe of possibility, shifting their understanding of nature, culture, and technology by recognizing each as related parts of a whole. Hippie Holism embraced cybernetics — which, from the 1940s onward, theorized that all systems, both natural and technological, were self-correcting through feedback processes. This movement included humanists and scientists alike, unifying around the ideal that the world has conceptually become a single system.

YOU THINK THE TRUTH

Fuller died in 1983. The later decades of his life were committed to teaching and lecturing at various universities, including Harvard and MIT. For his contributions to academia, he was named World Fellow in Residence at a consortium of universities in Philadelphia in 1972, receiving forty- seven honorary doctorate degrees. He is remembered as a geometrician, educator, and architect-designer, as well as the author of nearly thirty books. He was a systems theorist ahead of his time who aptly predicted the need for global coordination of natural resources.

Under our current pretense of climate-enforced disruption with COVID-19, Fuller’s approach to design and infrastructure has never been more relevant. Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth provokes a sense of awe at the connectivity between the natural energy cycles that support all life on our home planet. Notably, Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth warns that, without sustainable and innovative architectural responses to conserving resources combined with positive technological change, Earth’s carrying capacity will be far exceeded. Fuller’s thesis is proved not only by the COVID-19 pandemic but by the effects mass closures have on the environment. The variegated responses to the pandemic demonstrate our capacity for coordinated global reactions.

YOU BELONG TO THE UNIVERSE

The COVID-19 era and global climate crises are nothing short of existential problems that scientific frameworks will need help addressing. Understood as a metaphor for global climate catastrophes, COVID-19 displays the weakness of globalization without self-sustaining political, public health, agricultural, or urban infrastructures. Without the coordination that Buckminster Fuller proposed, we face environmental catastrophe. The virus progressed on an extremely quick timeline; by contrast, scientific communities have been warning for decades of impending and increasingly predictable climate disasters. When COVID-19 is past, perhaps the lesson we will be left with is how a pandemic demonstrates the need to create proactive solutions so that there is immediately actionable protocol for public health, climate, and other global catastrophes. We now realize that if we wait until we can see the impact, it is too late.

Today, Operation Manual for Spaceship Earth holds a foreboding predictive power, making one pause and consider what would be different had we followed the resourceful and regenerative guidelines Fuller proposed. The tone is optimistic — Fuller’s work is punctuated by a rational sense of enthusiasm for human ingenuity. As we face the immediate crisis of COVID-19, we are challenged to reform our global health network, local health systems, urban infrastructures, and economic systems. The new models must be self-sufficient, internationally coordinated, and locally responsive. Fuller wrote about this connected universal field before there was consensus about climate change; he was correct when he warned that nature would override human practices when the scale tipped too far. Culturally, and on the global scale Fuller proposed, we have an opportunity to reconsider what we deem essential — and determine the sacrifices we must make for a safe and environmentally sustainable future.