As I have shared with so many people, Bucky Fuller was as great a genius as Einstein (who passed down the torch of responsibility to him) or any other of the more popular thinkers and doers of past or present. Like Einstein and others, he was also more spiritual than mental. The only difference between Bucky and better-known people is that Bucky’s legacy has not yet been brought into the light of popular culture. After waiting all these years, it’s clear to me that I am the person destined to take on that task.

One of the key elements of Bucky’s philosophy for making a difference was that a person needs to find something that he or she feels needs to be handled and was not being attended to and to take care of that thing be it world hunger or a raising a child. So here I am with access to an amazing treasure trove of Bucky Fuller wisdom filled with experience and information that needs to be available to more people. I shared much of it in my book, but that was limited to 500 pages by the publisher. It was also limited in scope by what they felt was marketable.

Now, along comes the Internet, a technological tool Bucky Fuller predicted and would have been thrilled to use. He had one of the first personal computers, and he would have been all over the Internet because it reflects his desire to provide humans with opportunities to be autonomous. That’s why he invented the Dymaxion House and the Dymaxion Vehicle, so that people could have an inexpensive home that did not have to be hooked up to any power or water or waste disposable grid and could be hooked up to a helicopter and transported to a different location at any time. If you moved your Dymaxion House to the middle of the wilderness, you had to have transportation to and from it. Thus, the need for a vehicle that could travel in the air, on the water or on the ground. It also had to be able to land and take off like a helicopter, which the Dymaxion Vehicle was designed to do (once someone invented the jet engine that Bucky predicted would happen).

So, now I have a way to share much of what I have learned from Bucky since 1981. A great deal of that learning comes from my experience employing the strategies and principles he found to be most effective in living a life that makes the most difference with the least effort. This is the principle of trimtab that he discovered in Nature and brought into public awareness. In fact, that’s what he chose to have engraved on his tombstone – “Call Me Trimtab.” I know that this site will be a trimtab for making a difference in the lives of many people as each discovers whatever is important to them in the life, work and wisdom of Bucky Fuller.

This will not, however, be a biography of Fuller. If you are interested in the details of his amazing life, please consider reading my book Buckminster Fuller’s Universe. It was begun following Bucky’s passing when I was still producing workshops and seminars about him and his wisdom. People were continually asking what they should read, and, knowing what I knew about his writing (it was meant to be studied not read), I was hesitant to suggest anything. Thus, I began transcribing some of his thinking-out-loud talks and editing them into understandable articles. Those articles eventually grew into hundreds of pages, which, after dozens of rewrites became the book.

Today, we have reached a place in human history that Bucky predicted back in the 1930’s – humankind’s final examination to determine weather we are a valuable to Universe invention. If not, we will destroy ourselves. If we are, we will survive and thrive.

Right now things don’t look too good for our children. We’re trashing our environment and running out of fossil fuel. We’re living by human accounting rather than the cosmic accounting (another concept Bucky created and championed during his life) that says that we need to reorganize EVERYTHING so that it is sustainable. That means when we create another product, we have to create a plan for disassembling that product when it is no longer useful and include that plan into the manufacturing process. We also need to include the cost of the disassembly process into the cost of the product. By doing that, resources will naturally be recycled, and we can stop stripping our fragile Mother Earth of her valuable elements.

Bucky also pointed out that if we could harness less than one percent of the solar energy that enters our environment every day, we would have enough power to take care of everyone at a higher standard of living than anyone today experiences. Nature has created this marvelous sustainable system for us, but those in power are too caught in shortsighted greed to support such technology. That is another reason Bucky’s wisdom is not more available. If it is examined closely, you will find he was truly a rebel, even though he almost always appeared in public in a three-piece suite, white shirt and black tie.

His rebellious nature led him to make outlandish statements like we now live at a time when every person on Earth is a billionaire and has the potential to live at a higher standard of living than anyone has ever known. This is still true. We just need to look back a couple decades in our own lifetimes or look back as Bucky Fuller did to his early years.

If we look back thirty years, the richest person did not have many of the things we consider mundane such as cell phones or Internet connections. No matter how wealthy you were, you could not have a digital camera or a wireless remote for anything. Now, most people in our country have remote controls for many devices and teenagers are running around with cell phones (or wireless earpieces) jammed against their heads.

When Bucky Fuller was in elementary school shortly after the turn of the century, he remembered how they pasted a few extra pages in the back of his science book about this strange new phenomenon called electricity. At that time, the richest person in the world could not refrigerate food or speak to another person unless it was face to face. News traveled about as fast as a person could travel, and the majority of people never ventured farther from their place of birth than they could walk or get to on a horse. He witnessed all that change radically during his lifetime.

Still, even with all our technological progress, we stand on the brink of humankind’s final examination. The question being asked is quite simple. Are human beings a worthwhile to Universe invention? If we are not, Universe (Nature, God or whatever term you care to use) will allow us to keep moving down this path of self-destruction that most of us are currently following. Being aware of it, however, allows us the opportunity to turn things around.

And that’s where the concept of synergy comes into play. I purposely combined it with Bucky’s name in the domain name of this site because it was Bucky who moved it from the scientific world into popular culture. He used to talk about giving lectures to audiences of college faculties prior to about 1960 and asking how many people had heard the term synergy. Invariably, less than one percent would raise their hands, and those people were usually chemistry professors because the term came from chemistry.

Bucky Fuller, however, realized that it applied to much more than chemistry, and he began to talk about it in all his lectures and write about it in articles and books. Thus, he popularized synergy to a point where everyone knows the term, but few people understand what it really means. Synergy is behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the separately observed behaviors of any of the system’s separate parts or any subassembly of the system’s parts.

In more common language, synergy is not being able to predict the outcome of the whole from observing the behavior of its individual parts. For example, if you knew nothing about combining fire and gunpowder, you would never predict the behavior outcome when the two came together. You might experiment with both elements and never realize that their combination would produce an explosion. To the person who does not know about such things, this is synergy. To most of us it is simply knowledge. Thus, the broader your perspective, the less synergy you find. The synergy of synergies is something people have labeled God, Source, Great Spirit, etc.

So, the perspective of synergy is critical to knowing Bucky and his work. The same is true for several other concepts such as integrity, imagination, imagination, intention, inclusion, initiative and illumination. All these are included in this site, as my explanation and interpretation of some of his vital teachings.

I hope that you enjoy reading, thinking about and sharing these insights and questions as much as I enjoy putting them out in the world. I know that Bucky is watching and enjoying this next phase of the seeds he planted during his amazing lifetime continuing to sprout, bloom and make a huge difference in the lives of so many Spaceship Earth crewmembers.