Bucky’s Environmentalist Equation

More With Less +

Weaponry To Livingry
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Global Success For Everyone

We are, in fact, living within an environment that has the potential to support all our need well beyond what most of us could possibly imagine. This may sound like pie-in-the-sky thinking, but Bucky used scientific methodology to prove it beyond a doubt. He analyzed data and discovered that each time resources are recycled we add a very valuable component to them – knowledge. And that knowledge allows us to keep doing “more with less.” And our continuing ‘more with lessing’ has led us to a place where there is enough to go around.

In fact, Bucky found and proved that there is plenty to go around. He discovered that this is so dominant a reality that there is enough for everyone on the tiny sphere he named Spaceship Earth to live at a higher standard of living than anyone currently experiences. And we can do this while taking care of our fragile environment and living fully sustainable lives.

This may sound to good to be true, but again Bucky proved it to be so. The primary obstacle we must address is that we have to shift the use of our resources from weaponry to what Bucky called livingry. Livingry is quite simply everything that supports life be it education, health care, healthy food or clean water as opposed to weaponry which is everything that supports death and destruction. Bucky was one of the first proponents to talk about that needed shift to a culture of peace and prosperity for everyone. He was constantly speaking and writing about “a world that works for everyone” because he knew it became possible in 1976.

What has been proven was that he was correct about food. Bucky predicted that when we reached 1976 we would be doing so much more with so much less resources that there would be enough food on our planet to feed everyone. Since that time, his prediction has been proven by others to be correct. The only thing that causes the massive starvation that still exists is human greed, politics and the hoarding caused by a fear-based scarcity mentality. Although this is also true for all other resources, it has been proven for food. There is no longer any reason (other than those mentioned above) for thousands of people to starve to death each day or tens of thousands more to go to bed hungry.

When Bucky proposed the shift from weaponry to livingry, he was not simply talking about global peace. We need to end fear-based competition and shift the use of our resources from destructive to life affirming goals. If we continue to believe that peace can be achieved through the creation of larger and larger unsustainable war machines, humankind is doomed. If, on the other hand, we recognize that when people have their “basic” needs met, they stop having larger families and fighting over what they perceive as limited resources, then we will thrive beyond what most of us can envision. Such a shift handles many of our most critical problems including global warming. As a true environmentalist, Bucky was able to visualize such success long before anyone even knew it would be a problem. He was an advocate of environmental sustainability before anyone even considered it to be an issue. He recognized that we would soon run out of fossil fuel (oil and natural gas) and that our planet and species had been endowed with all the energy we could ever want or need in the form of sunlight. In fact, fossil fuel is nothing more than solar energy that has been stored deep within the Earth for millions of years.

Turning again to rational science as well as his environmentalist bent, he discovered that if we use “cosmic accounting” to determine the actual cost of a gallon of gasoline (adding up all the costs of heat and pressure that results in the creation of this fossil fuel), a gallon actually costs well over $1,000,000. Following that logic, it is be far more affordable to pay people to stay home and not drive their cars to work if they are working at jobs that do not support life and produce livingry. He often spoke of fear-based, win/lose industries such as the insurance and the legal industry as places where humankind would be better served if people involved in those professions simply stayed home and did not waste valuable gasoline.

Perhaps this is an extreme example, but it illustrates the perspective of a truly imaginative, innovative environmentalist. If each of us is not adding value and contributing to the welfare of humankind with our “work,” we would be better off being paid to stay home and not waste valuable resources. Bucky was one of the first people to seriously consider how he was utilizing the resources of his time and energy. Accordingly, he was constantly on the go and creating the next innovative project to further the success of humankind. And, in a global environment in which there is more than enough to support all life, each of us needs to be much more conscious of where we are devoting our valuable resources be they time and energy or gasoline and healthy food.

This is a true environmentalist in action. As Bucky so eccentrically taught, there is no such thing as pollution. Pollution is simply resources not in their proper (most useful) place. Consider the use of sulfur. Until not that long ago, tons of sulfur was going up smokestacks and “polluting” the environment while other corporations were mining sulfur from the Earth for industry and production. It was the exact same element, but one form was labeled pollution while another was labeled a valuable resource.

Bucky advocated making EVERYTHING sustainable. He was constantly arguing to add into the cost of a product the expense of breaking that product down into its essential elements once it was no longer useful. Then, those elements would be reused in other products. It seems so simple and sensible, but we have yet to establish such a policy as we continue to pile waste high in landfills. Eventually, future humans (if our species survives) will be forced to “mine” those landfills for the same resource elements that we now label garbage.

Nature is the ultimate environmentalist, never wasting anything. She does not use too much or too little to manufacture anything. That’s why most elements of nature are triangulated (examine, snowflakes, trees, flowers, human bodies or any other natural structures). The triangle uses the least number of elements to create stability, and that is what we need to do in our construction.

It’s also what we need to do in all aspects of our culture if we are to survive and thrive. We want people to have enough, but we don’t want to have people hoarding in fear that someday there won’t be enough. There is enough right now if we become a sustainable society. All we need to do is shift from weaponry to livingry and then take care of everyone’s needs. Bucky Fuller the environmentalist is just that simple to understand.