Saving Spaceship Earth — with science

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller, 1970

The famous futurist and engineer R. Buckminster Fuller was married to Anne Hewlett — of the Five Towns Hewletts — in 1917. In the mid-1990s, I did a big story on Fuller’s connections to the Five Towns. He was married at Rock Hall, the Hewlett family’s homestead, a white mansion that is now a Town of Hempstead museum behind Lawrence Middle School.

Fuller’s story fascinates me. He was awarded U.S. patents for the geodesic dome, that giant silver orb that graces the skyline at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center. I was reminded about him two weeks ago while on vacation in St. Augustine, Fla. While there, I read “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History Is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World,” by Paul Hawken, co-founder of the Smith & Hawken gardening company, about how the burgeoning environmental and social justice movements are slowly, steadily uniting to save the planet.

I know. Reading a serious text while on vacation? What can I say? I’m a geek. But, for the record, with my family, I also got spooked at St. Augustine’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not, meandered around the city’s old-world downtown eating ice cream, climbed one of the East Coast’s tallest lighthouses, played miniature golf, spent considerable time making sandcastles, flying a kite and playing soccer on the beach, and ate out a lot.

So there.

Anyway . . . “Blessed Unrest” devotes a small section to Fuller. Before reading this amazing little text, published in 2007 by Penguin Books, I hadn’t realized that Fuller wrote “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” though I had long thought I should read it.