Buckminster Fuller: a man whose time has come

Buckminster Fuller –a thinker whose time has come

Last night I chatted with my friend Ray Foulk – he who stole Dylan from Woodstock. His hero is the American thinker Richard Buckminster Fuller 1889-1983. This inspirational man was telling us in the thirties that we should abandon fossil fuels and that the earth’s resources are finite that we live on spaceship earth!

Warning! He wore no hair shirt: he believed we could use energy but we had to do it efficiently and sustainably and that was possible and  he suggested how. There were plenty of placards on the Extinction Rebellion marches saying

‘System Change NOT Climate Change. ‘ Bucky was saying that in the thirties-if only leaders had listened to him.

Ray worked with Buckminster Fuller and in the seventies & wrote to all British Cabinet ministers and MPs asking them to read about his ideas if we want to sustain life on earth. Two MPs read them and responded: one was the then education secretary Margaret Thatcher and the other the labour MP Tony Benn!

Here are a few quotations from Bucky.

‘I am a passenger on the spaceship Earth.”

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty…….. but
when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is
wrong.”

“Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.”
“If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do… HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?”

I compered the launch of Ray’s first  book Stealing Dylan from Woodstock -his memoir of the first Isle of Wight Festival which he founded . The author  Robert Lipscombe told me that means that Ray freed us (in the UK) from an authoritarian miltaristic yoke.  I have the honour to compere the launch of Ray’s first novel in Modern Art Oxford on October 17 .  ‘Picasso’s Revenge’ is based on real events. (The sketch is by my friend the Manchurian artist Weimin He)