A Work in progress. The best of times and the worst of times? Is the glass still half full? and of course, The International Situation is Still Desperate As Usual

Forty years ago I left my home country of England on what I romantically envisioned as a voyage of adventure and discovery of indefinite duration. I was 21 and had come of age in the 1960s, when all pre-existing assumptions about life, the universe and everything were up for challenge.
What I took with me had to fit on a Triumph Bonneville 500cc motorcycle. Along with a tent, sleeping bag and a change of clothes, I carried a copy of the Whole earth Catalog, some poetry by William Blake and Alan Ginsberg and a copy of Buckminster Fuller's book; An Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Four continents, four motorcycles, five cars, six trucks, and four sailboats, (three of which served as my homes for a total of thirteen years in California & Hawaii), and as many decades later I find myself perched on the western seaboard of North America by the shores of a lake in the middle of an island, raising another family and remembering that my original idea was to live creatively and in such a way as to make a difference in some small positive way that might advance the project of human civilization. A project that seems to be ever more endangered. To be somehow more aligned with the solution than with the aggravation of the situation.

The cluster of sites of which this one is the mothership represents my intention to share what I think I have learned and organize it in a way that it can contribute to the needs of the times in the spirit of that catalog and Buckminster Fuller's insight into the possibilities for a potentially positive future for humanity from the point of view of the perspective he presented in the World Game Papers and Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, provoking some participation and action in that direction, in shorter sentences, I promise, than this one, which is inspired by but still no match for some of the epic length sentences for which Fuller was renowned.

Here is a thumbnail portrait from the Buckminster Fuller Institute, an organization that is carrying on his work:

"Buckminster Fuller's prolific life of exploration, discovery, invention and teaching was driven by his intention "to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or disadvantage of anyone."

Fuller coupled this intention with a pioneering approach aimed at solving complex problems. This approach, which he called "comprehensive anticipatory design science" (CADS), combined an emphasis on individual initiative and integrity with whole systems thinking, scientific rigor and faithful reliance on nature's underlying principles. The designs he is best known for (the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion house, car, and map, and the global electric grid) were part of a visionary strategy to redesign the systems of human activity within the inter-related systems of planet earth.

After decades of tracking world resources, innovations in science and technology, and human needs, Fuller asserted that options exist to successfully surmount the crises of unprecedented scope and complexity facing all humanity- he issued an urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all."

The operating manual for planet Earth is now in the public domain and can be freely downloaded from this site:

It is a short book and still a good read. I'm not sure I can fully buy in to his great Pirates theory of world domination and exploitation but I believe that the main thrust of his view is as valid today as it was when the book was written in the 1960s, and more so as world events have tended to unfold as he envisioned, although maybe not as rapidly.

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