Bucky: Inspiring, Confusing, Design Pioneer

I think part of my attraction to Buckminster Fuller's thinking is his uncanny ability to defy accepted logics and invent his own. His method for forging his own path was a grand experiment of the self that reflected upon—and morphed forever—our thinking about human-planetary interactions. While the results were confusing, profound and prolific, even his most abstract work was always inspiring. Elizabeth Kolbert's recent profile in The New Yorker expresses the tension this created for Fuller as well as those whose lives he touched. The article features some interesting statements from Fuller about the capacity for behavioral change:

Fuller was also deeply pessimistic about people's capacity for change, which was why, he said, he had become an inventor in the first place. "I made up my mind . . . that I would never try to reform man -- that's much too difficult," he told an interviewer for this magazine in 1966. "What I would do was to try to modify the environment in such a way as to get man moving in preferred directions."

Yet, in many ways Fuller's pessimism is perhaps more an issue of scale than human capacity for change. He seems, in many ways, both a designer and anthropologist at heart:

If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.

Kolbert's article was written to accompany a retrospective of Fuller's work at the Whitney.

Energy Conservation as Sport

Photograph by Joachim Ladefoged.

Elizabeth Kolbert of the NYT provides a great portrait of a Danish community's shift from apathy to energy conservation. It all began with a contest and evolved in to a form of sport. But most importantly, it happened among people who didn't -and don't- necessarily see themselves as 'green.'

“The residents of Samsø that I spoke to were clearly proud of their accomplishment. All the same, they insisted on their ordinariness. They were, they noted, not wealthy, nor were they especially well educated or idealistic. They weren’t even terribly adventuresome.”

How it spread:

“One reason to live here can be social relations,” he said. “This renewable-energy project could be a new kind of social relation, and we used that.” Whenever there was a meeting to discuss a local issue—any local issue—Hermansen attended and made his pitch. He asked Samsingers to think about what it would be like to work together on something they could all be proud of. Occasionally, he brought free beer along to the discussions. Meanwhile, he began trying to enlist the support of the island’s opinion leaders. “This is where the hard work starts, convincing the first movers to be active,” he said. Eventually, much as Hermansen had hoped, the social dynamic that had stalled the project began to work in its favor. As more people got involved, that prompted others to do so. After a while, enough Samsingers were participating that participation became the norm.”

“If I’m reduced to being a customer, then if I like something I buy it, and if I don’t like it I don’t buy it,” Hermansen said. “But I don’t care about the production. We care about the production, because we own the wind turbines. Every time they turn around, it means money in the bank. And, being part of it, we also feel responsible.”

Ask Umbra on Breathing Car Exhaust while Biking

A great example of how doing the right thing for the planet doesn't always mean personal sacrifice. Umbra reviews the literature on exposure to car exhaust for different commute options and concludes that bikers, riders, and walkers aren't suffering disproportionately for their efforts.

A car shell contains little gaps into which pollutants flow, and as a result, car occupants sit in a stew of carbon monoxide, benzene, and particulate matter, among other unpleasant vehicle emissions. Bicyclists, bus passengers, and pedestrians are all exposed to these emissions as well, but in a different way. I wrote about this dilemma a few years ago, and just reviewed some of the old and new literature. It seems that cyclists almost always encounter fewer pollutants with each breath than car passengers -- that's a special way to say that the foul mix of toxics is denser in the car than in the cycling zone. Cyclists are breathing more heavily than those sedentary drivers, as you know, so at the very worst their total exposure becomes the same as car passengers. At least that's what I've managed to put together from the various studies. The bus and the sidewalk are, like the bicycle, on the edge of the toxic air zone; presumably riders and walkers are not breathing hard like a cyclist, and have lower total exposure.

Now that you're convinced, check out bikely, one of my favorite googlemap mashups, to share your route.