Spaceship Earth Day

A Book Club Guide

“Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth,” by R. Buckminster Fuller, was published in 1968 and could have been written tomorrow. We might be finally catching up with this man’s extraordinary ideas.

He anticipated global simulation modelling a decade before the Club of Rome, ‘Limits to Growth,’ and all the rest that has followed.

He made an inventory of world resources, determined there was enough to go around, and refuted the Malthusian underpinnings of our fear and scarcity based world.

Most of all, he understood that this thing we call a Planet has the vital characteristics of what we call a Spaceship, because that’s what Earth is. A vehicle travelling through space taking in energy, using it, losing it.

We are all the crew. But we mostly don’t see it that way.

Without pre-planning I found myself leading the final session of our VR Book Club on Earth Day. Still gives me the goose bumps going back over it now in my mind. Buckminster Fuller was a central figure in my life, in the abstract, exactly when the first Earth Day was emerging. Earth Day embodied Bucky’s views, which was still a rare thing then.

A few years later, I met Bucky in our office. We were a small business using his ideas to plan systems. I have never stopped using…