Sustainability lesson from a security guard

So I was trying to get into a downtown Microsoft building last weekend, because my password needed to be reset in order for me to fully take advantage of our "work anywhere" structure. It was after 6pm and I was hovering outside the main door with the fixation of a four year old in need of a bathroom.

A security guard noticed my suspicious behavior and sidled up to me, starting a conversation that was intended to split my focus on the door. He asked me what I was there for and then escorted me to the door when I approached a fellow employee who let me in. With a certain sense of validation and accomplishment, I walked in and thanked them both, only to find out that I needed a card for the elevator.

The doors opened and the security guard greeted me, still talking about his subject: Bucky Fuller. "Madam, if you have not looked into Bucky Fuller, you must have an introduction..." I have to admit, it was all a little creepy, but you do learn things from the strangest sources...

I finally looked the reference up-kind of interesting and relevant to my last post.

The grandson of a Unitarian minister (Arthur Buckminster Fuller),^[13] R. Buckminster Fuller was also Unitarian.^[14] Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist. He was very aware of the finite resources the planet has to offer, and promoted a principle that he termed "ephemeralization"—which in essence, according to futurist and Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, Fuller coined to mean "doing more with less."^[15] Resources and waste material from cruder products could be recycled into making higher value products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. Fuller also introduced synergetics, a metaphoric language for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, long before the term synergy became popular.

Fuller was one of the first to propagate a systemic worldview and explored principles of energy and material efficiency in the fields of architecture, engineering and design.^[16][17] He cited Francois de Chardenedes' view that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost out of our current energy "budget", essentially the incoming solar flux, had cost nature "over a million dollars" per U.S. gallon (US$300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their earnings.^[18]

Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet optimistic about humanity's future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the "technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life", his analysis of the condition of "Spaceship Earth" led him to conclude that at a certain time in the 1970s, humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed. Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness", he declared, "is unnecessary and...unrationalizable...War is obsolete..."^[19]

Fuller also claimed that the natural analytic geometry of the universe was based on arrays of tetrahedra. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. Some confirming results were that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral.^{[citation needed]}

His technologically oriented point of view can also be taken as a metaphor for what it is to be human generally. In his 1970 book I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: "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."