Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth

Buckminster Fuller to Children of Earth

R. Buckminster Fuller, Cam Smith (Photographer), Tom Solari (Editor)

Doubleday & Company | GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

ISBN: 978-0385029797

ISBN-10: 0385029799

Updated: 2024-12-18 19:362024-12-18

A portion of the proceeds of this book has been donated to Narconon, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing crime and drug abuse, for their youth program.

ISBN: 0-385-02979-9

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 72-86571

Photographs ©1972 by Cam Smith

Text Copyright ©1972 by R. Buckminster Fuller.

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

ENCODED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents

Appendix

Appendix

List of Figures

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Tables

Index

Index

Contents

Appendix

List of Figures

List of Tables

Index

Appendix

List of Figures

List of Tables

Index

Edited by Tom Solari

Sections on pattern integrity and geometry from the film ‘‘Buckminster Fuller on Spaceship Earth’’ used by permission of Robert Snyder

Quotes copyrighted and printed by permission of R. Buckminster Fuller

Cover Design by John Divers

Lithography by Triangle Lithograph • Los Angeles

ENVIRONMENT

to each must be

EVERYTHING

That isn't me

UNIVERSE

in turn must be

ALL THAT ISN'T me

AND me

Every time man makes a new experiment he always

learns more. He cannot learn less.

Change: Reformat for poetry

I decided that man as

designed was designed to be an extraordinary success;

his characteristics were just magnificent…

…and what would be necessary was really

to find out what were the great comprehensive patterns

operating in Universe.

A child is comprehensive. He wants to understand the

whole thing…Universe.

Children will draw pictures with

everything in them …houses and trees and people and

animals …and the sun AND the moon. Grown-up says,

‘‘That's a nice picture, Honey, but you put

the moon and the sun in the sky at the same time

and that isn't right.’’ But the child is right!

The sun and moon are in the sky at the same time.

A child plays with balls that are round like

the earth and touches whole things. He touches his

mother a lot when he is young…and she

is big and sort of round.

A child thinks in terms of wholes.

Adults are often busy. They don't answer

the child's questions. And then the child goes to

school and the teacher says,

‘‘First you're going to learn A, B, C.’’

The child still wants to understand UNIVERSE and

has big questions, and the teacher says,

‘‘Never mind that…you learn the parts first…A, B, C…‘‘

Then the child goes to college

and never does get back to the whole.

If you want to do something good for

a child…give him an environment where he can

touch things as much as he wants.

Sometimes we should send people fishing.

I'm not my hair that grows and gets cut off.

I'm not my fingernails. I'm not the food I eat that

turns into cells in my body…

Man is a pattern integrity.

He is like the knot tied in a rope.

He is not the rope.

I'm going to splice a piece of manilia rope to

a piece of cotton rope and then splice the

other end of the cotton rope to a piece of nylon rope.

I'm going to make the very simplest

knot that I know. The rope has not done this,

I have done it to the rope.

I can slide this knot along …I slide it along the

rope and now it leaves the manilia

and now it's on the cotton. I keep sliding it

along and now it's on the nylon.

So …and suddenly it's off the end.

We say the knot was a pattern integrity, it wasn't

manilla, it wasn't cotton, it wasn't nylon.

Cotton and nylon and manilla;

any one of them are good to let us know

about its shape, what its pattern was,

but it was not that; it had an integrity in its own.

Man sometimes thinks like a tree…

but he was built to move.

All anywhere about man,

within and without,

is eternally, ceaselessly motion,

whether he senses it or not.

Nature is so beautiful…How she is

working is so beautiful.

We need to find out what nature is doing so we

can be in harmony with her.

The kinds of ways in which man is measuring

tend to be much more complicated

than what nature is doing. Man starts off teaching

his children about measuring with a plane

and a line and a pair of lines parallel to each

other, and then 90 degrees to that, another

pair of lines, making something called a square.

But I find that that's all very well

if you could really live in a plane; and nobody can

live in a plane. Nobody can squash their body

into a flat plane. That's not the way nature is.

She's not in a plane. She's omni-directional.

So when I really look at a square

I find it's very unstable.

It doesn't want to stay square at all.

We take a side out of the square and…

suddenly it's very stable.

It doesn't get all

flexible the way it had been with the square. So this

is what we call tri-angle, three angles.

And triangle, with its three angles,

is the only stable structure.

Nature is doing things in very logical clean-cut

ways. And we begin to study these even more

and I find that she's using beautiful geometry; this

always finally gets down to the simplest geometry

you can get down to. You can't have a

geometrical form of less than four faces: 1, 2, 3, 4.

This is the tetrahedron, four faces,

and then sometime after, it gets its corners knocked off

and it gets to be a beautiful tetrahedron.

So this rock was once a tetrahedron.

I begin to look at all these rocks,

and it doesn't look like anything. Then I begin to

pick them up, and I pick up any rock, and

I find it has a beautiful face here, and then

another beautiful face, another

beautiful face…These are not carelessly done.

You begin to study these rocks a little

more, and you find face, face, face, face.

Their corners have been very knocked off…but

all of these rocks were once tetrahedrons.

We find nature doing more with less.

Nature doesn't build things that fall down.

The most creative woodworking I know of is

a tree. It can grow its branches straight out…

and each limb can support tons of weight.

We should do things with wood that the wood

likes. There are certain things

it likes to be used for. When I use wood I make

sure it likes what I'm doing to it.

I'm not trying to imitate nature,

I'm trying to find the principles she's using.

Nature has no ‘‘weeks/' There is no

‘‘Monday,’’ ‘‘Tuesday,’’ ‘‘Friday’’ in nature.

Energies are not lost…the universe is not running down.

We say sunset…but there is no sunset…if you

back up and look at earth you see the earth turns.

People sometimes say, ‘‘I wonder how it

feels to be on a spaceship’’…and I say, ‘‘Well

look around you…you are on one.

How does it feel? You are on spaceship Earth.’’

We are just about

to step out from amongst the pieces of our

just-one-second-ago-broken eggshell.

PHILOSOPHY

R. Buckminster Fuller is the inventor of the geodesic dome…but he is so much more. Explorer of the ‘‘big comprehensive patterns operating in universe,’’ Buckminster Fuller knows that the world can be made to work for all of humanity. Youth, he says, see this and will settle for nothing less. He sees man's capabilities wonderfully reflected in the fresh minds of children…and speaks to the child who lives in all people.

Cam Smith grew up in the mountains, can sit on a rock for a long time, wants people to be happy, likes to work hard, knows how to let children learn, thinks up things to communicate to people, takes photographs, listens, has fun, wants the world to make it, knows responsibility and happiness start with the smallest thing in front of one, and is a free being.

She has taught school, had photography exhibitions, and has published a book of her own poems and photographs, Notes From the Mountain, and a book on teaching, What it is, What it Ain't.

ISBN: 0-385-02979-9

Table of Contents

Contents

Unnamed

Appendix

List of Figures

List of Tables

Index