Stories tagged with "buckminster fuller"

Is It Time For A Four Day Working Week ?

Posted by Big Gav on March 2, 2009 - 8:55pm in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Demand/Consumption
Tags: buckminster fuller, four day week, idleness, laziness, sloth [list all tags]

The Sydney Morning Herald recently had an editorial calling for consideration of a 4 day working week as a response to economic contraction and alternative to making employees redundant.

The idea of a 4 day working week isn't an entirely abstract one for me, as my current employer has been significantly cutting back on staff levels over the past 6 months. The manager of my team took the approach of offering us all reduced work hours rather than having to let anyone go, which we've all accepted, so I'm now seeing what a 4 day week is like (and having just come back from a 4 day weekend hiking in the Snowy Mountains I can't say I have any complaints so far).

In this post I'll look at various proposals to reduce the amount of time we spend at work, as a way of addressing energy, environmental and other issues facing us.

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Buckminster Fuller's Critical Path

Posted by Big Gav on February 16, 2009 - 5:57am in The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: book review, buckminster fuller, critical path, geodesic dome, geoscope, world game [list all tags]

Critical Path was the last of Buckminster Fuller's books, published shortly before his death in 1983 and summing up his lifetime of work.

Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American architect, author, designer, futurist, inventor and visionary who devoted his life to answering the question "Does humanity have a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?". He is frequently referred to as a genius (albeit a slightly eccentric one).

During his lifelong experiment, Fuller wrote 29 books, coining terms such as "Spaceship Earth", "ephemeralization" and "synergetics". He also developed and contributed to a number of inventions inventions, the best known being the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes (buckyballs) were so named due to their resemblance to geodesic spheres. Bucky was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan in 1981.

There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance - Buckminster Fuller

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