Oh, if only we had listened to Fuller. We wouldn't be in such a mess now. ( )

Five stars for what this book is, a short explanation of the philosophy of technical optimism of R. Buckminster Fuller.
However, Fuller writes in a dense style that is sometimes hard to read.
By the way, this is not an operating manual at all, it focuses more on concepts rather than tactics. Spoiler alert - the key is that we work together and stop creating false differences between people (nations, rich and poor, races). ( )

This book is a time capsule that helps us see our intellectual progress since it was published. Actually, it is almost useless. Back then we thought it was great stuff, but only because almost everything else was even worse. One might get excited over the fact that there is a chapter titled General Systems Theory. Actually the chapter is so vague it is almost useless. ( )

The name R. Buckminster Fuller brings up images of geodesic domes for most people. I found a paperback 1973 printing of the 1969 book with a properly psychedelic deconstructed sphere/face on the cover. Only after reading the book did I find out we already had a copy (much newer edition) without the cool cover. Fuller's premise is that the earth, like a spaceship, needs to have all its systems working as one, that there has to be a balance between resources and their use. He carries the metaphor through various scientific explanations (most of which were beyond my knowledge) to show why our lives depend on the maintenance of our spaceship. A wonderful premise and metaphor -- seems really a propos as we look at climate change becoming irreversible by 2030. It's also scary that in the time since this was written not many have paid heed. ( )

This is a classic, published in 1969, first read by me back in 1970 or 1971, when we thought we would soon experience either the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius or, alternately, the Eve of Destruction. Definitely Utopian, still visionary, and in some ways quite wrong, Fuller makes interesting reading even now, 40 years later and 26 years after his death in 1983. One important area in which Fuller has turned out to have been wrong was his prediction that global population would stabilize at the then current 4 billion thanks to world-wide industrialization, which he expected to be complete by 1985. Now almost 7 billion, world population has nearly doubled since he wrote this book and has not yet even peaked.
Another issue that Fuller wasn’t exactly wrong about, but that he didn’t take fully into account, is that of waste; for example, what to do with all the plastic, such as the Texas-sized mat now floating out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, or nuclear waste (though it must be said that he categorized atoms similarly to fossil fuels as non-renewable capital, to be used only sparingly and then only for start-up purposes). He doesn’t mention climate change or global warming except by implication (i.e., if we don’t smarten up soon, we will use up or destroy our life support and enhancement system on this planet). However, Fuller placed great faith in human evolution proceeding in such a way as to result in a favorable outcome for humans on this planet. What has saved us in the past, he said, is our built-in (by evolution) trial and error approach in conjunction with a bank account of energy resources. Meaning, we have evolved in such a way as to enjoy enough breathing space to be able to make errors and then adjust our behavior accordingly and progress.
Some of his prognostications seem uncannily prescient considering the world's current economic crises, for example :
"The constantly put-off or undermet costs and society’s official bumbling of them clearly prove that man does not know at present what wealth is nor how much of whatever it may be is progressively available to him," and "The wisest humans recognized in 1810 only one three-hundredth of 1 per cent of the immediately thereafter 'proven value' of the United States’ share of the world’s wealth-generating potentials. Of course, those wisest of men of the times would have seen little they could afford to do."
R. Buckminster Fuller is still well worth reading, if only to ponder his definitions of democracy and wealth:
"Semi-democracy accepts the dictatorship of a majority in establishing its arbitrary, ergo, unnatural, laws. True democracy discovers by patient experiment and unanimous acknowledgment what the laws of nature or universe may be for the physical support and metaphysical satisfaction of the human intellect’s function in universe. . . . .
Wealth is our organized capability to cope effectively with the environment in sustaining our healthy regeneration and decreasing both the physical and metaphysical restrictions of the forward days of our lives.”

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