Reposted from Defenders Magazine.

A Stolen River

Rodger Schlickeisen

The Colorado River was once an unbroken ribbon of life from the northern Rockies of central Wyoming through the vast arid Southwest into Mexico and eventually the Gulf of California. But today the Colorado River is not healthy. In fact, it no longer exists in a form that could reasonably be called a river in its southernmost reaches.

By the early 1960s, decades of massive U.S. dam projects and water diversions had continuously reduced the southern flow until not a drop of water reached the Gulf of California . The once incredibly lush delta ecosystem dried up, and wildlife was extirpated. Local fishermen were put out of business. Indigenous people lost a way of life they had led for millennia.

Ask yourself: If the borders of the United States had encompassed the entire length of the Colorado River all the way to the Gulf of California, would the federal and state governments have permitted the delta and upper reaches of the gulf to be ecologically devastated? Such an outcome would have been inconceivable.

In recent years, because of an aberration in the management of the Colorado River in the United States, there has been a small, accidental flow of ìsurplus” water that has begun to restore the delta´s wildlife and its ecosystem, the Gulf fishery, and even the indigenous people´s way of life. That restoration makes a compelling case for revising the bi-national agreement allocating the river´s waters to reduce the massive ecological, economic and cultural harm that has been caused in Mexico .

Even now this remarkable restoration is seriously at risk, for north of the Mexico border the U.S. government, Colorado River Basin States, and other governmental entities are hard at work trying to eliminate the accidental flow and redirect it entirely to U.S. uses.

Western states have been fighting over the river for decades and have recently been joined by scientists, environmentalists and other public interest advocates. Native peoples too are now engaged, in the form of the Cocopah Indian Nation of southern Arizona, which is struggling with the impacts of the U.S. government´s ìmodern” Colorado River management, and their fellow tribal members (the Cucup·) in Mexico. The government of Mexico of course is also a player, albeit one that is obviously torn between its desires to fight for what is right for its own lands and people and its needs to placate a powerful and demanding northern neighbor.

To my mind the over-riding issue is one of cross-border equity in claims on and use of the river. In fact, viewed objectively by modern international standards, one can argue that the U.S. basically stole the Colorado River from Mexico – and continues to steal it every day it does not allow sufficient water to provide for the reasonable ecological, economic and cultural health of the delta and gulf.

Major Colorado River water users in the United States point to the U.S.-Mexico treaty of 1944, which established the current, grossly disproportionate allocations of river water between the two nations. But the simple existence of a treaty does not assure its fairness, especially when it was negotiated between parties of unequal power.

International environmental law has not yet evolved sufficiently to resolve conflicts over the Colorado River ´s water. But basic principles have been clearly enunciated and adopted by the community of nations. For example, international courts and national governments agree that every country has not only the sovereign right to manage its own affairs but also the solemn responsibility to ensure that activities within its borders do not cause environmental harm elsewhere. The United States has been a champion of this principle against transboundary harm since early in the twentieth century – ironically, even through the period in which it was aggressively capturing the Colorado River .

I recognize that giving up part of its claim on a valuable natural resource, no matter how unreasonably and unfairly acquired, is not easy. If it were, Defenders of Wildlife and other U.S. and Mexican public interest organizations would not be in court right now trying to compel the United States and five southwest state governments to do just that. But such a court result shouldn´t be necessary. The U.S. government should take the initiative, as it has in similar situations, to acknowledge the unfairness of the 1944 treaty and negotiate the kind of equitable solution expected of a great nation.

Reposted from Defenders Magazine.

The Local Connection

Robert Michael Pyle

Our concern for the absolute extinction of species is highly appropriate. As our partners in Earth’s enterprise drop out, we find ourselves lonelier, less sure of our ability to hold together the tattered business of life. Every effort to prevent further losses is worthwhile, no matter how disruptive, for diversity is its own reward. But outright extinction is not the only problem. By concentrating on the truly rare and endangered plants and animals, conservationists often neglect another form of loss that can have striking consequences: the local extinction.

Local extinctions matter for at least three major reasons. First, evolutionary biologists believe that natural selection operates intensely on “edge” populations. This means that the cutting edge of evolution can be the extremities of a species’ range rather than the center, where it is more numerous. The protection of marginal populations therefore becomes important. Local extinctions commonly occur on the edges, depriving species of this important opportunity for adaptive change.

Second, little losses add up to big losses. A colony goes extinct here, a population drops out there, and before you know it, you have an endangered species. Attrition, once under way, is progressive. “Between German chickens and Irish hogs,” wrote San Francisco entomologist H. H. Behr to his Chicago friend Herman Strecker in 1875, “no insect can exist besides louse and flea.” Behr was lamenting the diminution of native insects on the San Francisco Peninsula. Already at that early date, butterflies such as the Xerces blue were becoming difficult to find as colony after colony disappeared before the expanding city. In the early 1940s the Xerces blue became absolutely extinct. Thus local losses accumulate, undermining the overall flora and fauna.

The third consequence amounts to a different kind of depletion. I call it the extinction of experience. Simply stated, the loss of neighborhood species endangers our experience of nature. If a species becomes extinct within our own radius of reach (smaller for the very old, very young, disabled and poor), it might as well be gone altogether, in one important sense. To those whose access suffers by it, local extinction has much the same result as global eradication.

Of course, we are all diminished by the extirpation of animals and plants wherever they occur. Many people take deep satisfaction in wilderness and wildlife they will never see. But direct, personal contact with other living things affects us in vital ways that vicarious experience can never replace.

I believe that one of the greatest causes of the ecological crisis is the state of personal alienation from nature in which many people live. We lack a widespread sense of intimacy with the living world. Natural history has never been more popular in some ways, yet few people organize their lives around nature, or even allow it to affect them profoundly. Our depth of contact is too often wanting. Two distinctive birds, by the ways in which they fish, furnish a model for what I mean.

Brown pelicans fish by slamming directly into the sea, great bills agape, making sure of solid contact with the resource they seek. Black skimmers, graceful ternlike birds with longer lower mandibles than upper, fly over the surface with just the lower halves of their bills in the water. They catch fish too, but avoid bodily immersion by merely skimming the surface.

In my view, most people who consider themselves nature lovers behave more like skimmers than pelicans. They buy the right outfits at L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer, carry field guides and take walks on nature trails, reading all the interpretive signs. They watch the nature programs on television, shop at the Nature Company and pay their dues to the National Wildlife Federation or the National Audubon Society. These activities are admirable, but they do not ensure truly intimate contact with nature. Many such “naturalists” merely skim, reaping a shallow reward. Yet the great majority of the people associate with nature even less.

When the natural world becomes chiefly an entertainment or an obligation, it loses its ability to arouse our deeper instincts. Professor E. O. Wilson of Harvard University, who has won two Pulitzer prizes for his penetrating looks at both humans and insects, believes we all possess what he calls “biophilia.” To Wilson, this means that humans have an innate desire to connect with other life forms, and that to do so is highly salutary. Nature is therapeutic. As short-story writer Valerie Martin tells us in “The Consolation of Nature,” only nature can restore a sense of safety in the end. But clearly, too few people ever realize their potential love of nature. So where does the courtship fail? How can we engage our biophilia?

Everyone has at least a chance of realizing a pleasurable and collegial wholeness with nature. But to get there, intimate association is necessary. A face-to-face encounter with a banana slug means much more than a Komodo dragon seen on television. With rhinos mating in the living room, who will care about the creatures next door? At least the skimmers are aware of nature. As for the others, whose lives hold little place for nature, how can they even care?

The extinction of experience is not just about losing the personal benefits of the natural high. It also implies a cycle of disaffection that can have disastrous consequences. As cities and metastasizing suburbs forsake their natural diversity, and their citizens grow more removed from personal contact with nature, awareness and appreciation retreat. This breeds apathy toward environmental concerns and, inevitably, further degradation of the common habitat.

So it goes, on and on, the extinction of experience sucking the life from the land, the intimacy from our connections. This is how the passing of otherwise common species from our immediate vicinities can be as significant as the total loss of rarities. People who care conserve; people who don’t know don’t care. What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?

In teaching about butterflies, I frequently place a living butterfly on a child’s nose. Noses seem to make perfectly good perches or basking spots, and the insect often remains for some time. Almost everyone is delighted by this, the light tickle, the closeup colors, the thread of a tongue probing for droplets of perspiration. But somewhere beyond delight lies enlightenment. I have been astonished at the small epiphanies I see in the eyes of a child in truly close contact with nature, perhaps for the first time. This can happen to grown-ups too, reminding them of something they never knew they had forgotten.

We are finally discovering the link between our biophilia and our future. With new eyes, planners are leaving nature in the suburbs and inviting it back into the cities as never before. For many species the effort comes too late, since once gone, they can be desperately difficult to reestablish. But at least the adaptable types can be fostered with care and forethought.

The initiatives of urban ecologists are making themselves felt in many cities. In Portland, Oregon, Urban Naturalist Mike Houck worked to have the great blue heron designated the official city bird, to have a local microbrewery fashion an ale to commemorate it, and to fill in the green leaks in a 40-mile-loop greenway envisioned decades ago. Now known as the 140-Mile Loop, it ties in with a massive urban greenspaces program on both sides of the Columbia River. An international conference entitled “Country in the City” takes place annually in Portland, pushing urban diversity. These kinds of efforts arise from a recognition of the extinction of experience and a fervid desire to avoid its consequences.

Houck has launched an effort to involve the arts community in refreshing the cities and devoted himself to urban stream restoration. When streams are rescued from the storm drains, they are said (delightfully) to be “daylighted.” And when each city has someone like Mike Houck working to daylight its streams, save its woods and educate its planners, the sources of our experience will be safer.

But nature reserves and formal greenways are not enough to ensure connection. Such places, important as they are, invite a measured, restricted kind of contact. When children come along with an embryonic interest in natural history, they need free places for pottering, netting, catching and watching. Insects, crawdads and tadpoles can stand to be nabbed a good deal. Bug collecting has always been the standard route to a serious interest in biology. To expect a strictly appreciative first response from a child is quixotic. Young naturalists need the “trophy,” hands-on stage before leapfrogging to mere looking. There need to be places that are not kid-proofed, where children can do damage and come back the following year to see the results.

Likewise, we all need spots near home where we can wander off a trail, lift a stone, poke about and merely wonder: places where no interpretive signs intrude their message to rob our spontaneous response. Along with the nature centers, parks and preserves, we would do well to maintain a modicum of open space with no rule but common courtesy, no sign besides animal tracks.

For these purposes, nothing serves better than the hand-me-down habitats that lie somewhere between formal protection and development. Throwaway landscapes like this used to occur on the edges of settlement everywhere. Richard Mabey, a British writer and naturalist, describes them as the “unofficial countryside.” He uses the term for those ignominious, degraded, forgotten places that we have discarded, which serve nonetheless as habitats for a broad array of adaptable plants and animals: derelict railway land, ditchbanks, abandoned farms or bankrupt building sites, old gravel pits and factory yards, embankments, margins of landfills. These are the secondhand lands as opposed to the parks, forests, preserves and dedicated rural farmland that constitute the “official countryside.”

Organisms inhabiting such Cinderella sites are surprisingly varied, interesting and numerous. They are the survivors, the colonizers, the generalists — the so-called weedy species. Or, in secreted corners and remnants of older habitat types, specialists and rarities might survive as holdouts, waiting to be discovered by the watchful. Developers, realtors and the common parlance refer to such weedy enclaves as “vacant lots” and “waste ground.” But these are two of my favorite oxymorons: What, to a curious kid, is less vacant than a vacant lot? Less wasted than waste ground?

The number of people living with little hint of nature in their lives is very large and growing. This isn’t good for us. If the penalty of an ecological education is to live in a world of wounds, as Aldo Leopold said, then green spaces like these are the bandages and the balm. And if the penalty of ecological ignorance is still more wounds, then the unschooled need them even more. To gain the solace of nature, we all must connect deeply. Few ever do.

In the long run, this mass estrangement from things natural bodes ill for the care of the Earth. If we are to forge new links to the land, we must resist the extinction of experience. We must save not only the wilderness but the vacant lots, the ditches as well as the canyon-lands, and the woodlots along with the old growth. We must become believers in the world.

Reposted from Defenders Magazine.

Aldo Leopold’s Reverence for Life

J. Baird Callicott

The Earth Ethic

The Birth of The Geodesic Dome

 Lloyd Steven Sieden

Although Buckminster Fuller invariably maintained that he was a comprehensivist who was interested in almost everything, his life and work were dominated by a single issue: shelter and housing.  Even as a young boy in the early 1900s, Fuller–who preferred to be called Bucky–was constructing rudimentary structures and inventing better “environment controlling artifacts.”

The practical culmination of his quest to employ modern assembly-line manufacturing techniques and the best man-made materials in producing inexpensive, elegant housing came toward the end of World War II.  At that time, government officials contracted Fuller to build two prototype Dymaxion Houses at the Beech Aircraft Company in Wichita, Kansas.

The lightweight, circular houses were praised by all who toured them.  Because the Dymaxion House was to provide many new innovations at the very affordable suggested retail price of $6,500, orders flowed into the factory before plans for distribution were seriously considered.  However, Fuller’s interests were not geared toward practical matters such as financing and marketing, and the Dymaxion House never advanced beyond the prototype stage.  Fuller then moved on to consider other innovations that could benefit humanity in the areas of structure and housing.

He also returned to his less pragmatic quest to discover nature’s coordinate system and employ that system in a structure that would, because it was based on natural rather than humanly developed principles, be extremely efficient. That structure is the geodesic dome, which, because it approximates a sphere, encloses much more space with far less material than conventional buildings.

In order to uncover nature’s coordinate system, Fuller retreated from a great deal of his usual activities during 1947 and 1948.  The primary focus of that retreat was a single topic: spherical geometry.  He chose that area because he felt it would be most useful in further understanding the mathematics of engineering, in discovering nature’s coordinate system, and eventually in building the spherical structures that he found to be the most efficient means of construction.

Dome Models

Having observed the problems inherent in conventional construction techniques (as opposed to the ease with which nature’s structures are erected) and the indigenous strength of natural structures, Fuller felt certain that he could perfect an analogous, efficient, spherical-construction technique.  He was also aware that any such method would have to be predicated upon spherical trigonometry.  To do that, Bucky converted the small Long Island apartment that his wife, Anne, had rented into a combination workshop and classroom where he studied and discussed his ideas with others.

As those ideas started to take shape in the models and drawings he used for sharing his insights, Fuller considered names for his invention.  He selected “geodesic dome” because the sections or arcs of great circles (i.e., the shortest distance between two points on a sphere) are called geodesics, a term derived from the Greek word meaning “earth-dividing.”  His initial dome models were nothing more than spheres or sections of spheres constructed from crisscrossing curved pieces of material (each of which represented an arc of a great circle) that formed triangles.  Later, he expanded the concept and formed the curved pieces into even more complex structures such as tetrahedrons or octahedrons, which were then joined to create a spherical structure.  Still, the simple triangulation of struts remained, as did the initial name of the invention.

Although Fuller’s study of mathematics played a significant role in his invention of the geodesic dome, that process was also greatly influenced by his earlier extensive examination of and work within the field of construction.  During his construction experience, he came to realize that the dome pattern had been employed, to some extent, ever since humans began building structures.  Early sailors landing upon foreign shores and requiring immediate shelter would simply upend their ships, creating an arched shelter similar to a dome.

Land-dwelling societies copied that structure by locating a small clearing surrounded by young saplings and bending those uncut trees inward to form a dome that they covered with animal skins, thatch, or other materials.  Over time, that structure developed into the classic yurt that still provides viable homes for many people in and around Afghanistan and the plains of the Soviet Union.

A New Form of Architecture

In 1948, the geodesic dome was far from the amazingly sophisticated structure it would become only a few years later.  In fact, it consisted primarily of Bucky’s idea and an enormous pile of calculations he had formulated.

Although Fuller was developing and studying the geodesic dome using small models, he was eager to expand his understanding through the construction of larger, more-practical projects.  Thus, when he was invited to participate in the summer institute of the somewhat notorious Black Mountain College in the remote hills of North Carolina near Asheville, Fuller eagerly accepted.  He had lectured at that rather unorthodox institution the previous year and had been so popular that he was asked back for the entire summer of 1948.

When he was not delivering lengthy thinking-out-loud lectures that summer, Fuller’s primary concern was furthering an entirely new form of architecture. In his examination of traditional construction, he had discovered that most buildings focused on right-angle, squared configurations.

He understood that early human beings had developed that mode of construction without much thought by simply piling stone upon stone.  Such a simplistic system was acceptable for small structures, but when architects continued mindlessly utilizing that same technique for large buildings, major problems arose.  The primary issue created by merely stacking materials higher and higher is that taller walls require thicker and thicker base sections to support their upper sections.  Some designers attempted to circumvent that issue by using external buttressing, which kept walls from crumbling under the weight of upper levels, but even buttressing limited the size.

Fuller found that the compression force (i.e., pushing down) that caused such failure in heavy walls was always balanced by an equal amount of tensional force (i.e., pulling, which in buildings is seen in the natural tendency of walls to arc outward) in the structure.  In fact, he discovered that if tension and compression are not perfectly balanced in a structure, the building will collapse.  He also found that builders were not employing the tensional forces available.  Those forces are, instead, channeled into the ground, where solid foundations hold the compressional members, be they stones or steel beams, from being thrust outward by tension.  Always seeking maximum efficiency, Fuller attempted to employ tensional forces in his new construction idea.  The result was geodesic structures.

Because Bucky could not afford even the crude mechanical multiplier machines available during the late 1940s and was working with nothing but an adding machine, his first major dome required two years of calculations.  With the help of a young assistant, Donald Richter, Fuller was, however, able to complete those calculations.  Thus, he brought most of the material needed to construct the first geodesic dome to Black Mountain in the summer of 1948.

Disappointment before Success

His vision was of a 50-foot-diameter framework fabricated from lightweight aluminum, and, working with an austere budget, he had purchased a load of aluminum-alloy venetian-blind strips that he packed into the car for the trip to the college.  Over the course of that summer, Bucky also procured other materials locally, but he was not completely satisfied with the dome’s constituent elements, which were neither custom-designed for the project nor of the best materials.  Still, with the help of his students, the revolutionary new dome was prepared for what was supposed to be a quick assembly in early September, just as the summer session was coming to an end.

The big day was dampened by a pouring rain.  Nonetheless, Bucky and his team of assistants scurried around the field that had been chosen as the site of the event, preparing the sections of their dome for final assembly, while faculty and students stood under umbrellas, watching in anticipation from a nearby hillside.  When the critical moment arrived, the final bolts were fastened and tension was applied to the structure, causing it to transform from a flat pile of components into the world’s first large geodesic sphere. The spectators cheered, but their excitement lasted only an instant as the fragile dome almost immediately sagged in upon itself and collapsed, ending the project.

Although he must have been disappointed that day, Bucky’s stoic New England character kept him from publicly acknowledging such emotion.  instead, he maintained that he had deliberately designed an extremely weak structure in order to determine the critical point at which it would collapse and that he had learned a great deal from the experiment.  Certainly, the lessons learned from that episode were valuable, and his somewhat egocentric rationale was by no means a blatant lie.  However, had he really been attempting to find the point of destruction, Bucky would have proceeded, as he did in later years, to add weights to the completed framework until it broke down.

In his haste to test his calculations, Fuller had proceeded without the finances necessary to acquire the best materials.  Because of the use of substandard components, the dome was doomed to failure, and a demonstration of the geodesic dome’s practical strength was condemned to wait another year.

During that year, Fuller taught at the Chicago Institute of Design.  He and his Institute students also devoted a great deal of time to developing his new concepts.  It was with the assistance of those design students that Fuller built a number of more successful dome models, each of which was more structurally sound than the previous one.

Then, when he was invited to return to Black Mountain College the following summer as dean of the Summer Institute, Fuller suggested that some of his best Chicago Institute students and their faculty accompany him, so that they could demonstrate the true potential of geodesic domes.

Having earned some substantial lecture fees during the previous year, Bucky was able to purchase the best of materials for his new Black Mountain dome. The project was a 14-foot-diameter hemisphere constructed of the finest aluminum aircraft tubing and covered with a vinyl-plastic skin.  Completely erected within days after his arrival, that dome remained a stable fixture on the campus throughout the summer.  To further prove the efficiency of the design to somewhat skeptical fellow instructors and students, Bucky and eight of his assistants daringly hung from the structure’s framework, like children on a playground, immediately after its completion.

The Ford Dome

In 1953, Fuller and his geodesic dome were elevated to international prominence when the first conspicuous commercial geodesic dome was produced. That structure was erected in answer to a Ford Motor Company problem believed to be insoluble.  During 1952, Ford was in the process of preparing for its fiftieth anniversary celebration the following year, and Henry Ford II, grandson of Henry Ford and head of the company, decided he wanted to fulfill one of his grandfather’s dreams as a tribute to the company’s founder.  The senior Ford had always loved the round corporate headquarters building known as the Rotunda but had wanted its interior courtyard covered so that the space could be used during inclement Detroit weather.

Unfortunately — but fortunately for Bucky — the building was fairly weak. It had originally been constructed to house the Ford exhibition at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, but Henry Ford had so loved the building that he had had it disassembled and shipped in pieces to Dearborn, where it was reconstructed. Having been designed as a temporary structure, the fragile Rotunda building could not possibly support the 160-ton weight that Ford’s engineers calculated conventional steel-frame dome would require.  Under such pressure, the building’s thin walls would have immediately collapsed.

Still, Henry Ford II was a determined person, and he wanted the courtyard covered.  Consequently, Ford management and engineers continued searching for an answer until someone suggested calling Buckminster Fuller.  By that time, Fuller’s work drawing international attention, and although his geodesic dome had yet to be proven effective in an industrial project, desperate Ford officials decided they should at least solicit Bucky’s opinion.  When he arrives at the Detroit airport, Fuller was greeted by a Ford executive in a large limousine who treated him like royalty, quickly escorting him to the Rotunda building for an inspection.  After a short examination of the 93-foot opening requiring a dome, Ford management asked the critical question: Could Fuller build a dome to cover the courtyard?  With no hesitation, Bucky answered that he certainly could, and the first commercial geodesic dome began to take shape.

The Ford executives next began to question the specifications of Fuller’s plan.  When they asked about weight, he made some calculations and answered that his dome would weigh approximately 8.5 tons, a far cry from their 160-ton estimate.  Ford management also requested a cost estimate and advised Fuller that, because of the upcoming anniversay celebration, the dome had to be completed within the relatively short period of a few months.  When Fuller’s price was well below Ford’s budget and he agreed to construct the dome within the required time frame, he was awarded a contract.

The agreement was signed in January of 1953, and Bucky immediately began working to meet the April deadline.  The somewhat discredited Ford engineers who had failed to develop a practical solution were, however, not convinced that the obscure inventor’s fantastic claims were valid.  Thus, they began working on a contingency plan that would prevent further reputations further, the engineers secretly contracted another construction firm to hastily haul away any evidence of Fuller’s work when he failed.  The Ford engineers were once again proven wrong when the dome was successfully completed in April, two days ahead of schedule.

Building from the Top Down

Actual construction of the dome was a marvel to behold.  Reporters from around the world gathered to witness and recount the architectural effort as well as Ford’s anniversary celebration.  Because the courtyard below the dome was to be used for a television special commemorating the anniversary, and because business at Ford had to proceed normally, Fuller’s crew was provided with a tiny working area and instructed to keep disruptions to a minimum.

Ford management was also concerned with the safety of both the dome workers and the people who might wander beneath the construction.  They anticipated that problems would arise when Ford employees, television crews, reporters, and spectators gathered below to observe the construction workers climbing high overhead on the treacherous scaffolding, but once again Bucky suprised everyone.  Instead of traditional scaffolding, he employed a strategy similar to the one he developed in 1940 for the quick assembly of his Dymaxion Deployment Units.

Because the sections of the dome were prefabricated and then suspended from a central mast, no dangerous scaffolding was required.  The construction team worked from a bridge erected across the top of the Rotunda courtyard.  Like Dymaxion Deployment Units, the Ford dome was then built from the top down while being hoisted higher and rotated each time a section was completed.  The dome was assembled from nearly 12,000 aluminum struts, each about three feet long and weighing only five ounces.  Those struts were preassembled into octet-truss, equilateral-traingular sections approximately 15 feet on a side. Since each section weighed only about four pounds and could be raised by a single person, no crane or heavy machinery was required to hoist them to the upper bridge assembly area.

Once on the working bridge, the identical sections were riveted into place on the outwardly growing framework until it covered the entire courtyard.  Upon completion, the 8.5-ton dome remained suspended on its mast, hovering slightly above the building itself until the mooring points were prepared.  Then, it was gently lowered down onto the Rotunda building structure with no problem.

To complete the first commercial geodesic dome, clear Fiberglas “windows” were installed in the small triangular panels of the framework.  Because Fuller had not yet developed or determined the best means of fastening those panels, they would eventually be a cause of the destruction of the dome and the building itself.

Since it was the first large functional geodesic dome, many aspects of the Ford dome were experimental.  They had been tested in models, but how the dome and the materials utilized would withstand the forces of Michigan winters could be determined only by the test of time.  The Rotunda building dome did perform successfully for several years before the elements began taking their toll and leaks between the Fiberglas and the aluminum began to occur.  Still, with regular maintenance, that problem was not serious, and convening corporate events under the dome became a tradition.  One of those events was the annual Ford Christmas gathering.

In 1962, numerious leaks in the dome were noticed as the Christmas season approached, and a maintenance crew was dispatched one cold late-autumn day to repair the problem.  The temperature was, however, too cold to permit proper heating of the tar they used for the repairs, and, in a common practice, the workers added gasoline to thin the tar.  They were warming the tar with a blowtorch when that potent mixture ignited, and the building quickly caught fire.  Since the building had never been planned as a permanent structure, it was not long before the entire Rotunda was engulfed in flames that destroyed the first commercial geodesic dome, the singular structure that, more than any other, had catapulted Fuller to public fame.

Doing More with Less

The notoriety provided by the Ford project resulted in an enormous amount of nearly instant public interest in Fuller and his ideas.  It also brought him to the attention of a group of scientists who were struggling with another seemingly unsolvable problem: protection of the Distant Early Warning Line radar installations throughout the Arctic.  Once again, Fuller and his amazing geodesic dome surprised all the experts as his hastily invented Fiberglas “radomes” proved more than able to handle that difficult task.

The proliferation of radomes in technologically advanced situations around the world moved the geodesic dome into its rightful position as a symbol of developing humanity doing more and more with fewer resources.  Thus, geodesic domes are now employed for diverse tasks such as providing a more natural structure for children on playgrounds, covering athletic stadiums, and being proposed for use in future space construction.

However, the true significance of the geodesic dome is most evident in the fact that it is often the dominant symbol employed at major future-oriented expositions.  When most people remember the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair, the 1986 Vancouver World’s Fair, or Disney’s EPCOT Center, the first image they recall is the geodesic dome.

It properly stands as a monument to the work of Buckminster Fuller, who successfully shared his vision of a world that works for everyone.  He also inspired scores of people to work, as he did, to establish a network of equally significant individuals supporting humanity’s emergence into a new era of cooperation.  That relationship between individual human beings, as well as that between humans and their environment, is not modeled by the rigid conventional buildings that fill our environment.  It is modeled in the amazing geodesic dome’s network of lightweight, resilient struts, wires, and panels.

Copyright 1989 by the World Future Society

Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth
by R. Buckminster Fuller

Reposted from Defenders Magazine.

Building an Ethic

Edward O. Wilson

We may think that the world has been completely explored. Almost all the mountains and rivers, it is true, have been named, the coast and geodetic surveys completed, the ocean floor mapped to the deepest trenches, the atmosphere transected and chemically analyzed. The planet is now continuously monitored from space by satellites; and, not least, Antarctica, the last virgin continent, has become a research station and expensive tourist stop. The biosphere, however, remains obscure. Even though some 1.4 million species of organisms have been discovered (in the minimal sense of having specimens collected and formal scientific names attached), the total number alive on Earth is somewhere between 10 and 100 million. No one can say with confidence which of these figures is the closer. Of the species given scientific names, fewer than ten percent have been studied at a level deeper than gross anatomy. The revolution in molecular biology and medicine was achieved with a still smaller fraction, including colon bacteria, corn, fruit flies, Norway rats, rhesus monkeys and human beings, altogether comprising no more than a hundred species.

Enchanted by the continuous emergence of new technologies and supported by generous funding for medical research, biologists have probed deeply along a narrow sector of the front. Now it is time to expand laterally, to get on with the great Linnean enterprise and finish mapping the biosphere. The most compelling reason for the broadening of goals is that, unlike the rest of science, the study of biodiversity has a time limit. Species are disappearing at an accelerating rate through human action, primarily habitat destruction but also pollution and the introduction of exotic species into residual natural environments. I have said that a fifth or more of the species of plants and animals could vanish or be doomed to early extinction by the year 2020 unless better efforts are made to save them. This estimate comes from the known quantitative relation between the area of habitats and the diversity that habitats can sustain. These area-biodiversity curves are supported by the general but not universal principle that when certain groups of organisms are studied closely, such as snails and fishes and flowering plants, extinction is determined to be widespread. And the corollary: among plant and animal remains in archaeological deposits, we usually find extinct species and races. As the last forests are felled in forest strongholds like the Philippines and Ecuador, the decline of species will accelerate even more. In the world as a whole, extinction rates are already hundreds or thousands of times higher than before the coming of man. They cannot be balanced by new evolution in any period of time that has meaning for the human race.

Why should we care? What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of all the species on earth disappear? Let me count the ways. New sources of scientific information will be lost. Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed. Still undeveloped medicines, crops, pharmaceuticals, timber, fibers, pulp, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes and other products and amenities will never come to light. It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia’s pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin’s disease and childhood Iymphocytic leukemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery, and so on down a roster already grown long and illustrious despite the limited research addressed to it.

In amnesiac revery it is also easy to overlook the services that ecosystems provide humanity. They enrich the soil and create the very air we breathe. Without these amenities, the remaining tenure of the human race would be nasty and brief. The life-sustaining matrix is built of green plants with legions of microorganisms and mostly small, obscure animals — in other words, weeds and bugs. Such organisms support the world with efficiency because they are so diverse, allowing them to divide labor and swarm over every square meter of the earth’s surface. They run the world precisely as we would wish it to be run, because humanity evolved within living communities and our bodily functions are finely adjusted to the idiosyncratic environment already created.

Mother Earth, lately called Gaia, is no more than the commonality of organisms and the physical environment they maintain with each passing moment, an environment that will destabilize and turn lethal if the organisms are disturbed too much. A near infinity of other mother planets can be envisioned, each with its own fauna and flora, all producing physical environments uncongenial to human life. To disregard the diversity of life is to risk catapulting ourselves into an alien environment. We will have become like the pilot whales that inexplicably beach themselves on New England shores.

Humanity coevolved with the rest of life on this particular planet; other worlds are not in our genes. Because scientists have yet to put names on most kinds of organisms, and because they entertain only a vague idea of how ecosystems work, it is reckless to suppose that biodiversity can be diminished indefinitely without threatening humanity itself. Field studies show that as biodiversity is reduced, so is the quality of the services provided by ecosystems. Records of stressed ecosystems also demonstrate that the descent can be unpredictably abrupt. As extinction spreads, some of the lost forms prove to be keystone species, whose disappearance brings down other species and triggers a ripple through the demographics of the survivors. The loss of a keystone species is like a drill accidentally striking a power line. It causes lights to go out all over.

These services are important to human welfare. But they cannot form the whole foundation of an enduring environmental ethic. If a price can be put on something, that something can be devalued, sold and discarded. It is also possible for some to dream that people will go on living comfortably in a biologically impoverished world. They suppose that a prosthetic environment is within the power of technology, that human life can still flourish in a completely humanized world, where medicines would all be synthesized from chemicals off the shelf, food grown from a few dozen domestic crop species, the atmosphere and climate regulated by computer-driven fusion energy, and the earth made over until it becomes a literal spaceship rather than a metaphorical one, with people reading displays and touching buttons on the bridge. Such is the terminus of the philosophy of exemptionalism: do not weep for the past, humanity is a new order of life, let species die if they block progress, scientific and technological genius will find another way. Look up and see the stars awaiting us.

But consider: human advance is determined not by reason alone but by emotions peculiar to our species, aided and tempered by reason. What makes us people and not computers is emotion. We have little grasp of our true nature, of what it is to be human and therefore where our descendants might someday wish we had directed Spaceship Earth. Our troubles, as Vercors said in You Shall Know Them, arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be. The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins. We did not arrive on this planet as aliens. Humanity is part of nature, a species that evolved among other species. The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more quickly we will be able to discover the sources of human sensibility and acquire the knowledge on which an enduring ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built.