Charrette Austin is the latest manifestation of Jon Lebkowsky's attempt, with Derek Woodgate, to create a framework for discussion about Austin's cultural and social fragmentation, which in our opinion why Austin, a good and attractive place to live, is never quite a great city.The group met at Café Caffeine yesterday for a discussion led by David Armistead about Buckminister Fuller, whose work aligns well with the direction of Charrette Austin based on our earlier conversations.
Here's an excerpt from the Buckybio at Wikipedia:
He dedicated himself to advancing the success and fulfillment of humanity and lived by a set of self-disciplines; he was deeply concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet was profoundly optimistic about humanity's prospects.
Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the"technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodateall growth needs of life", his analysis of the condition of "SpaceshipEarth" led him to conclude that at a certain point 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 became the optimum survival strategy. "Selfishness", he declared, "is unnecessary and...unrationalizable...War is obsolete..."
By considering historical comparisons like the fact that even relatively poor people today are able to travel at speeds and with adegree of comfort which were unobtainable at any price in earlier times, and that illnesses that were fatal even to kings in the pastcan now be cured with affordable drugs, he concluded that everyone alive today can potentially live like a "billionaire." Hence hedescribed the human race as "four billion billionaires."
No comments:
Post a Comment