Bucky Fuller:

This Is the Future

by Eric Francis Coppolino and illustrations by Emil Alzamora, July 29, 2008

Last month I was writing Daily Astrology & Adventure, describing the helpless feeling that I think most of us have when we’re considering how serious the world situation is. Some names came to mind of people who were not scared or paralyzed, but rather who viewed the future as an opportunity to do things better.

Buckminster Fuller developed and refined the geodesic dome during the summers of 1948 and 1949, when he worked at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. One man who saw what was coming and was unfazed by the looming crisis of too-rapid growth, dwindling resources, and overcrowding was Buckminster Fuller. I linked to his Wiki page, and for a couple of days I mentioned his name around my neighborhood. I could only find one or two people who had even heard of him—and neither knew who he was or what he contributed.

Imagine if a scientist from the late 21st century dropped in on our lives today, and could see our current ecological and economic problems clearly, with the wisdom and sense of perspective of the future. Imagine that he knew the solutions as if they had already been worked out, and had withstood the test of time. That was Bucky Fuller.

He was born Friday, July 12, 1895, so his 113th birth anniversary just passed last month. He shares a birth year with Dane Rudhyar, Rudolph Valentino, Jeddu Krishnamurti, and Carl Orff. Oh, and J. Edgar Hoover, the eternal boss of the FBI. The year of his birth was also the year of the first prediscovery photograph of Chiron, which not surprisingly is one of the most interesting planets in his chart: a hint at the holistic consciousness to come, when Chiron was discovered in 1977 and the acceptance of Fuller’s ideas was at its peak.

Fuller was a Cancer with the Sun conjunct Jupiter. His job, as he viewed it, was to be a pragmatic steward of the world. He had large ideas; he was the grandfather of the sustainability movement. But while he was at it, he reinvented the world, proposing and designing such concepts as tsunami-resistant floating cities.