Imagine you’re in an office in a city somewhere in the real world. You walk out into the street and look around. You see buildings and landscapes, going and coming, transportation from bikes to rail to trucks, people with bags, boxes and briefcases, and everywhere everything is flowing. You see shops and offices full of supplies, electronics, food and drink, clothing and fashion, hardware and software. And there are towers, poles, wires, pipes, tunnels, joints and bridges, signal lights, valves and switches, all connecting and coordinating the flow. And you open your senses and see radio and the shimmering patterns of information connecting and coordinating the coordination of…. everything.

Now consider this, the bulk of those objects, signals, people and packages were designed, engineered, manufactured and built to one economic end – increase resource consumption – make it and throw away, waste and do not return.

Now, let the world shift. Allow the visible and invisible, tangible and intangible to transform into something similar but new, emerging from a background in which everything is designed, engineered, manufactured and built toward a different economic end: increase knowledge use to enable continual re-use, re-sourcing, re-making and recycling of everything; use and remake, weave then reweave, in endless regeneration. Imagine the world rebuilt to use ever more knowledge to empower each cycle of production and reproduction with more intelligence, productivity and value, in endless self-renewal.

How big is this business opportunity of remaking the entire built world?

Which future world is pulling you – the world built to waste or the world built to regenerate forever? Where should your business focus – on working ever harder to use up the world, or on working ever smarter to inform every bit of space, matter, energy and time used in the built world to continually re-connect and renew all things?

The business of business now is about provisioning the world for continual self-renewal. Where is your place in this emerging opportunity space?

“The living world is not “out there” somewhere, but in your heart. What do we know about life? In the words of biologist Janine Benyus, life creates the conditions that are conducive to life. I can think of no better motto for a future economy. We have tens of thousands of abandoned homes without people and tens of thousands of abandoned people without homes. We have failed bankers advising failed regulators on how to save failed assets. We are the only species on the planet without full employment. Brilliant. We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.” – Paul Hawkens, 2009, University of Portland commencement http://www.up.edu/commencement/default.aspx?cid=9456

]]> http://socialwebstrategies.com/2011/08/20/the-commercial-potential-of-rebuilding-the-world/feed/ 0 http://socialwebstrategies.com/2011/08/07/a-synergetic-bucky-symphony-humanity%e2%80%99s-final-exam/ http://socialwebstrategies.com/2011/08/07/a-synergetic-bucky-symphony-humanity%e2%80%99s-final-exam/#comments Sun, 07 Aug 2011 19:09:45 +0000 darmistead http://socialwebstrategies.com/?p=851 Continue reading →]]> A Samples Mashup Using Some Words from Buckminster Fuller
David Armistead, 2011

[This is a mashup of Bucky samples edited to present his idea that we are now entering ‘humanity’s final exam.’ The text is drawn mainly from his early 1980s writings. I offer this as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, a synergetic Bucky symphony. - David]

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims. But we are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully for much longer unless we see it as a whole and our fate as common. Humanity is moving ever deeper into a crisis without precedent brought about by evolution intent upon transforming humanity into an integrated harmonious whole, living sustainably at a higher standard of living than has ever been experienced.

Ninety-nine percent of humanity does not know that we have the option to make it on this planet. We do. We have the know-how to feed, clothe, and give every human on Earth a chance. We have the option for all humanity to make it successfully on this planet in this lifetime. An alternative to extinction does exist – by veering big business away from weaponry onto the accommodation of all humanity, a vastly larger and far more profitable enterprise for all.

Never before have the inequities and momentums of unthinking money-power been more glaringly evident. The great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who have become powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery. To expose the 4.2 trillion dollar (c.1980) rip-off of the people by the largest corporations over the last hundred years will be a tall order of business.

But integrity is the essence of everything successful. Whether humanity is to continue and prosper on Spaceship Earth depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political and economic systems. If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through.

There’s a soon-to-occur critical moment when the responsibly inspired majority of humanity, faced with the complete discontinuity of the nationally contained techno-economic system, will accomplish a world-around reorientation of our planetary affairs. At this critical moment the majority will realize that to sustainingly support all humanity, we must employ all the resources all the time as a completely integrated system operating on its daily income of solar energy. This is already underway. Can it be accomplished before fear and ignorance preclude success?

Fortunately, things emerge in emergencies. So, don’t fight forces, use them. The social revolution can now realize full economic success for all, without toppling the economically successful minority, by instead elevating all humanity to a sustainable higher level of existing and interacting than any humans have heretofore experienced or dreamed.

This is humanity’s final exam, to be administered once, and it is pass/fail. Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go race right up to the final moment, and each of us could make the difference. Only integrity is going to count. This has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with economic systems. It has to do with the individual. Does the individual have the courage to really go along with the truth?