Wanted: Your Solutions to Humanity’s Crises
The Brooklyn-based Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) has just announced its call for entries to the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. So if you’ve got a solution to the U.S. and global financial meltdowns, accelerating climate change, collapsing ecosystems and/or world poverty, the institute wants to hear it.
“We’re looking for comprehensive anticipatory design solutions that address multiple problems without creating new ones down the road — integrated strategies dealing with key social, economic, environmental, and cultural issues,” says Elizabeth Thompson, BFI’s executive director.
So what’s a comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated strategy? It’s any idea that can help solve a variety of interlinked problems, both present and on the horizon, that’s doable with current technology and knowledge. Oh, and you’ve got to make sure your idea’s success can be proven in real life, not just on paper, and that it can work on a wide scale under many different conditions.
Last year marked the first year of the challenge, and the top prize went to University of Vermont professor and ecological designer John Todd, who outlined a way to revitalize Appalachia’s landscape and communities without the destructive influence of coal mining.
“We want the winning solution to be what Fuller called trimtab — a catalyst inserted into a failing system at the right time and place that accelerates the transition to an equitable and sustainable future,” the BFI says.
Wow, considering the cascade of failing systems we’ve seen in the past few weeks alone — near-record Arctic ice melt, Wall Street chaos, devastating hurricanes — the time certainly seems ripe for some new and ground-breaking ideas.
What’s your solution? Check out the details at the BFI’s Website and put your ideas together. Deadline is Nov. 7.
