Reference Shelf
“During the decade leading up to the publication of Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, Buckminster Fuller has become something of an international culture hero and a lonely but eloquent optimist in a generation of professional prophets of doom…”Synergetics” is a comprehensive gathering, a kind of summa theological of Fuller’s mathematics, philosophy and design theories. It is all here – in 12 chapters, over 800 pages, charts, drawings, tables and digressions, from synergy to vector matrix to tensegrity to seven axes of symmetry to wrapability and beyond. The result is a major work, whose implications will be debated, acclaimed, questioned, and in some cases, attacked for years to come…You grope for analogies. The Notebooks of Leonardo, The Opera of Paracelsus, Pascal’s “Pensées.” Or Alexander Pope’s remark about Creation: “A mighty maze, but not without a plan.” It is alternately brilliant and obscure, opaque and shot through with moments of poetry.”
Fuller’s was the first systematic “organicist” vision in the design world, the word used here not in the metaphorical sense, but in the technical one that issued from biological and philosophical circles in the 1920s and ‘30s around the principle of “organization.” Fuller had a profoundly scientific intuition, which meant that he was primarily interested in values such as beauty, elegance, and economy as they pertain to a solution, not to cloying ornamental, stylistic properties.
China's Global Energy Interconnection: Exploring the Security Implications of a Power Grid Developed and Governed by China
RAND
In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping endorsed a new initiative, known as the Global Energy Interconnection (GEI), that could help solve humanity's pressing energy and climate dilemmas through the development of a global power grid. The GEI would connect remote renewable sources of energy to global consumption centers using ultra-high-voltage power transmission lines spanning continents and smart technologies. This way, peak demand for electricity in the evening in eastern China, for example, could be met using solar power at noon in central Asia, matching supply and demand across countries and continents more efficiently.
On paper, the proposal presents many benefits. However, concerns about China's intentions and the political, security, and economic implications of a China-led GEI also exist. The GEI is reminiscent of China's similar controversial initiatives to connect with the rest of the world in such sectors as telecommunications, port infrastructure, and rail. In this report, RAND researchers set out to advance knowledge on the GEI and to demystify the potential global security implications associated with this important but poorly understood initiative.
The Ultimate Atlas
Theo Deutinger
With Ultimate Atlas, Theo Deutinger―Austrian architect, writer, designer and author of the acclaimed Handbook of Tyranny―maps the basic data of Earth and its inhabitants to create a total portrait of the planet “from the digital logbook of Spaceship Earth.” How can we keep track of everything that happens on the Earth? How can we share this information with its inhabitants, despite their different languages and cultural backgrounds? Expanding on the visions of Buckminster Fuller and Otto Neurath, Ultimate Atlas answers these questions with the radical leveling of graphic data.
Breaking down this data into 11 sections―Surface, Population, Nature, Food, Energy, Infrastructure, Internet, Wealth, Military, Human and Space―the book gives a page spread to each of the statistics pertaining to these themes (for example, ethnic groups, religions, threatened species, number of motor vehicles per country) and divides it proportionally using vertical lines, in decreasing percentages from left to right. In this way Ultimate Atlas maps the planet with a clarity that is particular to the book form. The distance between the planets of our solar system and the sun; the planet’s most commonly spoken languages; the places where the most chickens are raised; all of this information is lucidly displayed for ready comprehension.
Critical Minerals Market Review 2025
International Energy Agency
The Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025 includes a detailed assessment of the latest market and investment trends, along with their implications for critical minerals security. It provides a snapshot of recent industry developments from 2024 and early 2025 and offers medium- and long-term projections for the supply and demand of key energy minerals, taking into account the latest policy and technology developments.
As a new chapter, the report also includes a comprehensive review of mineral markets and policy developments in different regions. The report will be accompanied by an updated version of our Critical Minerals Data Explorer, an interactive online tool that allows users to explore the latest IEA projections.
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
Published in 2023, Orbital is a literary novel by British author Samantha Harvey. The novel spans 24 hours in the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts onboard the International Space Station. Harvey uses their thoughts and experiences to frame discussions on climate change, humanity’s place in the universe, and the inevitable end of all material reality.
“Before they came here there used to be a sense of the other side of the world, a far-away and out-of-reach. Now they see how the continents run into each other like overgrown gardens – that Asia and Australasia are not separate at all but are made continuous by the islands that trail between, likewise Russia and Alaska are nose to nose, barely a spit of water to hold them apart. Europe runs into Asia with not a note of fanfare. Continents and countries come one after another and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.”
The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth
Zoë Schlanger
The Light Eaters is a deep immersion into the drama of green life and the complexity of this wild world that challenges our very understanding of agency, consciousness, and intelligence. In looking closely, we can see that plants, rather than imitate human intelligence, have formed a parallel system. What is intelligent life if not a vine that grows leaves to mimic the shrub on which it climbs, a flower that shapes its blooms to fit exactly the beak of its pollinator, a pea seedling that can hear water flowing and make its way toward it?
Divided Spheres: geodesics & the orderly subdivision of the sphere
Edward s. Popko with Christopher J. Kitrick
Everyone has seen a geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller or one of his colleagues. Divided Spheres second edition begins with the fundamentals of geodesic domes and explains the spherical design techniques that have evolved since and where they are being used today in fields such as:
biology
astronomy
virtual reality gaming
climate modeling
product design
supercomputers
mapping
children’s games
sports balls
Planetary Mine:Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism
Martín Arboleda
Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies emerge as the new pivot of the capitalist world-system. Through an exploration of the ways in which mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile—the driest in the world—have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the era of supply chain capitalism. Arguing that extraction entails much more than the mere spatiality of mine shafts and pits, Planetary Mine points towards the expanding webs of infrastructure, of labor, of finance, and of struggle, that drive resource-based industries in the twenty-first century.
Theory of Earth
Thomas Nail
We need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment. Climate change and other ecological disruptions challenge us to reconsider the deep history of minerals, atmosphere, plants, and animals and to take a more process-oriented perspective that sees humanity as part of the larger cosmic and terrestrial drama of mobility and flow. Building on his earlier work on the philosophy of movement, Nail argues that we should shift our biocentric emphasis from conservation to expenditure, flux, and planetary diversity. Theory of the Earth urges us to rethink our ethical relationship to one another, the planet, and the cosmos at large.
From Corporate Globalization to Global Co-operation: We Owe It to Our Grandchildren
J. Tom Webb
This book is about the need for an alternative to capitalism. But what does that alternative look like? And given the ever-increasing wealth and power of the 1 percent and the fact that corporations are given carte blanche to turn natural resources into profit, is an alternative possible?
Tom Webb argues that a massive shift to social enterprise, primarily co-operatives, is required. More than 250 million people around the world work for co-operatives, and co-operatives impact the lives of three billion people. This model reduces almost every negative impact of capitalism ― it is a model that works.
Webb outlines the principles co-operatives need to hold to if they are to be a successful alternative to capitalism and examines the public-policy changes needed to nurture such a transition, but he remains neither wildly optimistic nor unduly pessimistic. A better world is possible, but it is not inevitable.
R. Buckminster Fuller Pattern Thinking
Daniel Lopez Pérez
Pattern-Thinking reassesses the work of Buckminster Fuller—unique hybrid between theoretician, architect, designer, educator, inventor, and author—as advancing contemporary models of design research, practice, and pedagogy. Drawing extensively on Fuller’s archive, the book follows his unique process of translation between the physical and conceptual dimensions of design, to redefine our understanding of the relationships between geometry, structure, language, and intellectual property.
Rather than being organized around a chronology of distinct narratives, Pattern-Thinking follows these parallel explorations as the basis for Fuller’s artifacts and inventions. In the space between lines, models, words, and patents, it traces his ambition to measure physical experience in an ever-expanding pattern of relationships, while coordinating these into a conceptual network of words and concepts that shape the basis for his thinking. Advocating a multidisciplinary and political perspective, Fuller’s transversal logic expands the knowledge base of contemporary models of design, which seek to find broader participation and to address new publics.
Healing Earth
John Todd
A stand-out from the sea of despairing messages about climate change, well-known sustainability elder John Todd, who has taught, mentored, and inspired such well-known names in the field as Janine Benyus, Bill McKibben, and Paul Hawken, chronicles the different ecological interventions he has created over the course of his career. Each chapter offers a workable engineering solution to an existing environmental problem: healing the aftermath of mountain-top removal and valley-fill coal mining in Appalachia, using windmills and injections of bacteria to restore the health of a polluted New England pond, working with community members in a South African village to protect an important river. A mix of both success stories and concrete suggestions for solutions to tackle as yet unresolved issues, Todd’s narrative provides an important addition to the conversation about specific ways we can address the planetary crisis.
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Walter Rodney
An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African “mal-development” is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a relevant study for understanding the so-called “great divergence” between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the multiplication of global inequality today.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
David Graeber and David Wengrow
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume.
The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century Volume 1
Fernand Braudel
Braudel's technique, it has been said, is that of a pointilliste. Myriads of separate details, sharp glimpses of reality experienced by real people, are seen miraculously to orchestrate themselves into broad rhythms that underlie and transcend the excitements and struggles of particular periods. Braudel saw the past as we see the present - only in a longer perspective and over a wider field. The perspective is that of the possible, of the actual material limitations to human life in any given time or place. It is the everyday, the obvious that is so obvious it has hitherto been neglected by historians - that Braudel claims for a new and vast and enriching province of history. Food and drink, dress and housing, demography and family structure, energy and technology, money and credit, and above all the growth of towns, that powerful agent of social and economic development, are described in all the richness and complexity of real life.
The Rare Metals War
Guillaume Pitron
The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals — but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?
The green-tech revolution will reduce our dependency on nuclear power, coal, and oil, heralding a new era free of pollution, fossil-fuel shortages, and crossborder tensions. But there is a hidden dark side to this seemingly utopian vision.
Award-winning journalist and documentary-maker Guillaume Pitron reveals that, by breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence — on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium.
These are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, and solar panels, as well as our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other technologies. But we know very little about how rare metals are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs; meanwhile, China has captured the lion’s share of the market and is using it to consolidate its position as a leading global power.
Handbook of Tyranny
Theo Deutinger
Handbook of Tyranny portrays the routine cruelties of the twenty-first century through a series of detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations. None of these cruelties represent extraordinary violence—they reflect day-to-day implementation of laws and regulations around the globe.
Every page of the book questions our current world of walls and fences, police tactics and prison cells, crowd control and refugee camps. The dry and factual style of storytelling through technical drawings is the graphic equivalent to bureaucratic rigidity born of laws and regulations. The level of detail depicted in the illustrations of the book mirror the repressive efforts taken by authorities around the globe.
The twenty-first century shows a general striving for an ever more regulated and protective society. Yet the scale of authoritarian intervention and their stealth design adds to the growing difficulty of linking cause and effect. Handbook of Tyranny gives a profound insight into the relationship between political power, territoriality and systematic cruelties.
Energy Slaves
By Stuart McMillen
Just as a sunken ship provides the opportunity for a coral reef to form, I used the launch of my Energy Slaves comic as an opportunity to create a host of essays about my thoughts on energy.
Energy Slaves is a thoughtful comic that weaves together multiple topics. I discuss environmental and civilisational issues involving energy consumption. I examine these issues both from both personal and societal levels.
After I completed and published the 84-page comic, I took time to ask myself “what does it all mean?”. This led to a 6,500 word essay, which I have split up into seven blog posts – each with plenty of artwork. The essays each cover distinct topics, but could easily be read as one flowing thread:
Hidden in plain sight: our invisible slaves
The mind, but not the muscle: understanding Energy Slaves
Building up steam: our civilisation’s history of collecting energy slaves
Diminishing returns: understanding ‘net energy’ and ‘EROEI’
Powered by energy: the many layers of civilisation
Living within limits: low-energy lifestyles
All part of the problem: our collective wastes of energy
Critical Path
R. Buckminster Fuller
“In our comprehensive reviewing of published, academically accepted history we continually explore for the invisible power structure behind the visible kings, prime ministers, czars, emperors, presidents and other official head men, as well as the underlying, hidden causes of individual wars and their long, drawn-out campaigns not disclosed by the widely published and popularly accepted causes of those wars.”
“What my experience taught me was that if the physical laws thus far found by science to be governing Universe were intelligently and fearlessly employed in the production of ever higher performances per each pound of material, erg of energy, and second of time invested, it would be feasible to take care of all humanity at higher standards of living than had ever been known by any humans - and to do so sustainingly. Evolution seemed to be operating in such a manner as to drive humans to inadvertent accomplishment of their own success.”
”There is not a chapter in any book in economics anywhere about doing more with less. Economists traditionally try to maximize what you have, but the idea that you could go from wire to wireless or from visible structuring to invisible alloy structuring did not occur to them at all. It was outside their point of view - beyond their range of vision. Economists are specialists trained to look at one particular thing.”
Global Energy Interconnection
Zhenya Liu
Global energy network is an important platform to guarantee effective exploitation of global clean energy and ensure reliable energy supply for everybody. Global Energy Interconnection analyzes the current situation and challenges of global energy development, provides the strategic thinking, overall objective, basic pattern, construction method and development mode for the development of global energy network. Based on the prediction of global energy and electricity supply and demand in the future, with the development of UHV AC/DC and smart grid technologies, this book offers new solutions to drive the safe, clean, highly efficient and sustainable development of global energy.
The aim of GEIDCO is to promote the worldwide interconnection of power grids by 2050 in order to optimize the use of electricity coming from every power plant on the planet, employing supercritical UHV (ultra-high voltage) lines for fast, long-distance power transmission as well as smart grids to boost end-use efficiency.
GEI could be the backbone of a decarbonized world economy thanks to the full exploitation of renewables and clean technologies.
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
Robert Wright
Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity
Robert Wright
Francis Fukuyama has argued that the end of the Cold War would also mean the beginning of a struggle for position in the rapidly emerging order of twenty-first century capitalism. In Trust, he explains the social principles of economic life and tells us what we need to know to win the coming struggle for world dominance.
Challenging orthodoxies of both the left and right, Fukuyama examines a wide range of national cultures in order to divine the underlying principles that foster social and economic prosperity. Insisting that we cannot divorce economic life from cultural life, he contends that in an era when social capital may be as important as physical capital, only those societies with a high degree of social trust will be able to create the flexible, large-scale business organizations that are needed to compete in the new global economy.
A brilliant study of the interconnectedness of economic life with cultural life, Trust is also an essential antidote to the increasing drift of American culture into extreme forms of individualism, which, if unchecked, will have dire consequences for the nation's economic health.
Buckminster Fuller Inc. : Architecture in the Age of Radio
By Mark Wigley
The real architecture of our world is that of electromagnetic frequencies. We are constantly being reshaped by countless overlapping waves that pulse through our buildings and bodies. Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio extensively explores Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work and thought, shedding new light on the questions raised by our increasingly electronic world.
The publication investigates Fuller’s multi-dimensional reflections on the architecture of radio and his idea that the real site of architecture is the electromagnetic spectrum. It draws on Fuller’s archive to follow his radical thinking from toilets to telepathy, plastic to prosthetics, nanostructures to networks, and deep data to deep space.
Buckminster Fuller Inc. rethinks the legacy of one of the key protagonists of the twentieth century – a unique amalgam of theorist, designer and performance artist –and becomes a crucial reference point in trying to understand the development and impact of our electronic environment.
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.
Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.
Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order
By Bruno Maçães
From Lenin’s theory of imperialism to Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, a range of Marxist writers have insisted that the unit of social reality within which we operate, whose rules constrain us, is for the most part the world economy. In Beijing, these writers have been and remain in vogue.
China is quickly assuming a central role in world politics. Suddenly, every global story has a China angle, whether it is the growing instability in the Balkans, the coup in Zimbabwe, domestic politics in Australia or the midterm elections in the United States. The traditional opaqueness of Chinese politics and of the Chinese state was once a useful shield, a means of staying out of the limelight. Now it is a way to magnify Beijing’s reach: that we know so little about what China is doing seems to show that it is present everywhere. As Howard French puts it in his recent book, East Asia and the Western Pacific are starting to look less and less like a place configured for the needs and ends of the West and, in a return to the past, ever more like the world briefly dominated by China from the late twelfth century until the early sixteenth. China is already the largest trading partner for almost every country in the region and—short of total war with the United States—its military is quickly acquiring superiority across the region.