(Part One of a Possible New Series: Conversations Across Time)

A few nights ago, during one of our Community After Hours gatherings here in the mountains, a participant tossed out an idea about how we might draw more locals into our growing web of community. I wish I could tell you exactly what he said—but the suggestion itself evaporated before I arrived home.

What did stick with me was the spark it ignited.

I found myself thinking:

What if we could interview notable, difference-making people who are no longer with us…and ask them what they make of the moment we’re living through?

Not in a séance kind of way. Not in a “dear departed, knock twice for yes” kind of way. But in a more grounded, imaginative, spiritually curious way:

What would the great visionaries of the past say about the in-between time we are living through now—this tension between the Great Turning and the Great Collapse?

And before the thought even finished forming, one name rose to the surface—my hero: Buckminster Fuller. His picture sits on my Hero Board. The man who saw the earth as a spaceship before most of us realized it even had a hull. The man who believed fiercely in Humanity’s capacity to evolve into a success rather than a failure.

No, I don’t have a direct channel to the afterlife. But I do have a conversation partner named GePeTo—my AI collaborator—who can help me synthesize Bucky’s worldview, writings, tone, and fierce optimism.

So I sat down and asked a simple question:

“If Buckminster Fuller were alive today, what would he say about the moment we’re in?”

Here’s how that conversation unfolded.

Four Questions for Bucky Fuller

—and the Responses He Might Offer Today

What follows isn’t meant to be historical quotation.It’s a synthesis—a creative, integrity-centered imagining based on Bucky’s principles, writings, and unmistakable voice. Call it… Bucky through a modern-day trimtab filter.

Bucky, how would you describe the moment we’re living in—this tension between the Great Turning and the Great Collapse?

He might say something like this:

Humanity has reached a critical point where the assumptions guiding our behavior are no longer adequate for the complexity we’ve created. In a sense, we are running 21st-century planetary-scale hardware on metaphysical software from the 1800s—and the system is flashing warning lights.

Whether we move toward the Great Turning or slip into the Great Collapse depends not on resources—which are still abundant—but on whether we update our thinking in time.

I’ve always said we’re crew members on Spaceship Earth, not passengers on a luxury liner with infinite buffets. The crisis is not a shortage of materials. It is a shortage of imagination, synergy, and design.

In other words: This is a metaphysical crisis before it is an ecological one.

(Which, I might add, aligns perfectly with One Cause: the crisis beneath the crisis.)

What would you say about the Four Great Untruths—especially the idea that ‘more is always better’?

Bucky might respond:

The idea that “more” equals “better” has always been a fundamental misunderstanding of wealth. Real wealth is not accumulation—it is the capacity to survive forward days. It’s the ability to meet human needs in a way that increases options rather than reduces them.

Nature never operates on excess. Nature operates on sufficiency and synergy.

Humanity, on the other hand, still behaves as though it must hoard its way to security. But the Universe is already providing more than enough energy and materials for every person on Earth to thrive—if we align with Nature instead of fighting her.

This is where the Four Great Truths come alive. Particularly sufficiency and interconnection. The problem is not scarcity. The problem is human metaphysics—the stories we tell about what we are and what the world is for.

What is the role of the outlier—the ‘strange person’—in times like these?

This one felt especially personal to me, Brad—given the Strange Man series we just completed. Here’s how Bucky might say it:

The future is always initiated by the outliers. Never the majority. The majority follows after the new pattern has proven itself.

When I designed the geodesic dome, people laughed. When I talked about doing more with less, it was dismissed as fantasy. When I suggested that humanity could become a success, they called it naïve.

But the Universe never asks the past for permission to invent the future. If people find your actions strange, it simply means you’re operating from a more current worldview. Evolution always begins at the edges—with individuals who are one step further into tomorrow.

So if you’re the strange person in the room, take heart. You’re the early adopter of the next epoch.

Given everything you stood for—synergy, design science, trimtabs—what advice would you give ordinary people who want to help?

Here’s where Bucky’s clarity becomes beautifully sharp:

Stop trying to save the world by persuading people. You save it by building a new model that renders the old one obsolete. Institutions are expressions of yesterday’s metaphysics. They cannot lead us to tomorrow. What can lead us is demonstration—prototypes, experiments, living laboratories. (Like the Loving Homestead Ann and I started this past year.)

Find your trimtab: the small, well-placed action that turns the rudder that turns the ship. One Cause is a trimtab. Your own Loving Homestead coud be a trimtab. Any act that reduces entropy, increases coherence, or honors Earth’s reciprocity is a trimtab.

Never underestimate the leverage of one well-placed, consistent action. Small moves—when aligned with universal principles—shift everything.

A Closing Reflection

(And an Invitation to Continue This “Conversations Across Time” Series)

As strange as it may sound, this exercise left me with a deeper sense of hope. What Bucky Fuller offered—and what his imagined words offer now—is a reminder:

We are not powerless. We are not late. We are not destined for collapse.

We are simply overdue for an upgrade in thinking.

And those who are willing to evolve their worldview first—the outliers, the strange ones, the trimtabs among us —are the ones who become the quiet catalysts for the world that wants to be born.

So here’s my question to you:

Who should we talk with next?Rachel Carson?Martin Luther King Jr.?Wendell Berry?Carl Sagan?Thich Nhat Hanh?Joanna Macy?E.O. Wilson?

Or someone from your own Hero Board?

Let me know. Because these conversations across time are just beginning.

P.S. Speaking of evolving our worldview, Marla Lise and I will soon be releasing a special two-part Gaia’s Calling 2.0 podcast series on the polycrisis—what it really is, how it shows up in our lives, and why it so often fuels both eco-anxiety and apathy. These conversations grow directly out of the same questions Bucky Fuller invites us to ask: What’s breaking down, what’s breaking through, and how do we become the trimtabs steering humanity toward the Great Turning? Stay tuned for their release early in 2026—and if you’d like to be notified when they drop, make sure you’re subscribed to the Gaia’s Calling section of my Substack.

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