Alfred Korzybski was a pioneer whole-systems thinker and founder of general semantics.  Korzybski developed a comprehensive system that located human beings in their environment and a method for improving our perception of the environment and communication with others.  One of his students, Anatol Rapoport, was a founder of general systems thinking.  Here Korzybski is shown with his model of geometric growth which he was one of the first to understand as the driving condition of modern life.  An outline of Korzybski’s principles and linkages to the general semantics communities can be found by clicking here:  (Coming Soon).

Bucky Fuller, who was also a student of Korzybski’s, is most famous for his invention of the geodesic dome.  Fuller was an early and original thinker in the field of sustainability.  He developed an approach to systems theory called Synergetics, a geometry of thought that facilitates thinking in terms of whole and interdependent systems which he derived from his pursuit of sustainability.  Bucky wrote and spoke extensive on the subject of human sustainability starting in the late 1920s.  He was also a prolific inventor. (Coming Soon).

The Environment:  To live, to coexist, with our world, we must clearly understand it and our place in it.  From Emerson’s Nature to Thoreau’s Walden to John Muir and John Burroughs, through the militant, rear-guard environmentalism of the late twentieth century to Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest and Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution and to the Transition movement, we have laid the foundation and built the infrastructure for an architecture of a future sustainable existence.  Ken Burns’ PBS series The National Parks provides a deep and detailed, artfully presented summary of environmental principles that should be studied closely by those seeking to develop a sustainable society.  (Coming Soon)

Arts and Crafts:  To create only that which is useful and/or beautiful is the goal of a movement that, a century ago, started in England and spread to the US.  Inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris in England, and exemplified by Elbert Hubbard’s Roycroft and Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Style, we have the vision for a return to handcraft, to a reunion of head, heart and hand and thereby the rebirth of American manufacturing on a local scale.  Few of us see things made.  We do not know how the commodities we consume are made or even where they come from.  The Arts and Crafts movement provided training, guidelines on style and a considerable literature of both craftwork and social criticism.  Part of what defines us as human is our manipulative hands.  The restoration of work by hand is a restoration of the human essence.  (Coming Soon)

The Human Potential:  The ‘60s witnessed a surge, a hunger, for a deeper understanding of the human condition that was manifested in part by the Counterculture and more substantially as the Human Potential Movement.  The Human Potential Movement is largely the work of George Leonard, Michael Murphy and the Esalen Institute, and a cohort of humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Fritz Perls.  It involved holistic health, art, gardening, the martial arts, various forms of massage therapy and a variety of other approaches.  This movement sought to find personal integrity in an era of change, something we need more than ever today.  (Coming Soon)
 

Frank Lloyd Wright:  Organic architect, the creator of a vast art and a new style of homes that hugged the earth and used natural materials, Wright’s vision ran from practical, Usonian, homes to a self-sufficient city.  Wright’s life is the story of an artistically creative explosion moving through several careers.  His remarkable dwellings dot the country and his legacy lives through his homes at Taliesin and Taliesin West, the Fellowship and the small library of books by and about him.  (Coming Soon)

Emerson and the Concordians:  Emerson and his friends collectively symbolize perhaps the second “shot heard ‘round the world” from Concord.  He and Thoreau between them laid the cornerstone of a romantic reaction to the dawn of the industrial revolution and the stifling of the human spirit that came with mechanization.  They also helped establish a school that sought to understand human nature through the land upon which we live, from which we draw both nourishment and identity.  Concord itself, during its early days, represents an ideal model of the self-sufficient community and an example of a spirit that helped found America.  (Coming Soon)

Eric Hoffer and the Commonplace Philosophy:  Hoffer worked as a farm laborer and longshoreman while writing a sublime philosophy that, first, criticized mass movements such as that behind Nazism—and today global terrorism— and, second, voiced a strong approval of the common Americans he met in his work and travels up and down the West coast.  He left eleven volumes and a series of TV interviews that have inspired uncounted readers.  His simple and independent life is a classic of what I call an “urban Thoreau.” (Coming Soon)

Clifford D. Simak invented pastoral science fiction.  Born and raised in rural Wisconsin he set many of his novels and stories on farms and in villages filled with memorable characters.  Simak aired his views of the failures of technological civilization in a series of stories through the course of a long and eventful life.  While he considered modern human civilization perhaps a failure of one of nature’s grandest experiments he always believed that a core of insightful men and women, people who lived close to the land and flourished in the life of the small community, who sought to learn the secrets of an authentic life, would, in the end prevail.  (Coming Soon)