Jonathon Keats Quotes - Page 3

I would certainly never want to inflict anything on the world exactly as [Buckminster Fuller] envisioned it because there is a technocratic worldview that I find horrific.

[Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.

I would say that what the value of talking about and thinking about a dome over Manhattan is that [Buckminster] Fuller has identified a scale of action I think is actually really compelling.

At this point in history, the desperate need for building a sustainable society and for managing energy usage makes for a really - of vast importance that we need to place on where we live and how we live in those places.

You have the insanity that is geo-engineering which is a case in which you say the planet is heating up. Let's spray some aerosol and cool it down.

I think that what we need to do is we need to think about what scale makes sense for dealing with our need to live within a habitable zone and to do so without using air conditioning and heating in the way that is so incredibly expensive to the environment.

The city is better because the city has an economy of needs and once you're talking about a city, maybe you can start talking about how you manage the climate of that city as a whole. Not by putting a dome over it but by more passive means that can potentially be put together in creative ways.

Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.

Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.

I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.

I think that I feel that I have no choice but to operate under the illusion, which may be a delusion, that we can somehow get past the destruction that we have brought and that we are causing today.

That is to say that despair does not seem to be in any way potentially to be productive.

What we need to do is we need to say, how can - how can we operate independently in terms of putting together these various technologies in order to be able to make the world a better place?