Fuller's 1967 address to the AMA's Fourth Congress on Environmental Health Problems, arguing that perception and inherited information are easily corrupted, that environment is an omni-dynamic complex of events, and that comprehensively anticipatory design science — not the reform of man — is the path to a life-favoring Spaceship Earth.

What Quality of Environment Do We Want

Delivered to the Fourth AMA Congress on Environmental Health Problems (New York, April 1967) from Southern Illinois University's Department of Design Science, this essay opens from Eddington's definition of science as "the earnest attempt to set in order the facts of experience" and argues that ordering our environment first requires recognizing how easily perception is deceived and how contagiously misinformation spreads.

Environment as omni-dynamic event complex

Fuller defines environment as "all else of universe but self" — "everything that is not 'me'" — and insists it is not a static stage set but the continually changing sum of all external experience, "omni-dynamic," a complex of events. Some 99.999% of the events constituting physical and metaphysical universe are undetectable by our senses directly. Universe itself is "an aggregate of nonsimultaneous and only meagerly overlapping events," each continually transforming — like a moving-picture scenario whose single frame (a caterpillar) cannot imply the whole (chrysalis, butterfly).

Deceived perception, contagious misinformation

A recurring point: our perceptual faculties are easily deceived and misinformation is "persistent and lightning-like" in its contagion — illustrated by toddlers passing along the artificial concept of "that is mine." Human vision spans less than a thousandth of 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we cannot see the clock's hands move, life growing, or stars and atoms in motion; only memory plus thought, aided by instruments, reveals ultra- and infra-motion. Fuller calls the result "cerebral booby-trapping" by "yesterday's misinformation-polluted mental stimulus environment," naming information pollution as possibly "the most lethal pollution we have."

Spaceship Earth and the "natural" that keeps changing

Fuller restates his Spaceship Earth framing: students wondering "what it would be like to be on a spaceship" are told "you are all astronauts," already aboard a small craft mis-named "Earth," speeding around the sun. What each person calls "natural" is simply the state of the environment first encountered in youth — so airplanes, automobiles, and (for his granddaughter, who said "air" before "Mommie" or "Daddy," and saw thousands of planes before one bird) jets become more "natural" than cows or birds. He introduces the "Third Parent": television, with which the "Berkeley" class of 1966 was the first generation raised, averaging ~1,000 hours a year — often better-spoken and "more interesting" than the blood parents, and the source of the young's loyalty to "the whole human family."

Reliability, forecasting, and quantum frequency of hazards

Two reasoning episodes anchor the design argument. First, wartime analysis at Wright-Patterson Field of failed aircraft-engine parts established the earliest known failure time for each part, so scheduled replacement could nearly eliminate in-flight failure — making aviation extremely reliable and conditioning the young to trust technology. Second, Fuller's 1927 inventory of "all the things that ever happened to man," reordered by severity of hazard, revealed that "the larger and more severe the event, the less frequently it occurred" ("bugs" more often than "earthquakes") — which he identifies with the Quantum Laws of relative frequency and magnitude, meaning the environment can be analyzed and controlled "in powerfully selective scientific terms."

Up/down versus in/out

As in his other writings, Fuller attacks "up" and "down" as flat-earth relics. Scientists still "see" the sun going down; an aviator flying to China is upside-down relative to the United States but not to himself. Properly, "up" means out (omnidirectional, common to all) and "down" means in — toward the center of some specific mass — each inwardness unique and directional.

Reform the environment, not man

The essay's thesis is that man's ability to use his highest faculties is "more favorably affected by design science reformation of the inanimate environment than by direct legalistic, punitive, physiological, or psychological attempts to reform human beings." Fuller dates this commitment to 1927, shaped by his observations of his first daughter (who died before age four) and his reading of behavioral science (e.g., Benjamin Bloom's Stability and Change in Human Characteristics): the young are born with great innate capability that an unfavorable environment can impair. He claims 90% of humanity's problems can be solved only by comprehensively anticipatory design science.

Design-science evidence: cities, ships, and geodesics

Fuller marshals examples of "doing more with less." A hotel compared to the Mauretania weighed ~18 times as much per usable cubic foot yet would shatter under a single wave the ship routinely handled — exposing the inefficiency of land building versus sea/air technology, where competition forces constant design acceleration. He describes floating organic cities (a project for Japan, with a deep triangular concrete base like a bell buoy, combining atomic-reactor cooling with desalination), and the Expo 67 geodesic dome he designed — 20 stories high, 250 feet in diameter, weighing only 800 tons — as an "energetic valve" that admits what humanity needs. He reports his geodesic structures run at roughly 3% of the weight per enclosed cubic foot of alternatives, a thirtyfold improvement in environment-valving capability.

Malthus is wrong

Fuller closes with a political-economic claim aimed at the assembled doctors: science now says "Malthus is wrong" — failure is abnormal; it is "normal for all of humanity to be a success." Between 1900 and 1967 the share of humanity cared for at a high living standard rose from under 1% to 40%, not from finding more resources but from the fallout of more-with-less weaponry technology into the domestic economy. Yet political sovereignties frustrate the integration of world resources; only a "politically transcendental design science revolution" can provide enough for all. The challenge he leaves: will Spaceship Earth's biosphere be "an omnihumanity-sustaining environment or an omnilethal one?"

Sources

what_quality_of_environment_do_we_want/ — book project directory (repo-local source tree)
what_quality_of_environment_do_we_want/index.md — full essay text and project index