The Benefits of Regenerative Design

"The real news in all of this is that if living machines are allowed to develop in the twenty-first century, we begin to break down (and this was what Bucky was getting at) the old inequities between north and south and rich and poor; they don't exist in the same way in this new context.

The tropical world is so poor, and the northern world has some of the mineral resources, the libraries, and knowledge to bring to bear. The arid areas, now so "depoverished," have certain kinds of intelligence that are brought to bear in this age. So living machines actually can do as well in Beirut as they can in Iowa. This kind of concept of an ecological design is breaking down the global inequities. It strikes right at the heart of so much of Bucky's thinking.

We know and have already proven that living machines could reduce the amount of space that humans require by 90 percent. In other words, we could give back the wilderness to itself, by miniaturizing the processes that sustain us. That's extraordinary."

-- John Todd