One of Fuller’s Dymaxion cars (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

But it was never meant to be a car. At various stages, Fuller called it a 4D transportation unit, an omnimedium plummeting device and a zoomobile. One of the earliest sketches, dating from 1927, described it as a “triangular framed auto-airplane with collapsible wings.” The wings were supposed to inflate like a “child’s balloon” as three “liquid air turbines” lifted the teardrop-shaped three-wheeler off the ground.

The notion of a hybrid vehicle was not completely implausible when Fuller began designing his Dymaxion. The aviator Glenn Curtiss exhibited a prototype Autoplane at the Pan-American Aeronautical Exposition in 1917, and the engineer René Tampier actually got his Avion-Automobile airborne at the 1921 Paris Air Salon. However their technology was conventional: fixed wings powered by spinning propellers. Fuller’s vision called for jet engines to provide instantaneous lift, no runway required.

The requisite materials didn’t yet exist. In the late ’20s there were no alloys strong enough to withstand the heat and compression of jet propulsion (let alone inflatable plastics sturdy enough to support a plane in flight). So Fuller opted to start by building “the land-taxiing phase of a wingless, twin orientable jet stilts flying device,” as he explained to his biographer Hugh Kenner several decades later. Fuller also told Kenner that he “knew everyone would call it a car.” By the early ’30s, even Fuller himself was doing so, and after his three prototypes were built, he never returned to the omnimedium zoomobile concept.

Yet the reasoning behind his transportation unit was groundbreaking, even more radical than the jet stilts themselves. Fuller was conceiving an alternate way of living. To his biographer Athena Lord, he described that life as the freedom of a wild duck.

The zoomobile was a byproduct of Fuller’s earliest ideas about architecture, which were inspired by his time in the Navy. The sailor “sees everything in motion,” he wrote in a 1944 article for American Neptune. “Sailors constantly exercise their inherent dynamic sensibilities.” For Fuller, this was the natural way of life, intruded upon by landlubbers with their manmade property laws and heavy brick buildings.

For a seaman, like a duck, there was no earthly reason why a home ought to have a permanent fixed address. Fuller envisioned nothing less than an Air Ocean World Town, in which housing could be temporarily docked in any location, transported by Zeppelin. To achieve this, he needed the housing to be modular and self-sufficient, and he required a way for people to get around without roads. Zoomobiles promised complete air-ocean mobility for a global population unconstrained by cities and even national boundaries.

In other words, Fuller was trying to facilitate a self-organizing society, much as he’d observed in natural environments. Naturally inspired — an early premonition of what today gets called biomimesis — his global human ecosystem would allow people to live more harmoniously with nature. Yet his utopia was not a return to some imagined primeval idyll, for he never considered humans to be like other animals. Man is “adaptive in many if not any direction,” he wrote in his 1969 book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. “Mind apprehends and comprehends the general principles governing flight and deep sea diving, and man puts on his wings or his lungs, and then takes them off when not using them. The specialist bird is greatly impeded by its wings when trying to walk. The fish cannot come out of the sea and walk upon land, for birds and fish are specialists.”

To foster a human ecosystem in which self-organization would come naturally for Homo faber, Fuller had to extend human capabilities beyond what was technically possible in the 1930s. He needed new materials and techniques to fully decouple us from our primate past.

We should be grateful that he didn’t pull it off. To set billions of people loose in private jets would be an ecological disaster. As Fuller later came to appreciate, there are environmental advantages to cities where resources can easily be shared.

However the practical flaws in Fuller’s plan are trivial compared to the conceptual promise. His world, like ours, was built on political and economic hierarchies with vast control over resources. Through their tremendous leverage, those hierarchies have profoundly altered our environment, increasingly for the worse. Nature can inspire different social structures, self-organizing and universally local. From flocks of ducks to deep-sea fish, we can sample different relationships as the basis of different political and economic systems, no jet stilts required.

Even the simplest organisms can suggest alternatives to current power structures. For instance, slime molds can solve complex engineering problems without a central nervous system: Set a slime mold atop a map of the United States with dabs of food in place of cities and the organism will find an optimal way to spread itself from coast to coast, forming a feeding network closely resembling the layout of our interstate highways. Slime molds achieve this feat through distributed decision-making, in which each cell communicates only with those nearest. The creature uses a form of consensus different from anything ever attempted by a government.

Slime molds can provide a new model for democracy, a novel method of voting that could prevent political gridlock. Imagine an electoral college system in which there were many tiers, such as states, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, households, and individuals. Individual votes would be tallied resulting in a household consensus, households would be tallied resulting in a block consensus, blocks would be tallied resulting in a neighborhood consensus, etcetera. (Like states in the present electoral college, households, neighborhoods and cities with larger populations would have more votes, but all votes for a household, neighborhood or city would be cast as a unit. ) Equivalent to individual cells in a slime mold colony, people would interact most with those closest to them. Their interactions would be intimate and intense, driven by a palpable sense of mutual responsibility. Real discussion would replace mass-media rhetoric. National decisions would emerge through local confluences of interest. Political gridlock is caused by the buildup of factions and breakdown of meaningful communication. Slime molds don’t have that problem. By emulating them — schematically, not biologically — we can be as fortunate.

Slime molds suggest just one opportunity. At the opposite extreme, the global cycling of chemicals such as methane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide may provide models for more equitable distribution of wealth and a less volatile world economy.

Maintained by natural feedback loops involving all life on Earth, the methane, nitrogen and carbon cycles optimize the use of global chemical resources. There is no waste; every substance is valuable in the right place. That’s because organisms have co-evolved to exploit one another’s refuse. (The most familiar example is the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants and animals.) Humans can likewise cycle resources through reciprocal relationships. A minor example of this — already being tested in some cities — is the installation of industrial computer servers in people’s homes where the machines can provide warmth while keeping cool. These so-called data furnaces simultaneously save the expense of heating for families and air conditioning for cloud service providers. A global online marketplace for needs could facilitate many more such exchanges, making waste into wherewithal, transforming want into wealth. The world economy is vulnerable because of vast and increasing income disparity, reinforced by constraints on exchange which must be channeled through banks, mediated by money. Resource cycling requires no such funnel, and inherently tends toward equilibrium. We might even expect to see the co-evolution of supply and demand between communities, much as happens with communities of bacteria.

With the zoomobile, Fuller pioneered a form of biomimesis that is not reductionist but systemic. Once established, the system is feral, evolutionary, experimental. The results are unpredictable. Ultimately it’s about setting up an environment for the organic development of a different kind of society.

Fuller the sailor was never fixed in his thinking. “I did not set out to design a house that hung from a pole, or to manufacture a new type of automobile,” he informed Robert Marks in The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller. At his best, his mind was as free as a zoomobile. “I started with the Universe,” he said. “I could have ended up with a pair of flying slippers.”