[deadline: 4/10/2010]
The Buckminster Fuller Institute announces the Call for Entries to the 2011 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, an annual $100,000 prize program to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. In a statement about the Challenge, The Buckminster Fuller Institute explains the background of the prize program: Short term reductionist thinking which dominates all industrialized societies is a fundamental cause of the massive social, economic and environmental deterioration our world is confronted with today. It is now painfully obvious to many that most attempts by civil, corporate, scientific, academic and government sectors to deal with these breakdowns, despite good intentions and significant investment, often exhibit little more than a reflexive default to the same reductionist approach that created the problems in the first place. Little if any attention is ever directed toward optimizing whole systems. Instead the focus remains riveted only on improving various parts in isolation. Not surprisingly, when it comes to solving complex problems, actions are typically fragmented, disjointed and piecemeal. The net result: on a global scale the level of deterioration is rapidly increasing and imbalances have already reached crisis proportions […] Info: http://challenge.bfi.org