Medard Gabel | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Designer, Social Scientist |
| Period | 1970-present |
| Notable works | Global Inc. and Designs for a World That Works for All |
| Website | |
| bigpicturesmallworld | |
Medard Gabel is the executive director of the non-profit research and development organization EarthGame. He also leads BigPictureSmallWorld and the Global Solutions Lab. He is the former executive director of the World Game Institute and director of The Cornucopia Project and the Regeneration Project at Rodale Press. He has done work for Tanzania on regenerative agriculture, as well as work in Costa Rica, Spain, The Netherlands, Japan, China, Malaysia and elsewhere. He has written six books on world food and energy problems and solutions, the U.S. food system, multinational corporations, and strategic planning.
Medard Gabel’s seminal 1985 paper on regeneration, "Regenerating America: Meeting the Challenge of Building Local Economies" is the acknowledged first appearances of the idea of regeneration in the social and economic spheres. His prophetic 1975 and 1980 books Energy, Earth and Everyone were the first globally comprehensive inventory and explication of all renewable energy sources, as well as plans for the roll-out of renewable energy and the phase out of fossil and nuclear fuels. Much of what the book envisioned and called for has or is happening.
Mr. Gabel has designed and developed a variety of global problem solving and data visualization tools, such as the World Game Workshop, of which he was the chief architect and developer while the executive director at the World Game Institute, and the Earth Dashboard— the most compete rendering of the vital statistics for “Spaceship Earth” yet developed. He has also developed software applications, such as Global Recall, global databases, such as Global Data Manager, Internet based global simulations, such as NetWorld Game, and games and short films. He has worked as a consultant and/or run workshops for the UN, U.S. Congress, the governments of the Netherlands, Tanzania and Spain, as well as World Bank, UNEP, GM, Motorola, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, Exxon, AT&T, DuPont, British Airways, and other major multinational corporations. He worked with Buckminster Fuller for 12 years on a variety of projects—from work on the foundations of a Regenerative Resource Industry to participating in the first and designing and running subsequent World Game Workshops, to organizing Fuller’s archives, arranging the 42-hour video lecture by Buckminster Fuller presenting “everything I know,” and designing multiple versions of the World Game, including the World Climate Change Game, World Environment Game, World Diversity Game, and the online NetWorld Game. He is now working on WorldGame 2.0 with colleagues from the World Game Institute and the Global Solutions Lab, and writing a number of books.
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Arcology, a portmanteau of "architecture" and "ecology", is a field of creating architectural design principles for very densely populated and ecologically low-impact human habitats.
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
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A multinational company (MNC) is a corporate organization that owns or controls the production of goods or services in at least one country other than its home country. Black's Law Dictionary suggests that a company or group should be considered a multinational corporation if it derives 25% or more of its revenue from out-of-home-country operations. A multinational corporation can also be referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation, or a stateless corporation. There are subtle but real differences between these terms.
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James Tennant Baldwin, often known as Jay Baldwin or J. Baldwin, was an American industrial designer and writer. Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work was inspired by Fuller's principles and, in the case of some of Baldwin's published writings, he popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin was a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. In his career, being a fabricator was as important as being a designer. Baldwin is noted as the inventor of the "Pillow Dome", a design that combines Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with panels of inflated ETFE plastic panels.
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Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil.