FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, visit: http://challenge.bfi.org

Contact: Matt Barron, Tel: 718.290.9283, Email: challenge (at) bfi (dot) org

FEBRUARY 4th, 2008, NEW YORK CITY — The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) is pleased to announce that twenty-four outstanding entries to the BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE have been advanced to the next stage of the selection process.

“The 250 entries we received for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge included a very broad and varied set of initiatives, all characterized by a deep sense of purpose, stewardship and humanitarian activity. To witness such a demonstration of responsibility, initiative and sense of purpose was very inspiring. While only twenty-four were selected to advance to the next round, every entry deserves respect and appreciation”, remarked Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

As a group, the twenty-four solutions advanced are a set of world-changing applications of technology and know-how that have the potential to revitalize struggling economies, restore fragile environments, provide food, water, and shelter to those most in need, and shift our fundamental understandings of how energy is produced and stored. The entries present diverse solutions that range from a modular, carbon-neutral home; a comprehensive plan for regenerating the environment and economy of Appalachia; a simple and elegant plan for farm and ranchland sustainability; to a broad and expansive new theory of energy and atomic structure. A common thread linking all of these solutions is a deep concern for humanity, and an inspired commitment to addressing - and indeed solving - the most critical issues facing the world today.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge jurors will engage in final deliberations in mid-March, 2008. A winner will be selected in April. The distinguished jurors for the 2007-2008 Challenge are: JANINE BENYUS, celebrated natural sciences writer, innovation consultant and author of six books including The New York Times bestseller Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Co-Founder of The Biomimicry Institute; SIR NICHOLAS GRIMSHAW, renowned architect and President of the Royal Academy of Arts, London; HAZEL HENDERSON, futurist, author and consultant on sustainable human development and socially responsible business and investment; founder, Ethical Markets Media, llc; DANNY HILLIS visionary inventor, computer scientist, author, engineer; Chairman and CTO of Applied Minds, Inc., co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation; HUNTER LOVINS, President and founder of Natural Capitalism Solutions and co-author of nine books and hundreds of papers, including the 1999 bestseller Natural Capitalism; WILLIAM MCDONOUGH, sustainable design visionary, bestselling author, and founder of William McDonough + Partners, a leading architecture firm practicing cradle to cradle design; and VANDANA SHIVA, renowned physicist, author, and environmental activist, founder and Director, Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, New Delhi.

Inspired by the life and work of visionary 20th Century futurist and global thinker, R. Buckminster Fuller, The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks solutions that epitomize what Fuller called the trimtab principle - how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change.

The $100,000 prize will be conferred to the winner of the first Buckminster Fuller Challenge in late June 2008 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

For more information, visit http://challenge.bfi.org