Medard Gabel

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.