It was the middle of an oil crisis and the belief that the world was rapidly running out of everything. My parents, college professors in Boston, started growing an organic vegetable garden and bought a diesel Volkswagen that accelerated to highway speed in about five minutes. They put in a wood stove that entailed their teenage son getting to work splitting and stacking logs, and they installed a solar water heater on the roof of the house. As that teenage son, I was more concerned with swim practice than with world peace and the environment, but I nevertheless learned and remembered from my parents the name of the person guiding these choices. Amory Lovins. He was their guiding light.

Not long ago, I met and talked with him for the first time. Amazingly, he looked exactly the age that I had imagined him thirty-five years ago. Lovins had made his big first splash in 1973, with his book World Energy Strategies, when he was only twenty-six years old. By the time he was thirty-five, he and his wife Hunter had founded the Rocky Mountain Institute, in Snowmass, Colorado, as a base from which to do research and demonstrate practice on sensible energy technologies, pathways, and policies. Lovins's two themes at the time were energy efficiency, the idea that we could get more value out of using less energy by simply using it more intelligently, and renewable energy, which could supply us with what we needed from sunlight, wind, wood, and water. The two themes came together under the name of soft energy paths. Lovins's books of the 1970s and 1980s showed how these made more sense than the hard energy paths we were on. And it was in the 1980s that just about everyone in my school, even those of us on the swim team, were terrified of one particular hard energy source because it had the word “nuclear” there, right before the word “energy.”