The Plowboy Interview with Amory Lovins
(Page 2 of 15)
November/December 1977
By the Mother Earth News editors
When Amory isn't writing, reading, testifying, lecturing, attending seminars, or zipping back and forth across oceans, he can sometimes be found giving wilderness tours. ("I like to do about 100 daysof mountaineering a year, " Lovins admits.) And that's where Kas Thomas recently interviewed Amory Lovins ... between stints as a wilderness guide at Camp Winona, near Bridgton, Maine. During the exchange that resulted, Amory revealed himself to be remarkably articulate, disarmingly mild-mannered, genuinely concerned for the fu ture of the planet, and-in general-a very warm human being.
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PLOWBOY: Amory, for the benefit of those who don't know you, could you explain how you got into the field of energy analysis? How did a physicist happen to get so deeply involved in energy policy?
LOVINS: Through a series of historic accidents. It's true that I'm basically an experimental physicist, or at least I used to be. I was working toward a Ph.D. in physics at Oxford, in England, during the late sixties. Up until that time, I had been raised to be a normal, healthy techno-twit I didn't much care about environmental issues.
Gradually, though, I began reading about the wider problems in the world. And I started to realize that it wouldn't make a heck of a lot of difference to anybody whether or not I solved the problems I was working on in the laboratory. At the same time, I was becoming less and less able to see myself twenty years down the road as an academic physicist.
At about that time—which is to say, the very late sixties—I developed an interest in a wild part of northwest Wales called Snowdonia National Park. A colleague and I had done a lot of mountain photography there, and a little writing, too. We thought we might be able to recover some of our film costs by selling an article to National Geographic so we wrote to the magazine. And they said, "Well this is nice stuff, but it's not what we publish ... it's too atmospheric. But you might send it to Dave Brower at Friends of the Earth, because Dave likes that sort of thing. He might have some suggestions." So we wrote to Dave, and very much to our surprise we soon found ourselves signed up to do one of Dave's "exhibit format" books for FOE.
PLOWBOY: This was in 1970?
LOVINS: Right, late 1970. In the process of doing the book, during the spring of '71, co-photographer Philip Evans and I became very much involved with Dave Brower and the things he was doing. Also, I was getting to be sufficiently disenchanted with academic science at that point that I was willing to jump off and try something else ... so in May of 1971 I resigned my Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford, moved from Oxford to London, and went to work for Friends of the Earth as their British representative, which involved me in a mixture of analysis, writing, speaking, broadcasting, testifying, and lobbying at all levels, from grassroots to Prime Ministerial.
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