Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 12 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
AMORY: And isn't going to run out.
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HUNTER: And isn't going to do damage to the earth somewhere else. Now, if it were a choice between mobility and a sort of ecological purity, I'm crotchety enough that I just might choose my mobility. But the opportunity we now have is to move toward a system of having our cake and eating it too — a system that would allow all of that mobility and provide a high standard of living but would also be protective of the earth, protective of individuals, and much more under our own control. Why deny ourselves that?
PLOWBOY: When do you abandon your economic arguments and say, "Now my values are going to come in. My moral beliefs differ from what the dollar sign says, and I'm going to stand up for them"?
HUNTER: We don't, because we're pluralists; we don't want to impose our values on other people. We honor the diversity in this country, the ability of everyone to make up his or her own mind about exactly that question. So we really try to take great care not to involve our values in our analysis. We live them in our own lives, not in everyone else's.
PLOWBOY: But as you mentioned, the free market system does not address the issue of fairness, of social equity. Do you do anything about concerns such as that?
HUNTER: We work with states, utilities, and to some extent the federal government, trying to design programs that will make poor people less poor. We just don't feel that energy policy is a good means for creating social equity. In general, you just sort of mush up both programs. But it is an urgent social agenda of ours that individuals not have to choose between heating and eating ... and that the parts of the country that are still the way the good Lord made them be left that way for the people in the future to enjoy.
PLOWBOY: In your speech the other night, Hunter mentioned something about communities beginning to work on real security. What was that all about?
AMORY: That's a reference to another of Rocky Mountain Institute's programs — building true security from the bottom up. We've worked on security issues for years, of course, trying to stop the spread of nuclear bombs and to make the energy system more resilient, but we've also come to reexamine what makes people feel secure. It seems to be things that touch their lives directly, like having reliable and affordable necessities, a healthful environment, a sustainable economy, a cohesive society, a legitimate system of self-government, and so on. But these things are most responsively provided at the scale of a city council or block association rather than at the scale of a congress or president. The Economic Renewal Project is therefore a way of putting into practice the concept of building real security by nonmilitary means.
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