Amory and Hunter Lovins: Spokespersons for a Sustainable-energy Future
(Page 13 of 15)
July/August 1984
By the Mother Earth News editors
HUNTER: If that works, then we may have a concept that can give individuals something they can do about ending the arms race.
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PLOWBOY: Hold on a minute! You just made a jump from promoting community self-reliance to stopping the global arms race. Would you mind running that by me again?
AMORY: In the past few decades, we have fallen into the trap of supposing that security comes from ever larger piles of weapons. Yet although our country now has 30,000 more nuclear bombs than it had in 1945, we can all be devastated at any second. Whatever our military budget of $10,000-a-second is buying us, it's not buying us real security.
HUNTER: Present policy with the Soviets doesn't work. It's not cost-effective. If, on the other hand, communities and regions and therefore our country felt secure, then the urgency we feel as a nation to throw our weight around and maintain manifestly unnecessary stocks of nuclear bombs might greatly diminish.
If you enjoy the elements of security — what used to be called Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness — you can retain them only by making sure that your neighbors have them, too ... so you don't worry about their coming to take away what you have and they don't. If we reverse our whole military posture of threatening the Soviets and start offering them as much security as we can push out the door, we start making the globe safer for everyone. We should make others feel more secure, not less, whether on the scale of the village or the globe.
PLOWBOY: How do we offer this security to the Russians?
HUNTER: Look first at what is making them feel insecure. There are a number of fronts. Soviet, agriculture is about to collapse. Their system of production is not working. Help them with that. Try to give away our successes because, in a very selfish sense, that's what will make us more secure.
This doesn't mean that we trust and like the Soviets. I don't trust them. I really don't feel good about their intentions. On the other hand, I don't feel good at all about blowing each other up because we don't trust each other's intentions.
PLOWBOY: Excluding the possibility of a nuclear war, what do you think is going to happen in the next few years? What does the future hold?
AMORY: Surprises.
HUNTER: All of us in this energy business owe our careers to a single shock in 1973, but we cheerfully assume a surprise-free future.
AMORY: It's not going to be like that at all. In 1974, I wrote a list of the 20 most likely surprises in energy policy over the next couple of decades. Near the top of the list were a major reactor accident and a revolution in Iran.
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