"By doing nothing, nothing will be left undone." – why a genius teaches the laws of nature to corporations and how they like it.

Amory B. Lovins, Chief Executive Officer, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), Snowmass, Colorado, USA

Before visiting Amory Lovins, one of the most influential thinkers, writers and implementers in the field of resource efficiency, we already had high expectations after reading his innovative and paradigm shifting publications. We were then delighted to meet one of the living geniuses of our time and a great personality. Amory seems to be the seldom combination of a huge brain – certainly equipped with a higher processing speed and storage capacity than most of us – and respect for humanity and life. What makes his thinking even more amazing is to see it applied to make the world a better place and to see its persistence, with a 30-year track record. Amory Lovins is for sure a person that not only talks, but walks the talk. This starts with the building he lives and works in - we meet him in the Rocky Mountain Institute’s building in Snowmass, built in 1983/84 according to leading edge knowledge on green buildings - and goes to restructuring whole industries (see his last book: Winning the Oil Endgame; www.oilendgame.com) applying the principles he published in “Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution” (www.naturalcapitalism.org).
Natural Capitalism is a rapidly spreading business model that harnesses environmental performance as an engine of competitive advantage. The work of the RMI team is largely based on the thesis detailed in the book:
”Previous industrial revolutions made people vastly more productive when low per-capita output was limiting progress in exploiting a seemingly boundless natural world. Today we face a different pattern of scarcity: abundant people and labor-saving machines, but diminishing natural capital. Natural Capital refers to the earth's natural resources and the ecological systems that provide vital life-support services to society and all living things. These services are of immense economic value; some are literally priceless, since they have no known substitutes. Yet current business practices typically fail to take into account the value of these assets—which is rising with their scarcity. As a result, natural capital is being degraded and liquidated by the very wasteful use of resources such as energy, materials, water, fiber, and topsoil. The next industrial revolution, like the previous ones, will be a response to changing patterns of scarcity. It will create upheaval, but more importantly, it will create opportunities.”
Natural Capitalism is a new business model that enables companies to fully realize these opportunities. The journey to natural capitalism involves four major shifts in business practices, all vitally interlinked (see Harvard Business Review article “A Roadmap for Natural Capitalism” posted at www.natcap.org)

Enjoy Amory Lovins’s selected thoughts and statements of our discussion in the following lines. You may be able to read more about his fantastic work and passion in our book “MyImpact”.

Amory B. Lovins’s selected quotations:
"When we founded RMI we just wanted to have a small organization and work with a group of excellent people. Our mission since 1982 has not changed much: it has always been about fostering the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining.”

"There are three major sectors that can change things in society: government, civil society, and the private sector. The latter is highly effective and tends to have a lot of able people and resources, and that's the one we mainly work with."

"By now we have worked or been asked to work with 80 of the Fortune 500 companies in 22 sectors. We look for high-leverage organizations and apply specific criteria to choosing the right partners."

"Some people criticize that we are working with the enemy. It is a thin line but that's how things change. We are willing to work with companies who did bad things in the past if they sincerely desire to change at a sufficiently senior level."

"We usually try to get one, or better two, leaders in a sector and work with them. Then, we move to another sector because there is so much to do."

"I learned fairly early that there are few disciplines that a motivated, smart person could not learn about as much in a half a year as most people in the field know."

"Diversity is a strength. After learning about enough different things, everything starts to remind you of something. It's comparable to learning languages. I designed an energy efficient house, a luxury yacht, a mining site, a micro-chip fabrication plant and many more."

"Rocky Mountain Institute’s hierarchy of needs is to save the world, have fun and make money, in that order of priority."

"I don't think that the segregation of knowledge in subjects like physics or biology is very useful. That’s not how the world works; this is just how universities work.”

"I have been financing my education through physics consulting from the age of 15."

"I certainly wasn't simply an empty vessel into which one could pour knowledge."

"At some point it was obvious that most of the world's problems were caused by or related to energy. I wanted to do my PhD in this area but no university offered the degree at that time. There was no university, no research and no policy work in this area, just practical commercial positions. So, I resigned from my Fellowship [at Oxford] and moved to London to do energy consulting."

"I got a position with Friends of the Earth because I wrote a book on wilderness safety, while photocopying it met a lab technician who was a wonderful mountain photographer, and took up that art under his tutelage, so we ended up doing an Exhibit Format book for David Brower.”

"Things sometimes come full circle in very strange ways: I used to fight against a copper company and their practices; today I advise them and work with them."

"By doing nothing, nothing will be left undone."

"I learned that if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."

"For me hope, faith and clarity are very important."

"We are relentlessly patient. Big changes in the field of energy take 20-40 years; in the car industry around 30–50 years."

"In 1980 I wrote an article with advice that, if followed, would have avoided the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Well... But it is still constructive to do what needs to be done now. And I am trying not to think in terms of bad people who made mistakes. That won't bring us very far. It's like in Aikido; you honor others' beliefs even if you don't believe in them yourself, and you don’t fight with an opponent but dance with a partner."

"It is important for me to create and leave some durable outcomes. Legacy is different in different walks of lie."

"If you can change how people think of a problem, it is a very lasting outcome."

"I can't imagine not caring, not helping. That's who I am, sorry."

"I would like to manage Natural Capitalism so far that it would become a self-spreading beneficial social virus."

"I care about the world because I think the human experiment is a worthwhile one. It is, I agree, early to tell whether this evolutionary experiment of combining a large forebrain with opposable thumbs is really a good idea. We are still attempting to become much higher primates, and I’d like to contribute to that outcome. The world would come along very nicely without us, a lot better in some respects, but our species has done many worthwhile things and I would like future generations to have a chance to make their contributions, which are now at risk. I think we all have a responsibility to make things turn out a lot better and differently than they seem to be heading towards. Fortunately there is nothing we know in the universe as powerful as 6 billion minds wrapping around a problem, and those brains are evenly distributed, one per person.”

“Resource efficiency is not an aim in itself; it is a means to broader ends. We are trying to create a world that takes nothing, wastes nothing, and does no harm. And I would hope also that besides merely technological improvements that achieve elegant frugality by technical means, we would move towards a clearer sense of what is worth doing and how much is enough and towards a fairer and safer world which has many requirements besides resource efficiency.”

"In all my interactions I hope to become a better human being and supportive of others.”

Some background on Amory B. Lovins:
Amory Lovins was born and grew up on the East Coast of USA and, due to a respiratory infection and lack of gammaglobulin, he was forced to stay at home for longer periods of time as a boy. He used this time to read and learn and later graduated from high school in Amherst, Massachussetts, with parallel math and physics studies at nearby Amherst College, but also focusing on classics, music, photography, and literature. At the age of 16 Amory started attending Harvard University, however, he did not like the specialization required there and so he changed to Oxford, enjoying the freedom of experimenting with more disciplines and becoming a don. After Oxford wouldn’t let him do a doctorate in energy policy (which in 1971, two years before the Arab oil embargo, wasn’t yet considered an academic subject), Amory moved to London to be an energy consultant, which he did for around 10 years, at the same time holding a position with Friends of the Earth.
In 1979 Amory got married to Hunter Lovins with whom he later founded Rocky Mountain Institute and built - with the help of volunteers - the institute’s showcase resource efficient headquarters building. (They divorced in 1999 and she left RMI in 2002.)

Today, Amory’s work focuses on transforming the hydrocarbon automobile, real estate, electricity, water, semiconductor, and many other sectors toward advanced resource productivity. He has briefed eighteen heads of state, held several visiting academic chairs, authored or co-authored twenty-nine books and hundreds of papers, and consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. Much of his work is synthesized in “Natural Capitalism” (www.natcap.org) and “Small Is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size” (www.smallisprofitable.org), one of the Economist’s top three business and economics books of 2002. The Wall Street Journal named Mr. Lovins one of thirty-nine people worldwide "most likely to change the course of business in the '90s"; Newsweek has praised him as "one of the Western world's most influential energy thinkers"; and Car magazine ranked him the twenty-second most powerful person in the global automotive industry.

Amory Lovins has received nine honorary doctorates, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood ("Alternative Nobel"), World Technology, and TIME Hero for the Planet awards, the Happold and Benjamin Franklin Medals, and the Nissan, Shingo, Mitchell, and Onassis Prizes.

Some background on Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI):
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is an entrepreneurial non-profit organization that fosters the efficient and restorative use of resources to make the world secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining. It does this by inspiring business, civil society, and government to design integrative solutions that create true wealth.
Its staff shows businesses, communities, individuals, and governments how to create more wealth and employment, protect and enhance natural and human capital, increase profit and competitive advantage, and enjoy many other benefits — largely by doing what they do far more efficiently.
RMi’s work is independent, non-adversarial, and transideological, with a strong emphasis on market-based solutions. The Institute was established in 1982 by resource analysts L. Hunter Lovins and Amory B. Lovins. What began as a small group of colleagues focusing on energy policy has since grown into a broad-based institution with approximately fifty full-time staff, an annual budget of nearly $8 million (over half of it earned through programmatic enterprise), and a global reach. RMI brings a unique perspective to resource issues, guided by the following core principles:

• Advanced Resource Productivity
• Systems Thinking
• Positive Action
• Market-Oriented Solutions
• End-Use/Least-Cost Approach
• Biological Insight
• Corporate Transformation
• The Pursuit of Interconnections
• Natural Capitalism

Background on the four principles of Natural Capitalism:
1. Radically Increase the Productivity of Natural Resources
Through fundamental changes in both production design and technology, farsighted companies are developing ways to make natural resources—energy, minerals, water, forests—stretch five, ten, even 100 times further than they do today, often with reduced capital cost. The resulting savings in operational costs, capital investment, and time can help natural capitalists implement the other three principles.
2. Shift to Biologically Inspired Production Models and Materials
Natural capitalism seeks not merely to reduce waste but to eliminate the very concept of waste. In closed-loop, non-toxic, and no-waste production systems, modelled on nature's designs, every output either is returned harmlessly to the ecosystem as a nutrient, like compost, or becomes an input for another manufacturing process. Industrial processes that emulate the benign chemistry of nature reduce dependence on non-renewable inputs, make possible often phenomenally more efficient production, and can result in elegantly simple products that rival anything man-made.
3. Move to a "Service-and-Flow" Business Model
The business model of traditional manufacturing rests on the sale of goods. In the new model, value is instead delivered as a continuous flow of services—such as providing illumination rather than selling light bulbs. This aligns the interests of providers and customers in ways that reward them for resource productivity: both profit from doing more and better with less for longer, thus encouraging the first two shifts above.
4. Reinvest in Natural Capital
Capital begets more capital; a company that depletes its own capital is eroding the basis of its future prosperity. Pressures on business to restore, sustain, and expand natural capital are mounting as human needs expand, the costs of deteriorating ecosystems rise, and the environmental awareness of consumers increases. Fortunately, these pressures all create business opportunity. Capitalism productively uses and reinvests in capital; natural capital simply applies this principle to all four forms of capital—not just money and goods but also people and nature.

If you would like to engage with the work of Amory Lovins or get to know more about Rocky Mountain Institute, please visit www.rmi.org,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directly.