An extraordinary talk

A couple of nights ago, Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute (http://www.rmi.org/sitepages/pid23.php)  gave a talk close by, in North Adams. It was entitled ‚Winning the Oil End-Game', as is a book he co-authored. (free for download: http://www.oilendgame.com/) I wasn't sure what to expect other than hearing some kind of icon of innovative and environmental thinking (I am probably a dinosaur to not have heard of him before. And just in case you are too :-) , here is more about the evening). Within an hour and a half, he laid out a plan for the US to leave behind it's addiction to oil - quickly, easily and in the process creating a cleaner environment and very healthy economic growth. What was most astounding was that this wasn't a great plan of possibility - he had figures and proven technologies to back it all up, and in fact is already working with the Pentagon and Walmart and whoever else is willing to embrace his solutions. (Here I swallowed hard at first, more about that further down). "I don't deal in problems, I deal in solutions", is one of his favorite mottos, and it wasn't until after the talk that I realized how very profound and still relatively rare this attitude is in circles concerned with the restructuring of our economy or climate change. Especially for this attitude to not just be positive words, but it being founded in perfectly documented ways of action. He presented so many of these, and so many figures, that I won't even try to repeat them here. You can see a very condensed and quite overwhelming 19 minute clip here: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/51

What was most amazing to me though was walking out of this talk and realizing, how deeply, consciously and unconsciously, thinking about the future of the planet is rooted in dread and fear, and the sense that there is a very big problem (with us humans anyways) All that actually evaporated listening to him. And that is quite outrageous. He seemed to embody the best of the bright green movement (www.worldchanging.com)

Of course what he is proposing is not going to be perfect and no doubt will create its own problems in time as development always does, but it sure looks like a brilliant, do-able and all around uplifting avenue of action. His ending quote ( I forgot by who) was this: Small secrets need protection, big secrets are protected by the public's incredulity.

As far as the Pentagon even sponsoring his book - it certainly rubbed up against my own ideas of who and what is good and who and what is (very) bad. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me that traditional values like those held in the military, combined with holistic forward thinking as done by the Rocky Mountain Institute, could be just the recipe to get things done. As Spiral Dynamic Wizzard  Don Beck said, when he spoke about the paralysis in our postmodern, pluralistic and individualistic (green meme) culture - if green doesn't want to change, (the) blue and yellow (meme) will get together, and form a new green! 
 

And this sense of real potential and progress didn't at all have the effect of breathing a sigh of relief and wanting to lay back. Rather it made you ask - what's next and wanting to engage much more.