Conscious Choice: Hunter Lovins, part two

April 2000

Hunter Lovins, part two

by Ana Arias Terry

Conscious Choice: One of the assertions you make in your book is that Hypercars are going to transform the aluminum, steel, oil, and auto industries. But you also warn of a potential problem that the very efficiencies of Hypercars could bring about. Could you describe your vision of a Hypercar and the seeming pros and cons represented by this innovation?

Hunter Lovins: Too many of us know our neighbors through the windshield, or compete aggressively over square meters of asphalt. The way that we have designed cities says "cars live here." Cities are mostly designed to facilitate the movement of cars, not people. Anyone too young, too old, or infirm to drive, is effectively disenfranchised from access to mobility. From a service stand point that’s what we ought to be seeking to provide — access to mobility — not simply more cars. On the other hand, almost all of us own at least one of the beasts. We all drive around. When this debate came up in a listserv of sustainability activists, I posed the question, "How many of you are planning to get rid of the car you own and drive less?" No one stepped up. In that case, we all better get Hypercars!

People in developing countries want cars. Many may live in a society that travels primarily by bus or bicycle, and they don’t like it. That’s not to say that the bicycle and pedestrian and mass transit activists are wrong. But I’m a big fan of the saying, "You can wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which fills up fastest." Wishing is not going to get rid of the automobile, so we had better figure out a better one. We think that is the Hypercar.

A Hypercar is an ultra-light, hybrid drive, ultra-low-drag vehicle. It can look like and perform like an SUV, Jaguar, Mercedes, or a Porsche. We are not talking about tiny, unsafe, poor performing eco-cars. These can be pickup trucks, buses, vans, whatever. They can be as big as you need them to perform the service, but because of technical features, the vehicles will be dramatically more efficient, better performing and safer than the vehicle that you drive now. As a result, we think that these things will sell themselves. This is not something that the government has to impose upon anyone who wants to drive. It’s rather like compact discs overtaking vinyl records, they will sweep the market because of superior performance.

However, because they would be made primarily out of composite fiber bodies, they will likely do away with much of the steel industry, the coal industry, and possibly the aluminum industry. These things would probably ultimately be powered by fuel cells. Initially, very small, clean internal combustion engines that run at constant speed and constant torque will feed power to electric motors on the wheels. This provides all the advantages of the pure electric car with none of the disadvantages of having to haul around a ton of batteries. They would be cleaner in, say, the Los Angeles airshed because a pure electric car is just an elsewhere emission vehicle, plugged into a power plant.

The Hypercar, if it is fueled ultimately by a hydrogen fuel cell, could also displace most electric generation. Cars running around on the road today have five times the generating capacity of the entire U.S. electric grid. When your Hypercar is not running or moving you around — cars are typically parked 94 percent of the time — the thing would be sitting there being a power plant. The hydrogen fuel cell would put completely clean power back into the grid. You would pull up to hydrogen reformer at your house or work (fuel cells are a great way to power and heat buildings, too, producing very clean, reliable electricity and hot water), hook up to it, swipe a little credit card like device, and let it credit your account with the power you are producing for everyone else.

You have now shut out the rest of the coal industry, much of the conventional electric industry, a good bit of the oil industry — perhaps all of it because you are no longer using oil for cars or for heating buildings.

Exactly how this transition will play out is unclear, but what is clear is that we are now technically capable of disappearing something like a third to a half of the U.S. GNP just through this one Hypercar technology. This transition is coming at us far faster than what we as a society have any clue on how to implement. The first hybrid electric cars have just entered the U.S. market, the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight, and they are pretty good cars, I’m told. The next generations will be even better, when they add fuel cells. A recent report states that such car companies as Toyota are expecting a significant percentage of cars to be fuel cell vehicles by 2010. Such technology changes will alter a good deal of how we think of society. Pogo once said that "we’re confronted by insurmountable opportunities." That really is how we feel when we look at the opportunities offered by natural capitalism.

CC: In the "Food for Life" chapter, you talk about the benefits of looking at "nature as model and mentor." In your discussion about alternatives to heavy-duty livestock feedlot production, you suggest that it is important to let the animals — particularly cattle — graze as their ancestors were built to do. Could you elaborate on the concept of ecologically founded grazing and range management?

HL: Dr. Allan Savory at the Savory Center for Holistic Management in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has developed a whole approach to land management and, indeed to all decision making, that I think is spherically sensible. Any way you look at it, it makes sense. As a wildlife biologist in Rhodesia, he noticed that where the native herds would sweep across the landscape, the land was in good ecological health. Where the native people raised cattle, there wasn’t too much degradation. Where the white folks raised cattle, there was desertification, erosion, and a general degradation of ecological health, including loss of species diversity.

It occurred to him that by mimicking the way in which much of the earth co-evolved with large grazing herds, you could actually restore diversity, raise water tables, reverse desertification, and enhance the health of the land. He points out that much of our landscape can’t exist in a healthy state without grazing animals. It’s just that we’re grazing them the wrong way. We turn them out on huge tracts of land and let them select which plants they want to eat. There are no predators to group them or move them, no natural rational to graze one area and then move on to the next. Fences contain them, so they spread out to eat what they like, then we call the land desertified.

Instead a growing number of ranchers are doing whatever it takes to mimic nature: opening and closing water holes, using fences to dense pack the herds so that they eat everything and then move on, so that the land recovers. Their hooves chop the surface of the soil, their manure fertilizes it, and the seeds collect in these little hoof pockets and germinate. I have stood at a drift fence out in the Great Western Desert, on the edge of the Deep Creek Mountains on the Nevada/Utah border, and looked at where a rancher has been practicing this technique and where his neighbors have not. This rancher talked the BLM into putting up a drift fence so that his neighbors’ cattle would not come into his experiment. His land is tawny. You can see the grass. He goes out and points out to you a dozen different species of grass. You step across the fence, and the land is grey and dusty. It only has spiny, inedible plants, and there is essentially no grass.

When the pony express riders came through this country, they rode through chest high grass everywhere. What this guy is doing is bringing it back through the intelligent use of grazing. Much of the western lands and, indeed Savory says, much of the lands of the world are going in the wrong direction, desertifing, in part, because we’re pulling the animals off them.

Many of these lands require the presence of grazing animals. Raising beef at a community level, mimicking nature, restoring the health of the land, is a very viable part of the fourth principle of natural capitalism, reinvesting in natural capital. It’s when we start to stick the animals in feed lots and feed them corn or exotic grasses on which they wouldn’t naturally graze that you get the problems of concentration and manure build up. You can no longer distribute the manure naturally to the land that needs it. You get fatty cattle that contribute to health problems in the people that eat them. It’s a system of lunacy.

I buy my beef from a local rancher. That side of beef never saw a feedlot, and I’m here to tell you, it is the tastiest beef around. There are now some people around, like this brilliant guy named Dan Dagget of Flagstaff, Arizona, who’s putting together a program called Eco Results. This would be a way that individuals could contribute to farmers and ranchers who are practicing these techniques, and thereby invest in restoring the health of the land. Dan goes around giving speeches about people such as David Ogilvie, who restored an area of willows and cottonwoods along a streambed to such a state of health that it now supports the largest and fastest growing population of endangered southwestern willow flycatcher in the world. And this guy is a rancher.

Lots of the western ranchers know their land and care about it. But the way that the beef industry has gone with the advertisers saying you want the rich marbled fat beef, there is less of a market for these guys. There are some folks down in southern Arizona called the Malpais Group that are marketing their natural beef. We just had some ranchers in this area set up a similar program. What can individuals do? Find out about who in your area is growing healthy beef and support them, buy from the little guys. Similarly, support the growing movement called CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, in which people who have organic farms sell shares of their produce. RMI belongs to one of these. As soon as the growing season starts and all the way through the fall, our produce comes from a neighbor farm. It’s a way of keeping rural communities intact and keeping the wisdom of organic farmers on the land.

CC: How has natural capitalism changed your life? What’s your trick for graciously answering not only what must appear like an infinite number of questions, but so many of the same questions dressed up a little differently over and over? What are your days like at work? What drives you? What interests and hobbies do you have?

HL: I have always been driven by the search to be effective and to contribute. It’s assumed that what makes Americans happy is acquisitiveness, getting and having. I don’t think it’s true. What really makes people happiest is contributing. This is true at a community level, personal level in a relationship, and professional level. People do need to make a living wage. It’s hard to really contribute and to be creative if you feel everyday at work like you are being cheated. But what really attracts the brightest people to companies is not the money, it’s the ability to be creative, and the feeling that they are contributing.

The title I wear is co-CEO for Strategy for the Rocky Mountain Institute. That may mean I’m spending the day here with the RMI group that helps companies implement natural capitalism, designing a new program with them. Next week a major industrial group will be coming here for three days to learn how they can implement natural capitalism. The week after that I’ll be on the road, lecturing and consulting.

Amory and I have divvied up the waterfront. He is doing more work now with the corporations; I am doing more work with communities and universities. In April, we will both be out in San Francisco receiving a Time magazine award for "Heroes of the Planet." It’s a somewhat presumptuous title, but such recognition helps promote the work of RMI.

I’m a volunteer fireman and emergency medical technician here in my own community. At RMI we are also the stewards of a thousand acres of ground that we are restoring. So I may be out on the land watching how the elk herds move across it, or checking the population of coyotes. We’re trying to encourage predators to come back, and in the past few years have welcomed coyotes, bears, and now mountain lions back on this property.

Writing takes up a fair amount of time. I’m working now on trying to think through how the principles of natural capitalism can reverse the problems with, say, the World Trade Organization. If that’s successful, it may grow into articles or even a book.

There is obviously a lot of administrivia that goes along with running any institution. One of the things that we are doing here now is applying the principles of natural capitalism to ourselves and thinking through how all of RMI’s operations can be more efficient. We also are what Peter Senge calls a learning organization, so a fair amount of time goes to thinking through how what we are doing works, where it doesn’t work or can work better, and inventing new approaches.

John Muir once said, "If you tug on any part of the universe, you find that it is connected to all of the rest of it." Artificial distinctions between one line of work and another are something that we try to avoid. RMI seeks what we call a vision across boundaries and that’s my responsibility — trying to figure out how what we are doing in one area relates to another, and how we can make it all more effective.

When all of that is done, I try to save a little time each day to spend on a horse. I ride rodeo, and this year am aiming to be on the national championship Polocrosse team from the Rocky Mountain zone (polocrosse is an Australian game of lacrosse on horseback). I run a little company called Nighthawk Horse Company that buys and sells horses and imports Polocrosse gear into the country.

Of course, there are only 36 hours in a day...

For more information on the Rocky Mountain Institute visit their web site.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: