At the A-list conferences on sustainability and business, Amory Lovins is the speaker whom all the other speakers mention from the stage. He’s the touchstone — the talisman that others figuratively hold aloft in order to reaffirm their own sustainability bona fides and intellectual chops.

It’s not clear whether Lovins even notices — or cares. He sits in the front row, bespectacled and mild mannered, and mostly appears to be curious — about everything — and to have no time for fluff. There’s work to do. He’s there to do it.

And thus has it been for Lovins for decades, especially since his 1982 cofounding of the famous Rocky Mountain Institute, an entrepreneurial, nonprofit “think-and-do tank” that, according to Lovins, continues to be misunderstood. “Our DNA is that of practitioners, not theorists. We do solutions. Occasionally I read in the press, to some dismay or amusement, that we are an environmental think tank; we are actually neither,” he says. “Our work is in advanced energy and resource efficiency.” Notably, RMI claims that half its revenues are earned helping implement what it learns in research. (The other half are from typical nonprofit sources.)

Lovins has worked the intersection of sustainability and business for longer than most of us have known the intersection exists, along the way authoring dozens of books, including the pathbreaking Natural Capitalism — Creating... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.