Hunter Lovins Biography | Hunter Lovins
L. Hunter Lovins (née Sheldon, born 1950) is an author and a promoter of sustainable development for over 40 years, is president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, a 501(c)3 non-profit in Longmont, Colorado and the Chief Insurgent of the Madrone Project.
She teaches sustainable business management at Bard College in New York. She was a founding professor at Presidio Graduate School’s MBA in Sustainable Management program (2002-2010). She also has taught at various universities, consulted for many citizens’ groups, governments, and corporations.
She co-founded with her then-husband Amory Lovins the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) which she led for 20 years. She has addressed the World Economic Forum, the U.S. Congress, the World Summit on Sustainable Development, and other major conferences.
Named a “green business icon” by Newsweek, a millennium “Hero of the Planet” by Time Magazine, she has also received the Leadership in Business Award, among other honors. In 1983, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “pioneering soft energy paths for global security.”
Hunter Lovins Age
L. Hunter Lovins is an author and a promoter of sustainable development for over 40 years, is president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, a 5013 non-profit in Longmont, Colorado and the Chief Insurgent of the Madrone Project. She was born on February 26, 1950, in Ripton, VT, L. Hunter Lovins is 69 years old as of 2019
Hunter Lovins Background
Lovins received her undergraduate degree in sociology and political science from Pitzer College, in Claremont, California and her J.D. from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. In 1979 she married Amory Lovins; they separated in 1989 and divorced in 1999.
A practicing attorney (a member of the State Bar of California), Lovins helped establish and was for six years Assistant Director of the California Conservation Project (Tree People), an urban forestry and environmental education group. She served as policy adviser for Friends of the Earth under David Brower.
Named Henry R. Luce visiting professor at Dartmouth College, Lovins has taught at several universities and is currently a professor of Sustainable Management at Bainbridge Graduate Institute which offers an accredited MBA in sustainable management.
In 1982 she co-founded the Rocky Mountain Institute, a 50-person research center with a $7 million annual budget, half of it earned through programmatic enterprise. She was RMI’s CEO for strategy until 2002.
In 2013, Hunter served as a mentor for Unreasonable at Sea, a technology business accelerator for social entrepreneurs seeking to scale their ventures in international markets, founded by Unreasonable Group, Semester at Sea, and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.
Hunter Lovins Awards
Lovins shared a 1982 Mitchell Prize for an essay on reallocating utility capital, a 1983 Right Livelihood Award, a 1993 Nissan Award for an article on Hypercars, the 1999 Lindbergh Award for Environment and Technology, and several honorary doctorates.
In 2000, she was named a Hero of the Planet by Time Magazine and received the Loyola Law School Award for Outstanding Community Service.
In 2001, she received the Leadership in Business Award and shared the Shingo Prize for Manufacturing Research. In 2005 she received the Distinguished Alumni Award of Pitzer College.
Lovins has written several articles for Unreasonable Group’s social entrepreneurship hub, UNREASONABLE.is.
Lovins is a founding professor of the Bard MBA in Sustainability and serves as a faculty member.
Hunter Lovins Net Worth
L. Hunter Lovins is an author and a promoter of sustainable development for over 40 years, is president of Natural Capitalism Solutions, a 5013 non-profit in Longmont, Colorado and the Chief Insurgent of the Madrone Project. Her pieces of information about marriages, wife, wedding are unknown but stay ready for the update soon
Hunter Lovins Publications
Lovins has co-authored 14 books including Climate Capitalism: Capitalism in the Age of Climate Change (2011), Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (1999), and The Natural Advantage of Nations (2006), Green Development (1998),
Factor 4: Doubling Wealth – Halving Resource Use and Least Cost Energy (1997, together with Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker), Energy Unbound: A Fable for America’s Future (1986), The First Nuclear World War (1984),
Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security (1983), Solving the CO2 Problem (1981). The Way Out: Kickstarting Capitalism to Save Our Economic Ass (2012), Creating a Lean and Green Business System (2013)
Hunter Lovins Husband, Married
Amory Bloch Lovins is a husband of Amory Lovins m. 1979–1999. He is an American writer, physicist, and Chairman/Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute.
He has written on energy policy and related areas for four decades. In 1983, he was awarded the Right Livelihood Award for “pioneering soft energy paths for global security.”
Hunter Lovins Natural Capitalism
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution is a 1999 book co-authored by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins. It has been translated into a dozen languages and was the subject of a Harvard Business Review summary.
Content
In Natural Capitalism the authors describe the global economy as being dependent on natural resources and ecosystem services that nature provides.
Natural Capitalism is a critique of traditional “Industrial Capitalism”, saying that the traditional system of capitalism “does not fully conform to its own accounting principles.
It liquidates its capital and calls it income. It neglects to assign any value to the largest stocks of capital it employs – the natural resources and living systems, as well as the social and cultural systems that are the basis of human capital.”
Natural capitalism recognizes the critical interdependency between the production and use of human-made capital and the maintenance and supply of natural capital.
The authors argue that only through recognizing this essential relationship with the Earth’s valuable resources can businesses, and the people they support, continue to exist.
Their fundamental questions are: What would an economy look like if it fully valued all forms of capital? What if an economy were organized not around the abstractions of neoclassical economics and accountancy but around the biological realities of nature?
What if generally accepted accounting principles recognized natural and human capital not as a free amenity in inexhaustible supply but as a finite and integrally valuable factor of production? What if in the absence of a rigorous way to practice such accounting, companies started to act as if such principles were in force?
The authors of Natural Capitalism say that these choices are possible and “such an economy would offer a stunning new set of opportunities for all of society, amounting to no less than the next industrial revolution. The book has many practical suggestions for companies interested in a sustainable future.
According to the authors, the “next industrial revolution” depends on the espousal of four central strategies: “the conservation of resources through more effective manufacturing processes, the reuse of materials as found in natural systems, a change in values from quantity to quality, and investing in natural capital, or restoring and sustaining natural resources”.
While traditional industrial capitalism primarily recognizes the value of money and goods as capital, Natural Capitalism extends recognition to natural capital and human capital.
Problems such as pollution and social injustice may then be seen as failures to properly account for capital, rather than as inherent failures of capitalism itself.
Hunter Lovins a finer future
The blueprint for an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and the planet.
Humanity is in a race with catastrophe. Is the future one of global warming, 65 million migrants fleeing failed states, soaring inequality, and grid-locked politics? Or one of empowered entrepreneurs and innovators building a world that works for everyone?
While the specter of collapse looms large, A Finer Future demonstrates that humanity has a chance – just – to thread the needle of sustainability and build a regenerative economy through a powerful combination of enlightened entrepreneurialism, technology, and innovative policy.
The authors – world leaders in business, economics, and sustainability – gather the evidence, outline the principles of a regenerative economy, and detail a policy roadmap to achieve it, including Transforming finance and corporations
- Reimagining energy, agriculture, and the nature of how we work
- Enhancing human well-being
- Delivering a world that respects ecosystems and human community.
Charting the course to a regenerative economy is the most important work facing humanity and A Finer Future provides the essential blueprint for business leaders, entrepreneurs, environmentalists, politicians, policymakers, and others working to create a world that works for people and the planet.
Hunter Lovins Rocky Mountain Institute
Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is an organization in the United States dedicated to research, publication, consulting, and lecturing in the general field of sustainability, with a special focus on profitable innovations for energy and resource efficiency.
RMI was established in 1982 and has grown into a broad-based institution with 150+ staff and an annual budget of some $30 million. RMI’s work is independent and non-adversarial, with a strong emphasis on market-based solutions.
The institute, including recently merged Carbon War Room, operates on 9 initiative areas: Electricity Platform, Renewables Solutions, Buildings, Reinventing Fire: China, Smart Island Economies, Mobility Transformation, Shipping Efficiency, Sunshine for Mines, Sustainable Aviation, and Trucking Efficiency.
The work of RMI has benefited more than 80 Fortune 500 companies in a diverse range of sectors.RMI is headquartered in Basalt, Colorado, and also maintains offices in Boulder, Colorado, New York City, Washington D.C. and Beijing, China.
History
In 1978, experimental physicist Amory Lovins had published many books, consulted widely, and was active in energy affairs in some fifteen countries as synthesist and lobbyist. Lovins is a main theorist of the soft energy path.
Later in 1979, Lovins married L. Hunter Sheldon, a lawyer, forester, and social scientist. Hunter received her undergraduate degree in sociology and political studies from Pitzer College, and her J.D. from Loyola Marymount’s School of Law.
In 1982, Amory and Hunter founded Rocky Mountain Institute, based in Colorado. Together with a group of colleagues, the Lovinses fostered efficient resource use and policy development that they believed would promote global security.
RMI ultimately grew into an organization with a staff of around fifty. By the mid-1980s, the Lovinses were being featured on major network TV programs, such as 60 Minutes.
At RMI’s headquarters the south-facing building complex is so energy-efficient that, even with local -40 °F (-40 °C) winter temperatures, the building interiors can maintain a comfortable temperature solely from the sunlight admitted plus the body heat of the people who work there. The environment can actually nurture semi-tropical and tropical indoor plants.
The Lovinses described the “hard energy path” as involving inefficient liquid-fuel automotive transport, as well as giant centralized electricity-generating facilities, often burning fossil fuels such as coal or petroleum, or harnessing a fission reaction, greatly complicated by electricity wastage and loss.
The “soft energy path” which they wholly preferred involves efficient use of energy, diversity of energy production methods (and matched in scale and quality to end uses), and special reliance on “soft technologies” (alternative technology) such as solar, wind, biofuels, and geothermal.
According to the Institute, large-scale electricity production facilities had an important place, but it was a place that they were already filling in the middle 1970s; in general, more would not be needed.
In a 1989 speech, Amory Lovins introduced the related concept of Negawatt power, in which the creation of a market for trading increased efficiency could supply additional electrical energy to consumers without increasing generation capacity—such as building more power plants.
In recent years, RMI has convened a team of designers and engineers to develop a super-efficient prototype automobile, which they’ve dubbed the Hypercar.
In December 2014, RMI merged with Carbon War Room, an organization with similar goals but a different approach. In June 2017, RMI merged with WattTime, an organization providing real-time power plant data to consumer devices for automatic dispatchable power consumption.