A couple of nights ago, Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute gave a talk close by in North Adams, Mass. It was entitled “Winning the Oil End-Game,” as is a book he co-authored which is available free for download.

I wasn’t sure what to expect other than hearing some kind of icon of innovative environmental thinking. I am probably a dinosaur to not have heard of him before, but I was astounded by what he shared in his talk. Within the space of an hour and a half, he laid out a comprehensive plan for the US to leave behind its addiction to oil quickly and easily and, in the process, create 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 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.

Walking out of this talk, I realized how deeply (both consciously and unconsciously) our 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.

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 (by Marshall McLuhan) was this: Only small secrets need protection; big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity.

As far as the Pentagon 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 Dynamics Wizard 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, blue (authoritarian) and yellow (integral thinking) 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 me ask What’s next? and left me wanting to engage much more.