Happy 50th anniversary to “certainly one of the most important things we have published …”
The quote from David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, in November 1976, is from his introduction to an essay by a future Roaring Fork Valley resident. Brower noted that nobody had won the Peace Prize that fall and offered a theory: The Nobel people “had not yet seen what Amory Lovins has to say.”
The essay, “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” was published in Foreign Affairs in October 1976 by a 28-year-old who went on to grow bananas in Old Snowmass and found the Rocky Mountain Institute, now RMI, with revenue over $170 million a year.
That was the party Friends of the Earth threw 50 years ago: an entire issue of its newspaper and talk of a Nobel. Nobody is throwing much of a party on the 50th anniversary of that Foreign Affairs issue, so I brought cake, a calculator and a request.
