#061 We're Gonna Reinvent Everything
A conversation with legendary author, educator & rancher, L. Hunter Lovins
Hunter Lovins has been a highly influential figure for many decades in the regenerative economies movement. She’s a best-selling author, including of the seminal Natural Capitalism, with Paul Hawken and Amory Lovins. She’s also founder and President of Natural Capitalism Solutions, founding Professor of Sustainable Management at the Bard MBA, a pioneering rancher, and Chief of Impact at Change Finance.
Hunter sports her Humungous Fungus Award during our conversation!
“When the Kentucky coal museum puts solar on its roof because it’s cheaper than hooking to the coal fired grid at its door step, the fossil era is over. Now we have to decide, as you say, what kind of a world do we want to live in?”
Hunter consults for companies and countries around the world, has been named Millennium TIME Magazine Hero of the Planet, and was awarded the 2008 Sustainability Pioneer Prize by the European financial community for her decades of pioneering work. I could go on. Oh, she also recently took out the Humungous Fungus Award – and we will talk about that!
I heard Hunter say not long ago, before the pandemic, that her research suggests the regenerative economy is already bigger than the extractive one in her home state of Colorado. But that nobody knows. So I asked Hunter if she’d join me to talk about it, along with how things are changing right now, and of course some of her brilliant life story.
Like my other extensive conversations with legendary figures in this space, like Hazel Henderson and Paul Hawken, this one drifted into ever more meaningful and heart felt exchanges as we went.
Our conversation includes why she ditched being a lawyer and accidentally became a regenerative rancher, her retrospective view on change and approaches to it over the decades (spoiler alert – where were the stories?), and the growing number of calls she’s receiving asking how to build a regenerative economy out of the COVID collapse. And on that, so much of her thinking, she says, has changed in just the last couple of months.
Hunter’s is a trans-partisan vision where we’re all in for societies that are better for people and planet – genuine prosperity. She’s helped set up so much of the world’s work to this end – including more recently the Wellbeing Economy Alliance and the Regenerative Communities Network.
Dana Meadows’ famous leverage points piece – Places to Intervene in a System – was seeded on Hunter’s whiteboard. This prompts a moving conclusion to our conversation reflecting on some of Dana’s profound insight.
We’re up against it, but we can still make something good of this situation, Hunter believes. Tectonic shifts are upon us. So where and how do we go from here?
This episode was recorded online on 7 May 2020.
Get more:
Hunter’s organisation, Natural Capitalism Solutions.
Her most recent book ‘A Finer Future: Creating an economy in service to life’.
John Fullerton’s 8 principles (or qualities, as he’s currently speaking of them) of a regenerative economy.
Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll).
Theme music:
The System, by the Public Opinion Afro Orchestra.