The high priest of energy efficiency came on line in November 1947, the second child of Gerald and Miriam Lovins. Ukrainian forebears on both sides of Lovins's family had come to America with the massive wave of Eastern European immigrants between 1889 and 1905. Gerald's father arrived alone at age 16, eventually settling in Denver, where he opened a pharmacy. Miriam's Ukrainian parents were first cousins. ("That's sup­posed to result in imbeciles," she laughs.)

Mriam was a social service administrator, Gerald an engineer who custom-designed and built scientific instruments. They were in their forties when Amory and Julie (now a computer linguist in California) were born. Husband and wife ran Lovins Engineering Company from the basement of a small house in Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Amory's career as a contrarian began shortly after birth. He had severe food allergies. Desperate to find something he could digest, if only to cut down on diapers, his parents finally hit upon a concoction of rice run through the blender. Gerald used a hot nail to widen the hole in the nipple of his son's bottle.

It didn't take long for them to recognize his unusual aptitude. He hardly uttered a word until he was 20 months old, and then out came complete and grammatically correct sentences. "I didn't need to talk. Everybody did everything for me," he explained to his parents. By the time he was three he'd picked up the multiplication tables. By four and a half he was reading on his own from his parents' library. "He became a speed reader," says his father. "He still amazes me on that score." He had taken up the piano at three, and later composed his Opus 1 on the Sohmer upright in the living room: Air in A Minor, 1:15, owed a heavy debt to Purcell, but Amory was only seven. As a teenager he gave children's recitals, including one with a cartoonist who sketched as Amory played from his suite Morceaux de la Jeunesse, which featured such numbers as "The Splash-Happy Seal," "The Dainty Hippo," and "General Nuisance March."

Lovins can trace some of his feeling for the land to the maple woods that he slipped through each morning on his way to East Silver Spring Elementary. He skipped second grade, then fifth. Lovins, with his mania for numbers, says his IQ was measured between 180 and 220, but he recalls that the tests "weren't very interesting."

All through early childhood he was besieged by colds and croup; he spent long stretches at home, reading by himself in his room, which he had decorated with portraits of American Indians. Pneumonia nearly killed him at age three and again at eight. It wasn't until he was diagnosed and treated for a gamma globulin deficiency at age ten that he began to gain strength. He suffered in his teens from chronic synovitis; his joints, especially his knees and shoulders, were inflamed, and he was often in considerable pain when he practiced the piano or burned up the keys on the typewriter.

The family moved north in 1955, settling in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, and a few years later in Amherst, Massachusetts. "I think his interest in physics and in science generally started when we were in Montclair," says Gerald Lovins. "One day when he was around eight he presented me with a diagram of a floor plan of a submarine he'd cooked up, naming all the parts and functions. Then he started designing shaped charges of explosives."

His talents were nudged in a more constructive direction by the table talk in Amherst. "I had joined the League of Women Voters," remembers Miriam. "I'd come home and tell the family about the meetings at dinner. Amory was always interested that there were people out there changing conditions that weren't good for the community. I think he got the idea that you don't just sit still and take it, you do something about it."

At Amherst High he started designing and building nuclear magnetic resonance machines. He also took physics courses at Amherst College. His protected, isolated childhood formed a social style he would deprecate years later as that of a "techno-twit." Some of the lower life forms gave him the business, shoving him down and stealing his briefcase. The abuse ended when Amory, installed as manager of the track team, was befriended by Peter Johnson, a star hurdler who still holds a record at Amherst High.

"Mentally high school was superfluous," recalls Johnson, who now works as a potter and an artist in Whitehall, Michigan. "He went for the socialization. He was a 98-pound weakling, but underneath he had a big desire to see what youth was like."

It was Johnson who took Lovins camping in the Holyoke Range and then to Camp Winona, in Bridgton, Maine, where Lovins spent the first of 15 summers hiking and leading trips. He had overcome some of his physical handicaps with a regimen of special exercises designed to strengthen his joints.

At 16, a National Merit and Presidential scholar, he went off to Harvard. He hustled lunch money playing pool and purging circuit noise from nuclear magnetic resonance machines. The synovitis in his knees kept him out of Harvard his second year; when he returned he took graduate courses and some law. Harvard wanted him to declare a major. He got a one-page application to Oxford, filled it out, and was admitted.

After two years at Magdalen College and aiming toward a doctorate in biophysics, he applied for a scholarship. He was called before a roomful of stone-faced dons in black robes who, he was surprised to discover, were considering him for a post on the faculty of Merton College. He was elected to the plum office of junior research fellow, though dons were supposed to have at least a master's degree and Lovins didn't even have a bachelor's. A special gown with shortened tassels was designed for the degreeless new don, who was, at 21, the youngest faculty member in 400 years.

The good thing about the post was that he had few duties other than reciting grace in medieval Latin when the "senior classical postmaster" was absent. He was free to go tramping in the mountains of Wales, which he had discovered not long after moving to England. His weak knees got stronger, and in those stone climbing huts, those misty cwms, those wind­-scoured summits of Yr Wyddfa and Tryfan and Pen-Llythrig-y-Wrach, he met a new side of himself, an energy that had first stirred in the woods of Silver Spring. A muse descended: "These torn stones on which we stand," he wrote, "this blinding fire and the snow on which it casts our shadows high and thin, this freezing air that sears our throats—of these things we are made, and in the grace of an instant and a place we dissolve into them again, single in exaltation. There is no we and no time, nothing but the blazing silent earth. There are no words."

Learning of a mining company's bid to open a copper mine in Snowdonia National Park, Lovins's life swerved from academia. He had taken many pictures of the wild lands in jeopardy. Eventually they found their way to David Brower at Friends of the Earth, who commis­sioned Lovins's first book, Eryri, a collection of photographs and rapturous essays, and a strong indictment of those who would despoil the Welsh wildlands. The copper company tried unsuccessfully to prevent the book from being published and eventually abandoned its efforts to develop the mine.

Brower became Lovins's mentor. After two years at Merton College Lovins had developed a passion for energy policy but was unable to do a doctorate because no such field existed. He was ready to move on. Brower was convinced that Amory and his calculator could be of immense help to the cause. Consider what he proposed to do for the Sierra cup: Lovins sketched some 11 improvements to that classic implement of 1970s backpacking, including a new rim that wouldn't collect dirt, a knurled bottom to keep the cup from sliding, scribe marks on the inside for measuring liquids, and a handle that could be readily grasped in mittens. Brower persuaded Lovins to put aside his education and take up a new position representing Friends of the Earth in Britain.