One of the most frequently reprinted articles ever published in Foreign Affairs, that distinguished organ of policy wallahs, is "Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?" The paper went through 12 drafts; with a hurricane threatening to knock out power lines in Maine, Lovins stood in a phone booth near Camp Winona for 14 hours, combing galleys.

He made many points, but the main one was that the country had to decide which of two routes it would travel into the future. We could continue down the Hard Path or take a road less traveled. The Hard Path relied on a technical elite to operate huge, centralized power stations; the Hard Path was expensive, rigid, and bureaucratic, and it separated the benefits of power from the costs. (New Englanders, for example, enjoy the benefits of Hydro-Québec; the Cree Indians lose their hunting grounds.) Driven to consume more and more nonrenewable resources, we would be obliged to raid the earth's wild places, despoil the air and water.

Or we could take what Lovins called the Soft Path toward a system of energy that would rely on renewable resources like sun and wind and on the more efficient use of energy already available. Soft Path technologies were "flexible, resilient, sustainable, and benign," and they enhanced democratic values because energy decisions were closer to the people using the energy. Lovins did not foresee the Soft Path immediately solving the energy problem, only keeping it from getting worse. He didn't call for throwing away the power plants already built or for a halt to the turning of fossil fuels. Rather, he envisioned a 50-year transition to a new energy system.

There was little reaction in the first weeks after the Foreign Affairs article came out, but a debate began to build as it made its way around he energy community.

"I thought it might make a stir, but I had no idea how much," Lovins recalls. And indeed, were it not for some three dozen critiques, ranging from reasoned rebuttals to ad hominem denunciations, the article might have faded into oblivion. Instead Lovins rode to fame on the outrage of his critics.

"Reckless," they called him. "Myopic." "Irresponsible." Nuclear advocates were beside themselves about Lovins's nonnuclear scenario. The Soft Path was "a Shangri-la," said General Electric executive Bertram Wolfe. Lovins's ideas were "flaccid and flatulent," said Charles Yulish, a former employee of the Atomic Energy Commission and a public relations consultant for the nuclear industry who gathered ten critiques of the article into a book. The most melodramatic denunciation came from University of Arizona professors Aden and Marjorie Meinel: "Should this siren philosophy be heard and believed, we can perceive the onset of a new dark age."

Lovins was not easily intimidated. Two months after the article ap­peared, he testified before a congressional committee. What had proved especially controversial was his argument that the two paths were mutually exclusive. He explained to the committee: "In principle nuclear power stations and solar collectors can coexist. But soft and hard paths are culturally incompatible: Each path entails a certain evolution of social values and perceptions that makes the other kind of world harder to imagine…. Every dollar, every bit of sweat and technical talent, every barrel of irreplaceable oil, every year that we devote to the very demanding high technologies is a resource that we cannot use to pursue the elements of a soft path urgently enough to make them work together properly."

Over the next two years Lovins parried every critical thrust—time he considers wasted today. Where questions were raised about his num­bers, Lovins directed critics to the technical companion paper he presented to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After extensive correspondence, Hans Bethe, the Nobel laureate, conceded that a disputed calculation was in fact sound: "Thank you very much for your detailed discussion of seasonal storage with solar heating. I am very much surprised that it works. The figures seemed based on solid statistics."

Where the social implications of his scenario were doubted, Lovins reminded commentators that he had simply launched an experiment as a scientist, exploring what was possible from existing data. He claimed he had not tried to make his numbers fit his values, but rather articulated values only upon obtaining numerical results—results that were, as it turned out, rather congenial.

Where his work had been met with ad hominem attacks, he professed a policy of taking the high road, "lest I approach here the fatuity of the material to which I am responding." Along with his daunting calculator, he had a polemicist's knack for finding ever more subtle ways of patronizing opponents, a cheeky Oxford wit, and an elegant and lucid style. He could be neither outcalculated nor outargued. "This baby-faced ex­patriate," said Newsweek in 1977, "has become one of the world's most influential energy thinkers."

Lovins had struck at a belief system, and the blow was felt at many levels. No less an authority than Margaret Mead later suggested that some of the hostility toward the concept of a Soft Path came from the unmanly overtones of the phrase. Was Lovins not, in essence, urging a phallocentric generation of men who had energized great metropolises with turbines and transmission towers to give up their life's mission and devote them­selves to the humble task of retrofitting homes with better insulation and more efficient light bulbs? It was the equivalent of trying to recast John Wayne as a hostage negotiator from the U.N.