Time for more tea. In what seems seconds, the water comes to a boil. Water boils fast at altitude but here in the "bioshelter" it's being whizzed along by an English copper kettle with a heavy coil rim that traps hot gases. Most of the heat is put to work and does not escape up the side. (The fuel saving has been calculated, of course.) After a while in Lovins's company you begin to see waste and inefficiency everywhere; an ordinary house peppered with spendthrift incandescent bulbs is pos­itively offensive.

The night before, he had noticed that his wife had attached a Basalt Volunteer Fire Department tag to the bumper of his Honda—or "Pon­gomobile" as he calls it, in honor of his beloved orangutans. (Orangutan portraits cover the walls of his bedroom.) The little plate was sticking up into the slipstream. He had calculated the increase on the car's drag coefficient and the waste chafed on his nerves.

Hunter walks in. She works at the house and runs the institute with Amory, but she now has her own apartment down the valley. They were introduced at the Los Angeles airport by the chief economist of Arco. She was a lawyer, a political scientist, an active environmentalist, and an­ admirer of his work. They were married in September 1979 in an aspen grove in the mountains around Crestone, Colorado: an Episcopal-Zen-­Ute Indian ceremony. Amory wore an Indian headdress. Paul Winter played the soprano sax. Are the marital strains that have produced separate living arrangements amenable to a technical fix? Amory is happy to see his wife, and strokes her hand while they talk. Since 1978, they have been inseparable professional partners, coauthoring books and articles, appearing together on "60 Minutes" and in a film about the Soft Path. Hunter is technically Amory's boss.

Hunter says she has to buy a washing machine. "Get a front loader," he says. "It uses half the water and half the energy."

"I don't want a front loader," Hunter says. "You have to bend over to put your damn clothes in."

"You just put the clothes in," he says. (Later he would find that a horizontal-axis top-loader is more efficient and would amend his position.)

RMI now has a $1.4 million budget and employs 39 people. With its goal of fostering the efficient and sustainable use of resources, the institute does policy research in five areas: energy, water, agriculture, security, and economic renewal. The budget comes from consulting work, grants, contributions, and the sale of publications. Many of the so-called RMltes are the sort of bright idealists who might have gone into public-interest work in Washington but were lured to Colorado by the mountain setting and the communal spirit of the nonprofit enterprise. The RMI community also includes a stable of nine horses, two peacocks, three beef calves named Barbeque, Brunch, and Dinner, and Nanuq's sometime adversary Bandit, who is part coyote and who enjoys bathing in the alpha waterfall. Lovins presides over the research staff with an air of benevolent dis­traction; the best way to get some time alone with him is to take him for a walk—there's a sign-up sheet on a bulletin board. The workplace atmosphere is casual, but the fax machines are always croaking and the in-boxes are stuffed. Several of Lovins's former employees have spun off businesses from their work at RMI; the growing professionalism of the institute is reflected not just in rising budgets but in new marketing efforts. RMI recently hired a publicist, and some of the new brochures feature corporate-report-style logos and velum flyleaves—true evolu­tionary milestones for what began as a kind of countercultural think tank. Sometimes on Thursday afternoons there's a staff meeting to discuss broad topics such as "Efficiency for What?" People in jeans circle up over trays of cookies and fruit; strawberry hulls are pitched directly into the garden; conversation may halt if Iggy or Juana makes a stir in the bougainvillea.

"Hey, Hunter?" says Amory as she heads for her office. "You know that little fire department plate on the front bumper of the Pongomobile?"

"Yeah."

"We'll have to move it. It's right in the slipstream. I figure it's probably costing us upwards of a mile per gallon."

"Horrors," she says.