tree huggers and hawks

Jim Woolsey, former head of the CIA and now energy guru, came to AJC recently to speak about a subject that has become his new burning passion – getting more Americans “off the grid.”_His most memorable story, one that will appear in the essay of a book soon to be published, was a fictional account of a contemporary conversation between John Muir, an early 20th century environmentalist, and George Patton, a U.S. General in WWII. He said the two disagreed vehemently about what they cared about and wanted to fix in America today – Muir was concerned about what we are doing to nature, and Patton was worried about the terrorist threat – but they surprisingly agreed on similar steps to address and improve the respective situations they saw.__The thesis: energy conservation and energy security are very complementary goals._But the people who espouse them are not. We’d like to explore how we can create an even more dynamic force for positive change in the area of energy usage by bringing together these two powerful motivating forces and the people who passionately espouse them today.