CAL FUSSMAN has interviewed quite a few extraordinary people, including Muhammad Ali, Al Pacino, Jimmy Carter, and Greg Mueller, the world's foremost fungi expert (see "Dr. Mushroom," July 2005). But talking to energy conservationist Amory Lovins for "The Energizer," page 52, was a humbling experience. "He is probably the smartest person I've ever met—sometimes he would be talking and I'd just have to nod my head, but I understood enough to know that if we'd only listen to this guy we'd get our energy problems solved." Fussman is a frequent contributor to Esquire.
 

When photographer BEN STECHSCHULTE  visited Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute in Old Snowmass, Colorado, he found a man who truly walks the energy-conservationist talk. Lovins's home-cum-office is a 99 percent solar-heated module that includes a 900-square-foot semitropical banana greenhouse. "It makes me think every house should have a waterfall in the living room," says Stechschulte, whose work has also appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, and House and Garden.

Writer and filmmaker THOMAS LEVENSON describes his cover story about the Giant Magellan Telescope, "The Biggest Game in the Cosmos," as a space-age Moby-Dick with a happy ending. "A small band of men and women set out to pursue the white whale of an impossible telescope, but at the end you don't get a smashed leg or a gory death—you get a beautiful view of the cosmos and a new way of understanding how humans fit into it," he says. Levenson is shown doing high-tech universe scanning in Chile for his award-winning NOVA documentary, Origins: Back to the Beginning.Books, 2002).