While the Pentagon has always sheltered diverse, eccentric tinkerers, the convergence of environmental and military greenness was actually inspired by a conversation at a 2005 Christmas party when activist Nora Maccoby, the bride at the afore-mentioned wedding, buttonholed another guest, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “I told him that the rest of the world was moving ahead with energy technology that the US had developed and was now neglecting. The Pentagon was perfectly positioned to lead a new technology revolution. If he didn’t, his only legacy was going to be war.”

The next day the Secretary e-mailed off one of his “snowflakes” to his constellation of advisors, and his memo gathered mass. Soon in-house “closet greens” came out of the woodwork. That January President Bush, an oilman from Texas, put renewable energy issues at the center of his annual State of the Union Address. The Department of Defense quietly began investing half a billion dollars in research and development of technology for tapping solar, wave, biofuel and wind. These days, the Pentagon, the headquarters of the biggest consumer of oil in the world, now literally has a solar farm in its front garden.

While not as dramatic a shift as the Royal Navy’s switch from coal-based to oil-based locomotion in 1911, the intention has taken root. What’s more, just as the decision by a young First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, tipped the geo-political center of gravity toward the empty deserts of Arabia, this one may have, to some degree, the reverse effect.