Jeremy Bruno is a tech writer who blogs about ecology, evolution, conservation and culture at The Voltage Gate. Visit the 
Anyone noticed the raft of press and programming based on the late 1960's counter culture of late? I caught a great show on VH1 discussing the Monterey Pop festival the other day (incredible stuff, but I wish they would have played more clips of the festival instead of the commentary). At the end of the program, the surviving attendees, organizers and band members waxed poetic about the times and the innocence, and we've all heard it before, over and over. The hippies reshaped America, set the precedent of politics and art and philosophy for succeeding generations, and to an extent, I agree. The counter culture was naive and without foresight, but it certainly sparked outcry on all levels - sociopolitical, artistic and of particular interest to this post, environmental.
I found a post over at the Seatle-Post Intelligencer this morning calling for a return to 1969, when the Ecology symbol was used to denote a person's support for environmental issues.
Remember the "ecology symbol" popularized in the seventies? Like a new sign of the Zodiac, it seemed to herald a dawning awareness of Earth and environment.What better time to revive it?
[...] The symbol played an important role as a visual emblem, a simple sign of solidarity. It accompanied what was, for many, new vocabulary: "Ecology." Billboards appeared around Vancouver saying, "Ecology? Look it up! You're involved."
The beginning of the ecology movement was an irreversible cultural shift. It brought us more vocabulary -- recycling, acid rain, climate change -- and the collective will to do something about it.
Let's bring theta back into our visual vocabulary.
Let's not.
I have an inkling as to why it was dropped. The hippies lost their innocence [ignorance] and grew up, replacing all that love with money. Saving the environment, like fighting for civil rights or artistic freedom, became complicated took effort; many grew tired of fighting.
I don't think that a return to that era is appropriate for that very reason. The idealism was largely an excuse to be irresponsible for many. Environmentalism has been tangled up with hippie philosophies for so long, and we are just now getting to the point where it has become a legitimate lobby, backed by loads of scientific evidence revealing human beings as a detriment to ecosystems and public health. There's a big difference between the flawed "getting back to nature" mentality of the sixties and the push to protect biological systems from the byproducts of our habits.
Isaac Asimov attended such a lecture in the seventies and reflected later:
I was at a talk in which the speaker said, "We must give up our automobiles and get closer to nature." I was the only one in the audience who didn't applaud because I was the only one who wasn't a hypocrite. Not one intended to give up an automobile.
This childish notion is irrelevant in today's world and potentially dangerous. The hippies turned out to be incredibly hypocritical, and successive generations have had to pick up the pieces and bolster support by steadily working within the system and engaging people instead of refusing to "conform" and ostracizing entire sections of the population with melodramatic, polarized rhetoric.
The Ecology symbol is just another symbol of the hulk that was the counter culture. It even misrepresents its namesake. I've said it a million times and people still think I'm splitting hairs: ecology is not synonymous with environmentalism. Ecology is science and therefore devoid of inherent ethical applications. Environmentalism is a worldview, a philosophy that supports the protection of the environment.
The counter culture gave so much to successive generations that was positive, but they also gave us a daunting "public image" problem that we're just now working through. Maybe.
Comments
How original, another glib attack on hippies.
How could they be environmentalists without having foresight?
You're wrong to imply there wasn't solid documentation of environmental damage until recently, and you're wrong to imply that the hippies were environmentally ignorant, but for the sake of argument let's pretend you're correct. Has waiting for the lab results been beneficial for the biosphere? Or would the world be better off now had the Western world adopted a spiritually based environmentalism 40 years ago?
You claim the environmental lobby has only recently become legitimate, yet the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, RARE, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the EPA all date from the Nixon era.
I know a few people who were hippies in the 60s and 70s, are middle class and have yet to own a car. I don't know how you folks track all these hippies. I suspect you conflate them with yuppie boomers for the easy rhetorical points.
The hippies have a big PR problem vis a vis the environment: they were right. Their more superficial characteristics apparently make it socially unacceptable for you and many others to admit any respect for them. So the most self-defensive among you write these these patronizing little essays that say nothing new, because to do that would be complicated, and it would take effort.
Posted by: hip hip array | July 2, 2007 5:38 PM
They were without foresight because of their apparent disregard for consequence (see Haight-Ashbury). They launched themselves into drug abuse to explore their minds without realizing the long term affects of drugs on their bodies.
The same could be said of their solutions for environmental protection. Planting a tree is not a viable ecological solution in itself. Ecosystem management, provided by ecologists, has given us a window into what kind of tree and where.
The hippies were not the first environmentalists. There's a laundry list of great thinkers dating back a century before the flower children walked.
Not true. Did you read my last statement?
You obviously scanned the post and assumed the worst. The counter culture was a turning point in America socially/artistically speaking. The minds and talents of that culture provided us with new ways of looking at ourselves and fought to bring what was deliberately hidden from view in the 1950's to the forefront to be discussed.
But they were idealistic to a fault, and environmentalism has been tied up with being a hippie for the past 40 years. To be taken seriously by politicians and the general public, environmentalism needs to be dressed up in a suit and tie, not tie-dye and dreds.
The culture was poignant in 1969. We are in a very different place in 2007.
That's very true, and that was a good start. How long did it take for all of those lovely federal mandates to become a reality? And was the counter culture responsible for pushing for that legislation, or were people like Rachel Carson responsible?
Posted by: Jeremy Bruno | July 3, 2007 10:03 AM