Psychedelic lab coats
Grokking hippies, climate scientists and their almost happening
Acknowledging the marginal value in woulda/coulda/shoulda hindsight, there is one, like, groovy and unexplored near miss in history that offers us some wisdom relevant to understanding our climate situation today.
Flower power, it turns out, had science to back it up.
And, Jupiter aligned with Mars
Hippies, those long-haired freaky people who raged against the machine of government overreach, globalization, war, corporatization, materialism and conformity, were in full psychedelic bloom in the 1960s and 1970s, just as climate science was having its own kind of harmonic convergence.
In a remarkable synchronicity of “you’re doing it wrong” dissent, both hippies and climatologists warned society of the dangers of the “dominant” culture — in their own ways and independently.
Willful unorthodoxy notwithstanding, one group organized around the cultural observation that mainstream behaviors are social, political and environmental bummers that need a totally new vibe to get mellow.
The other group, with jobs and haircuts, was coalescing around lab-grown concurrence that, yes, mainstream behaviors are an existential threat according to the replicated climate data: Society should switch gears.
Yet, hippies and climatologists didn't share notes. As much as the psychedelic era sparked scientific advances in physics, the divide between cultural free thinker and climate rethinker is a downer. Had they collaborated in some alternate history, freaks and geeks could have explored together the parallel and mutually beneficial relationship between countercultural movements and scientific advancements.
Today, there would be grants for a transdisciplinary art-science collaboration that explores whether a unified whole of hippies and climatologists woulda/coulda/shoulda have been greater that its parts.
“Energy and the environment were getting a huge reboot of attention among tuned-in young people in this time period,” says David Kaiser, an author and MIT professor exploring how psychedelia sparks scientific breakthroughs. “Many of these people really thought the revolution was nigh. They thought the basic structure of society was about to come in for enormous change, and could imagine new roles for themselves and the work they loved doing. Their horizons seemed broader, in a very hopeful way.”
Oh, well. Bygones.
It’s a lot to put on fun-seeking youth just trying to get high and get laid.
While they had the right societal impulse and viral appeal, faddish hippies did not wield the substance or legacies of other counterculture movements like feminism and civil rights. It wasn’t their job to fix climate, but hippies had a unique vantage to see the world differently had they just taken a hit of science credibility.
It all seems like a missed opportunity. A collaboration might not have not gelled in the end anyway, but I would rather be able to say we took a chance on a unique symbiosis intended to make a difference.
It’s the position we take with our Bank of Nature proposal today that juxtaposes a different social movement (trillion-dollar pensions) and the science-backed climate remedies. Maybe we are wrong in thinking that pensions are untapped climate heroes, but what if we are right?
Sign, sign
Everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery
Breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that
Can't you read the sign?
The Merry Pranksters’ storied road trip of 1964, electric kool-aid and the earliest Grateful Dead performances sit on the historical timeline with the first meetings of experts concerned about the troubling human influence on global warming.
Of course, it doesn’t matter now whether the timing of these happenings was coincidence or, fatefully, the moon was in the seventh house. They didn't get it on, but still…
When the Summer of Love in 1967 descended on Haight-Ashbury, science created the first computer model of Earth’s climate. By 1969’s Woodstock festival, science reported its first warnings of collapsing Antarctic ice sheets and rising seas from greenhouse gas emissions from expanding society (1968) and then published the first comprehensive global atmospheric readings from satellites (1969).
Also, in 1969, Buckminster Fuller published his Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth. As another hint of what might have been possible with a substantive and coordinated approach, the first Earth Day was 1970. The UN hosted its First Earth Summit in 1972, the same year as the Limits to Growth report was published.
The Vietnam War, a key spark for the hippie protest movement, ended in 1975, the same year the world became worried about the ozone layer — and worked together to sort it out, we should note.
By 1977, when the baby boomers of the hippie generation became the biggest sellouts in history, forsaking free love for 7% mortgage rates, scientists had reached a near consensus on global warming, as a climate risk – save the fateful 3% of holdouts.
Something else happened at the time of the hippies and emergent climatology that Peter Drucker, years later, called the Unseen Revolution.
He was talking about the birth of the “Institutional Investor” and the source of a lot of bread in the world.
In 1969, the Ford Foundation commissioned world-changing studies from lawyers William Cary and Craig Bright about prudent investment for endowments (and by extension pension funds with fiduciaries). A biased summary is here. Also in 1969, the US Congress changed tax laws making it untenable for fiduciaries to replenish their funds only by lending at interest, which was the scope of their options at the time. In response, in 1972, the US rolled out state-by-state the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act (later amended to become the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act) that was (mis)interpreted as allowing fiduciaries to speculate.
(The parenthetical “mis” is our emphasis and a pivot for our case.)
The policy changes unleashed billions and trillions of duty-bound fiduciary dollars to swamp exchanges like Wall Street.
That means that together on the historical timeline was the will, the way and the tailor-made financial wherewithal to coordinate a scaled approach to the climate threat. They could have rallied in the brief window of time before government and industry were organized to defend themselves against such efforts.
By 1971, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell had written his infamous memo that was part anti-left screed and part playbook for his neoliberal friends to double down on the caustic priorities that originally set hippies adrift to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.”
That this cosmic alignment went unnoticed means we missed the only real window to force change toward a better climate outcome
— if you were relying on government policy and corporate sustainability to lead the way to the Age of Aquarius.
At Bank of Nature, we’ve adopted the hippie-adjacent position that government and industry are unwilling or unable to deal with the crisis, a fix is not in their DNA, and fomenting the crisis is a economic growth generator.
This is where we start to rethink our current situation through the lens of historical anti-status quo protest. Where the hippies, who fought the establishment so vividly, failed was in not offering up a viable alternative to that same establishment. To be fair, such alternatives were few and or still embryonic. We don’t have the same excuses today.
In what combination of opportunities right now do we have the will, the way and wherewithal to mount a different response to the crisis – one that sidesteps The Man altogether?
Why won’t the more mature protest movement today consider alternatives approaches when sticking it to The Man has yet to produce meaningful reductions to the threat?
Why, like the hippies, do we leave the problem solving in the hands of the problem makers aka The Man? Is there no one else?
Fiduciary duty, our alternative based on specific behavioral precepts arguable in law, is a model of 21st Century citizenship with the dedicated money to back it up. It’s elegantly uncomplicated and ready to be tested.
That’s hard to fathom if you believe the climate crisis solution is supposed to be complex. Simple doesn't mean easy or trivial given the task at hand — but, though our pitch, it questions authority, shakes off establishment stuck points, and encourages fiduciaries, in particular, to let their climate freak flags fly.
We know how it’s evolved since the hippie fad.
Love children, ultimately, did not resist the establishment. They were subsumed by the dominant culture and organized into more business-like “new left” civil society and watchdog groups. Eco-groups splintered, built out Ivy League business plans, and now compete for operational funding from the donors, sponsors and governments that most profoundly necessitate the eco-work. Far from their hippie roots, they use powerpoint instead of tie dye.
And, it has been a real slog for activists to make happen today what was, by serendipity, just there waiting to be put together 50+ years ago. Instead, the eco-sector today suffers from enervating disillusionment, PTSD-like climate anxiety, constant money grubbing and agenda creep, self doubt and a steadfast moat of stiff-arming, status quo acolytes protecting The Man, on his throne, from any real eco-coup or be-in.
Meanwhile, all around them, yoga, mindfulness, organic foods and weed are big business. Ben & Jerry made a fortune in ice cream. Hippie ideals are brand attributes.
“Thanks to the efforts of about 40 hippie innovators and the products and ideas they came up with, I estimate Hippie, Inc. to be worth hundreds of billions of dollars and responsible for employing millions of Americans,” writes Michael Klassen, unironically, in promoting his book Hippie Inc. in 2016.
Anti-science disinformation has successfully pitted professional skepticism against itself to sow utter confusion about which was is up. Government continues to play all sides of the issue. Dark money interests influence policy. Oil companies, backed by oil-based geopolitical instability, are making huge profits at the expense of future habitat stability. Pensions and endowments control tens of trillions worldwide. They literally define the economy and our collective future — and are complicit in its gloomy climate forecasts.
Once contraband, mind-altering psychedelic medicines and plants are mainstream therapies, with hallucinogens including psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, and Mary Jane providing the consciousness expansion benefits in a clinical setting instead of the commune. This is an amazing mental health advancement, no doubt. However, as an example of a post-hippy reach, social science says psychedelics and their cosmic unity themes that were fun in the 1960s comprise a practical wedge for environmental gains today.
“By increasing nature relatedness, psychedelics can help encourage pro-environmental behavior, making them relevant in the face of the current ecological crisis,” explains Psychedelic Support blogger Sam Woolfe in an April 2023 summary of current research.
A visit to an ayahuasca retreat will not make Charles Koch a treehugger, so I’m not convinced of the climate-fixing value of making people appreciative of nature more appreciative, but outtasight!
Extreme weather, exacerbated by human society behaviors decried as not socially or environmentally viable since the 1960s, is the norm and the climate crisis continues worsening by the month.
The record has been skipping on these themes for 50+ years: The friction between expression and compliance, the needs of individuals and the institutions created to manage individuals, the cost of the response an the cost of the solution, and the choices today and their impacts to the future. The hopeful energy of the hippie era, the possibility of new, transformative, potential alliances that happen to exist independently in this moment, and a rewriting of a toxic status quo would be, like, primo just about now.
Luckily, we have Burning Man.