New Age Environmentalism.

The back to the earth movement was one aspect of a New Age Movement that was predicated on the belief that people were able to attain an increased level of awareness by communing with nature. On 24 February 1977 the prestigious Rand Corporation described the shift of one million people from urban centers to rural areas in 1970-1975 as one of the most important trends in recent American history. Later events proved this claim was somewhat exaggerated, but this back-to-the-earth movement was no mere fad. The hippies celebrated nature, saw Native Americans as a spiritual people close to Mother Nature and God, and rejected the urban capitalist industrial society. Millions of hippies, and countless other would-be or weekend hippie wanna-bes, flocked to the countryside. Abandoned farms in New England or upstate New York became hippie communes, as did isolated sites in the...