Would the World be a Better Place if we all Played Guitar and Ultimate Frisbee?

When I was about to leave home to come back to Long Branch, my mom commented on the fact that I drive a Volvo, wear Birkenstocks, play Ultimate, and am working on an organic farm. I’m conscious that I fit a certain stereotype, whether it’s “granola” or “hippie” or “college student,” but I didn’t realize how much the environmental movement is embodied by people who look, think, and act like me. Including me, there have been six interns here at Long Branch in the past month, and, assuming that we’re reasonably representative of environmentally conscious people, certain similarities pop up. All the interns are white, two thirds play guitar, half play ultimate Frisbee, and half are college students.

I do admit, I think my statistics teacher would be mad at me if I made any generalizations with a sample size that small, but there’s some truth to the fact that a significant number of the people who care about the well being of the planet fall under the label of “hippie” to some degree, and it seems to me that being pigeonholed as such gives people an easy excuse not to listen. I’ve been reading a good bit of Daniel Quinn recently, and I think he put forth the problem in a slightly different way. In one of his books, he differentiates between “programs” and “vision.” Recycling is a program, but the industrial revolution was the product of vision. If people have to be persuaded to change the world, then no matter how many times the Sam Cooke song is covered, no change is going to come.

I’m slightly misusing Quinn’s term here, but I feel that the same is true if only a stereotyped segment of the population shares the “vision.” I enjoy listening to Paul, the director of Long Branch, talk about homeopathy and sustainability and the coming transition from the fourth age to the fifth age, but ultimately he’s preaching to the choir when he’s talking to me. I had the experience of hearing descriptions of Paul before I came out to Long Branch, and he was at least once brushed off as “weird,” and therefore inconsequential, because he ate poison ivy in homeopathic dosages to stop his allergic reactions.

So, to go back and pose the title question, would the world be a better place if everyone suddenly became a hippie? If we shared the peripherals, would the core message of treating the planet better be more likely to come through? Would an environmental message dressed up in a suit and tie ultimately lose something? I wish I knew.