Journal of Urban History 36(6) 831–848 © 2010 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0096144210374449 http://juh.sagepub.com Back to the Garden: Communes, the Environment, and Antiurban Pastoralism at the End of the Sixties Steven Conn 1 Abstract This essay examines the complicated relationship among hippie communes, the environmental movement, and New Left and Black Power militants in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those relationships lie the roots of the divide that separated environmental issues on one hand and urban issues on the other during the 1970s and beyond. This essay examines how the fight between militants and back-to-the-land communards and environmentalists, between what we might call urban progressives and antiurban progressives, was staged as a fight between those who cared about the issues of the city and those who turned their backs on them. In this way, this essay locates the city more centrally in politics of the era. Keywords communes, environmental movement, New Left, antiurbanism, American pastoralism Writing in 1969, Carl Gershman looked back on the previous year and opined dryly, “It is hard to think of social conditions more conducive to the growth of a powerful left-wing political movement than those which obtained in America in 1968.” But, he concluded, “The election returns last November proved this to have been unwarranted optimism.” 1 Looking back on it all from this distance, we can debate whether that optimism was ever really warranted, whether those social conditions really did obtain in the America of the late 1960s. Still, Gershman was certainly not alone in believing at the time that the United States stood poised for revolutionary political and social change. The nonviolent incrementalism of the early civil rights movement had been supplanted, at least in the national limelight, by a Black Power movement both less patient and less phobic of violence. The student movement that coalesced under the umbrella of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) tracked this trajectory almost exactly. They traded their commitment to participatory democracy in the early 1960s for an infatuation with weapons and with Chairman Mao by the early 1970s. And while the energy of both seemed to burn brightest in 1968, it had all but burned out just a few years later. Gershman blamed it on the essentially isolated nature of the New Left, which 1 Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Corresponding Author: Steven Conn, Ohio State University, 106 Dulles Hall, 230 West 17th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 Email: conn.23@osu.edu