It is commonplace among today’s environmental historians to acknowledge the overlap between so-called acidheads and tree huggers. This imbrication was noted by the environmental historian Frank Zelko, who explained that the early generation of green radicals “wore tie-dyed T-shirts and long hair, smoked dope and dropped acid, and fomented a consciousness revolution that sought nothing less than a radical change in Western culture.”³ I historicize the connection between eco-warriors and radical psychedelicists, paying special attention to their institutional histories. In what follows, I will explore how the formation of Greenpeace and Earth First! in the 1970s was not a departure from psychedelicism, but a reformation within the largest cadre of militant psychedelicists, the Youth International Party.

From ‘Acid Bolsheviks’ to ‘Earthfreaks’

The religious use of drugs is found across cultures and can be traced back to humanity’s ancient past. The “psychedelic” interpretation of drugs is a more recent phenomenon, originating in The Doors of Perception (1954), Aldous Huxley’s autobiographical essay of the visionary experience occasioned by mescaline. Huxley’s short essay argued that the mind can be “expanded” to perceive higher knowledge through the use of certain drugs and that the use of these “mind-expanders” was integral to the evolution of human consciousness. According to this line of thinking, humanity was poised to make the evolutionary jump into godhood, provided enough people underwent the psychedelic augmentation of consciousness. Making this evolutionary leap was seen as imperative within the movement of psychedelicists, lest humanity destroy itself with atomic weapons. This messianic perspective animated the movement of psychedelic collectives and was especially visible among its antiracist activists (e.g., the White Panther Party), esoteric brotherhoods (the League for Spiritual Discovery and the Discordian Society), religious assemblies (the Neo-American Church and the Shiva Fellowship), biker gangs (the Moorish Orthodox Church of America), crime syndicates (the Brotherhood of Eternal Love), rock bands (the Grateful Dead), experimental theater groups (the Living Theatre), and therapy centers (the Esalen Institute). The messianic impulse was most evident in the rural, or “back-to-the-land,” commune movements, which romanticized wild nature as the site for a new Eden.

There were thousands of rural communes operating between the early stirrings of this movement in the mid-1960s and its climax in the mid-1970s.⁴ These experiments in ecological living represent the clearest indication of how environmentalism has been an integral aspect of psychedelicist discourse and the ideologies that grounded it. The foremost proponents of consciousness expansion, including Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Synder, and Alan Watts, each promoted ecology as part of their respective psychedelicist ideologies. The most recognizable example is Leary’s creed for the psychedelic masses: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Unpacking this pithy slogan: Leary was instructing his admirers to “turn on” their higher order faculties through LSD; “tune in” to the holy power of love; and abandon or “drop out” of society, together with a small band of like-minded freaks. Despite the demonstrably green dimension of Leary’s grand vision for psychedelic revolution, his influence on the early generation of eco-radicals pales in comparison to the Buddhist-anarchist-animist teachings of Alan Watts and Gary Snyder, who were celebrated as saints by the green militants of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.

Before moving to the story of Greenpeace and Earth First!, it is worth pausing to consider how ecological thinking became integral to the psychedelic discourse. Even a cursory glance at the sizable literature on psychedelicism reveals that drug enthusiasts often associate consciousness-expansion with the dissolution of the ego, a process referred to as “ego-death.” Moreover, trippers tend to claim that the dissolution of their ego opens them up to the sublime realization that everything in the universe is interconnected, and this view of cosmic holism represents the height of gnosis. Recognizing the interconnection of all life within the biosphere is fundamental to ecology, and therefore its affinity to psychedelic experience seems natural. However, as a historian, I do not have any way to evaluate the veracity of this correlation. Or, rather, I did not until a few years ago.

In the August 2017 issue of The Journal of Psychopharmacology, Matthias Forstmann and Christina Sagioglou published their groundbreaking article, “Lifetime Experience with (Classic) Psychedelics Predicts Pro-Environmental Behavior through an Increase in Nature Relatedness.” Two years later, the correlation between psychedelic experiences and an appreciation of nature was confirmed in another scientific study, “From Egoism to Ecoism: Psychedelics Increase Nature Relatedness in State-mediated and Context Dependent Manner,” authored by Hannes Kettner, Sam Gandy, Eline C. H. M. Haijen, and Robin L. Carhart-Harris.⁵ The connection between an ecocentric point of view and psychedelic consciousness expansion was reiterated once more in March 2022 in Sandeep M. Nayak and Roland Griffiths’s article, “A Single Belief-Changing Psychedelic Experience Is Associated with Increased Attribution of Consciousness to Living and Non-living Entities.”⁶ Backed by such scientific data, the historical imbrication of psychedelicism and environmental perspectives does not seem so mysterious. But researchers have yet to historicize the imbrication of these two currents. In what follows, I will attempt to lay the groundwork for this line of inquiry.

The Varieties of ‘Flower Power’

The vanguard parties of eco-radicalism, Greenpeace and Earth First!, germinated within the largest psychedelicist faction of the 1960s, the Youth International Party, or as they were more commonly known, the Yippies! (the exclamation point is part of the name). Founded in the Manhattan apartment of Paul Krassner on New Year’s Eve 1967, the Yippies! were formed as a self-conscious attempt to channel the social ferment unleashed by the popularization of LSD into a spiritual revolution that would lead humanity into a higher stage of evolution. The group was led by veterans of the civil rights movement and anti–Vietnam War agitation—including Jerry Rubin, Nancy Kurshan, Abbie Hoffman, Ed Sanders, Allen Ginsberg, and Anita Hoffman—who had abandoned politics in favor of the consciousness revolution. Self-styled “psychedelic Bolsheviks,” the Yippies! were not an organized political faction, but a decentralized uprising of shock troops waging their own nonviolent revolution against modern industrial America. The key to shifting the consciousness of mass society, in their eyes, was the invention of new grand narratives, or “myths.” Their most successful myth was the “Yippie!”—that is to say, they invented the persona of an already-evolved ambassador from the utopian future, who was a psychedelically mutated, ecologically conscious, free-love mutant, whom they positioned over and against the derogatory but extremely popular media stereotype of the “hippie.” The myth proved extremely popular among the psychedelicized youth of America of the 1960s and ’70s.

The Yippies! brought their new myths to life by manipulating the corporate media with elaborate pranks and didactic hoaxes. The best remembered of these stunts included their antiwar march on Halloween 1967, in which they led thousands of demonstrators dressed as witches, warlocks, and wizards in a ritual “exorcism” of the Pentagon. Aside from being a lot of fun, this prank dramatized how the evil of war could only be overcome with a spiritual revolution, in which violence and hate were “exorcised” by consciousness expansion. Denouncing the greed of American capitalism, Hoffman and Rubin similarly titillated a band of reporters by burning dollar bills and scattering stacks of money off the balcony onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. As in the case with all of the Yippies! actions, the point of this stunt was to alter the perception of television and newspaper audiences, much in the same way LSD alters the individuals who used them. They referred to these demonstrations as “mindfucking,” a concept which would go on to define the eco-militancy of Greenpeace and Earth First!.

The Yippies! presented “mindfucking” as an expression of a larger ideological position, which they termed “Flower Power.” Though this term has become synonymous with the ersatz commodities of the sixties, such as love beads, tie-dye, and lava lamps, Flower Power was originally modeled after Black Power. It encompassed both psychedelicist activism and its source, namely, the realization that all life is interconnected. The founding of Greenpeace represented a significant development within the ideological framework of the Yippies!.

Judging by Greenpeace’s current status as the world’s leading environmental NGO, with an annual budget exceeding two hundred million dollars, it is hard to believe it originated as a rag-tag group of Canadian Yippies! devoted to high-seas adventurism, green mythmaking, and media “mindfucking.” The product of Kitsilano, Vancouver’s psychedelicist enclave, Greenpeace was the brainchild of Canadian beatniks and draft dodgers from the United States, brought together by an antiwar rally in October 1968. This rally was led by Rubin and a contingent of US Yippies!, who spurred the residents of Kitsilano to occupy the University of British Columbia for a few days. The revolutionary zeal generated by the occupation led to the formation of a new Yippie! chapter, the Vancouver Liberation Front, also known as the Northern Lunatic Fringe of the Youth International Party. This new Yippie! faction brought together Bob Hunter and Paul Watson, who utilized the Yippie! playbook to form their own ecological activist group.

From the start, Greenpeace inveighed against political solutions to the ecological problem, such as lobbying, conservationism, and voting for green candidates. Instead, its founders believed that only a mass, nonviolent uprising against industrial society would halt the destruction of the planet. To galvanize the formation of this movement, they engineered a number of media spectacles. The purpose of these stunts was to fool the public into thinking that an uncompromisingly radical movement in defense of Mother Earth already existed. The creation of Greenpeace was founded on a self-conscious myth, which was “mindfucked” into existence when Bob Hunter and other members of the Northern Lunatic Fringe of Yippie! called a press conference, announcing their intention to sail to Amchitka, Alaska, in order to disrupt a series of nuclear tests conducted by the US military.

Their expedition ignited a media firestorm in which the ethics of direct action protest were debated, alongside the right of the United States to conduct nuclear testing so close to Canadian shores. Revising the concept of the “mindfuck,” Hunter referred to their stunt as a “mindbomb” intended to destroy mass conditioning that led people to turn a blind eye to environmental destruction. The mission to Amchitka proved disastrous; however, it became the first of many ocean expeditions, each of which further stoked the flames of antinuclear activism. The storied rise of Greenpeace has been told elsewhere, so here I will only mention that another one of the co-founders, Paul Watson, went on to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a decidedly more militant outfit that proved far less interested in mythmaking than in sinking whaling vessels engaged in the illegal poaching of sea life.

Earth First! can be viewed as the crustier, crankier American sibling of Greenpeace. Founded in 1980, this band of so-called ecoterrorists was likewise shaped by the Yippies!, as made evident in their use of an exclamation point in the Earth First! logo. A more substantive connection between these two groups can be traced back to Mike Roselle, one of Earth First!’s three founding members. Roselle belonged to the second generation of Yippies! active in the 1970s and worked as one of the “Earthfreaks” in Green Power Feeds Millions, a Flower Power organization founded by Wavy Gravy, the founder of the Hog Farm commune and famed inspiration for the eponymous flavor produced by Ben & Jerry’s. (Wavy Gravy would appear in an early issue of the Earth First! newsletter, thereby demonstrating the continued presence of psychedelicists in the nascent radical environmental milieu.)

In keeping with the post-Yippie! politics of Greenpeace, Roselle and the Earth First! gang made their national debut by unfurling a banner made to look like a crack in the side of the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in northern Arizona. Once again, this mindfuck was engineered to symbolize the myth that a rising tide of industrial sabotage was crashing in America. By staging even more bold mindfucks in the years that followed, these radicals actually built a popular front of “eco-warriors.” The subject of a sustained FBI counterterrorist campaign, Earth First! and its sister organizations, the Earth Liberation Front and the Animal Liberation Front, developed the nonviolent program of militancy of the Yippies! into tactics specifically engineered to halt the clear-cutting of old-growth forests. These tactics included “ecotage” and “eco-tricks,” which one of the early issues of the newsletter Earth First! defined as: “any nonconventional means employed to protect the Earth Mother. It implies the use of superior wit and cunning in a form of psycho/political judo to render our/her opponents impotent . . . hopefully in the bedroom, as well as in the arena of contest.”⁷ The most controversial form of ecotage was “tree spiking,” which entails driving long metal rods into the base of trees, which prevent them from being clear-cut; in fact, loggers who unwittingly laid a chainsaw to “spiked” trees have been permanently maimed, thereby drawing Earth First!’s commitment to nonviolence into question.

While linking the Yippies! to Greenpeace and the Earth First! has been an exercise in primary source research, it remains unclear why militant psychedelicists turned to environmental politics in the 1970s and 1980s. The end of the Vietnam War and the demonstrative worsening of environmental devastation are two obvious factors in this shift, as is the onset of the War on Drugs. President Richard Nixon launched his punitive crackdown on drugs in June 1971, around the same time he allegedly declared Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America,” thereby leaving no doubt about his intention that the government would wage “war” against psychedelicists. The persecution of psychedelicists exerted immense pressure on the movement of psychedelicist groups, so much so that many disbanded, went underground, or remade themselves as spiritual, political, or artistic organizations. However, my point here is not that Greenpeace and Earth First! were merely covert psychedelicist organizations (though there was a lot of psychedelic usage within them); rather, they represented a reformation within the psychedelicist community. In order to understand this shift, it is important to state outright that mind-expanding drugs were not solely responsible for inspiring deep green resistance movements.

A myriad of factors were at play in the creation of Greenpeace and Earth First!. The longstanding tradition of environmentalism in North America exerted a palpable influence on the first generation of eco-militants, as did the antinuclear movement, conservationism (as embodied by the Sierra Club), and the American naturalist tradition personified by Walt Whitman, Aldo Leopold, and John Muir. Moreover, as activists, they also regarded their defense of nature as a continuation of the tradition of social justice embodied by the civil rights movement, anti–Vietnam War protests, and Rachel Carson’s impassioned criticism of pesticides in Silent Spring (1962). All of these influences colored the way socially conscious people interpreted their profoundly unusual experiences occasioned by psychedelics, and the result was a new mode of meaning-making that was ecological, spiritual, and, evidently, activist.

The turn toward eco-radicalism was, in fact, not a major shift at all, considering how almost every school of psychedelicism imbued the expansion of consciousness with messianic, social significance. Broadly speaking, the core idea at the heart of psychedelicism was the belief that psychedelic drugs expanded consciousness to higher levels of spiritual awareness that revealed how all the universe was interconnected. As psychedelicists, the early eco-radicals went one step further in emphasizing the salvific importance of honoring humanity’s interconnection with the natural world, and the dire threat posed by environmental destruction. For them, consciousness expansion meant moving species chauvinism, or “anthropocentrism,” toward a new holistic perspective, which they termed “ecocentrism.” In short, ecocentrism was simply a more precise way to describe consciousness expansion.

Scholars have interpreted the movement of psychedelicist groups as a separate entity as compared to eco-militant factions. The reason for this is not hard to guess, as radical environmentalists themselves have not given any indication of the psychedelic roots of their movement. Moreover, eco-activists have been met with extreme prejudice by law enforcement agencies on every level of the US government, and, harking back to the paranoia of the era of McCarthyism, the government persecution they have faced has been termed the “Green Scare.” In this tense climate, deep green radicals had nothing to gain by disclosing their connection to mind-altering substances, which were subject to their own domestic military campaign at this time. Here is another reason why scholars have neglected this history.

Though there are signs of a major de-escalation in the drug war, its legacy persists in the epistemological conventions that frame the way scholars discuss the international psychedelicist scene. I used the terms “psychedelicist” and “psychedelicism” in a deliberate attempt to reappraise the movements and groups variously misconstrued as “invented religions,” “love cults,” “acid fascists,” and simply “hippie bullshit.” Such terminology is often emotionally loaded and ultimately distracts from the empirical study of the hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of psychedelic fellowships that spread across the globe over the last half century. As a de facto alliance between medical, legal, and media establishments, the drug war misconstrued the use of psychedelics as the gateway to criminal behavior, mental illness, and chromosome damage (at least in the case of LSD).⁸ Unsurprisingly, this “war” was also sufficient deterrent for academic inquiry, as scholars who ignored this injunction risked their academic position and raised suspicion among their colleagues. Research on psychedelic spirituality has languished as a result.

However, the tide is turning, as scholars in the humanities and hard sciences come to recognize psychedelics as the engine behind many cultural innovations, from the wellness industry and treatment of mental illness, to antiwar movements and the ecological activist movements I have discussed here. As these studies pro-gress across disciplines, I believe that scholars of religion can play an important role in helping us understand both the past and future of meaning-making, and the many tools—including psychedelics—that humans have used in this pursuit.

J. Christian Greer is currently a lecturer at Stanford University. While a postdoctoral researcher at HDS’s Center for the Study of World Religions, he led a series of research seminars that culminated in the formation of the Harvard Psychedelic Project, an HDS student group, and the Harvard Psychedelic Walking Tour. His latest book, Kumano Kodo (OSGH Press), analyzes pilgrimage folklore in Japan, and his forthcoming book, Angelheaded Hipsters (Oxford University Press), explores the expansion of psychedelic culture in the late Cold War era. This is an edited version of Greer’s presentation at the Ecological Spiritualities Conference sponsored by Harvard Divinity School and held April 27-30, 2022.