For two days, 20 speakers are gathering at this scholarly symposium in France to “recontextualize” the historic and wild counter-cultural event that was Woodstock!
The English translation at the conference website reads:
In August 1969, Max Yasgur organized a festival of music and peace on his farm near the small town of Woodstock in upstate New York. His “Woodstock Music and Art Fair” was a great moment in popular music but also – and perhaps more importantly – Woodstock became a symbol of a whole generation of young people who face an America that was reactionary and warlike, adopted a particular way of being and living, culture, freedom of thought and political vision of the United States and the world.
As part of this conference, author Destiny Kinal is presentating a paper on the Diggers, and how their experience laid the basis for the philosophy of bioregionalism.
Says Kinal:
The Diggers grew out of the SF Mime Troupe and used street theater to make their political points. They were behind the media that hit the street on a daily basis, like the Oracle and the Communication Company. They worked with others to stage the first Human Be-Ins and the Summer of Love.
Kinal’s speech will trace how the
Diggers moved out of the city into the countryside, setting up and linking alternative communities that expressed more fully the values forged in the Sixties counterculture: a return to natural birthing and dying, wholesome food, alternative medicine, a return to growing and preserving food, new ways to build….
In the mid-Seventies, a relationship with one’s watershed was proposed by Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann called bioregionalism.