In the Digger Underground there lived a hobbit.



Emmett Grogan & The Diggers

Tolkien and radical ecology in the Sixties.

by Walt Contreras Sheasby
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Tolkien_Ecology/

*At this time, in 1966, the Haight was being inundated with
young
people from all over the country who came seeking liberation or hope
for
a life of personal empowerment,* recalled the actor Peter Coyote,
known
then as the Digger, Peter Cohon. (1) Even in January of 1966 in San
Francisco, before the influx of 75,000 in the 1967 Summer of Love,
near
the panhandle of Golden Gate Park you might meet a bearded man named
Gandalf. This bit of grassy shire was the new Hobbit-land, and
Gandalf
would offer to take you to meet the youth who was fast becoming a
legend there, Frodo Baggins. (2)

The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) was published in the heyday of
anti-
Communism, and Tolkien felt he might even have to field a question
about whether the Orcs were communists. (3) But in the radicalized
subculture of the Vietnam War era, the colossal epic of the Ring,
often
seen as a war between good and evil, was understood as fundamentally
a
war between Nature and Capital. The defense of endangered life itself
was expressed in the slogan that appeared everywhere: Frodo Lives!
As
the Christian journal Second Spring noted: *The book became a Bible
for
the Hippy movement and the Greens.* (4)

The Lord of the Rings, published by Houghton-Mifflin in hardback
in
the US from sheets printed in England by Unwin, sold modestly for ten
years. But the three books suddenly appeared in paperback for 75cents
apiece in 1965 in an unauthorized edition by Ace Books, and an
outraged
Tolkien urged a consumer boycott. Within months an authorized
paperback series was issued by Ballantine Books as royalties were
settled
with Ace. The Lord of the Rings became a best-seller twice over:
selling
well in the controversial pirated edition, and then in an official
edition
just months later. Ballantine was the first to come out in paperback
with
The Hobbit that same year, and it became one of the best-selling
paperbacks of all time. In England the trilogy did not appear in
paperback
until 1968. It became an instant sensation, and the Beatles tried
unsuccesfully to convince Tolkien to let them turn it into a movie
starring
the Fab Four as the adventurous hobbits.

Margarita Carretero-Gonzalez, a Tolkien scholar at Granada
University in Spain, reported that *...seeing recently on TV a banner
reading *Frodo Failed* held at a New York demonstration against the
war in Iraq reminded me of what I had read about the way some of
Tolkien's character's names had also been frequently repeated in
demonstrations against the Vietnam war.* There was even a Gandalf
for President movement. (5) Warren Hinckle, a radical Catholic who
in 1962 founded Ramparts magazine, wrote in 1967 that Tolkien's
classic trilogy Lord of the Rings was *absolutely the favorite book
of
every hippie.* (6)

The Hungry Sixties
Peter Coyote has said *Part of the energy for the Haight was
this
hunger for real experience.* (7) Besides Tolkien, other authors had
shaped those who came to the Haight. Although it had been published
in
1951, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye still spoke to those coming
of
age in the sixties. Holden Caulfield's daydream offered a sense of
meaning in the chaos:
Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some
game in
this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and
nobody's
around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the
edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch
everybody
if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running
and they
don't look where they're going. I have to come out from
somewhere
and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the
catcher in the
rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd
really like
to be. (8)

Jack Kerouac's 1957 lyrical novel On the Road turned the quest
of
Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady) into a road map for the counter-culture.
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old
broken-
down river pier watching the long, long, skies over New Jersey
and
sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge
bulge over to
the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people
dreaming in the
immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be
crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the
stars'll
be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening
star
must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie,
which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses
the
earth, darkens old rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final
shore in,
and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody
besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean
Moriarty, I
even think of Old Dean Moriarity the father we never found, I
think of
Dean Moriarity. (9)
This mythic search frightened some and inspired others. *Many of the
delighted ones,* as Gary Snyder, a central figure in the Beat
Renaissance,
said, *moved out to San Francisco (scene of Kerouac's subsequent
novel,
The Subterraneans)....* (10) His interaction with Snyder and Allen
Ginsberg inspired his Dharma Bums (1958).

The love of country in a geological sense rather than an
abstract
nationalism became a real part of the social consciousness of
youth.
Besides Lord of the Rings, there were other classics of the
imagination
that expressed an awareness of the interrelationship of nature and
intelligent beings, such as Robert A. Heinlein's cult classic,
Stranger in
a Strange Land (1961) and Frank Hertbert's Dune (1965).

In this period Silent Spring (1962) by Rachel Carson introduced
many
to at least some of the ramifications of ecology. But to some of the
founders of the SF Diggers, a more influential book was The
Destruction
of California (1965) by Raymond F. Dasmann of the Conservation
Foundation. The back cover announced *What it says, in simple prose,
is
that here, in this state, we are committing suicide,* and it
described
Dasmann as a zoologist, biologist and an expert in forestry, range
management and plant ecology. (11)

Peter Coyote spoke for many when he said *I've never lost the
sense
of devotion to the universe I had as a kid. I've felt my basic
intention was
always to wake people up to this majestic planet, wake them up and
appreciate it.* (12)

The Disenchanting Wizard
Into this growing sensitivity about the natural environment
stepped the
one wizard to rule them all. Murray Bookchin's comprehensive survey
of
environmental ills, Our Synthetic Environment, was published in 1962,
a
few months before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Under the pseudonym
Lewis Herber he published the first manifesto of radical political
ecology
in any language. *The hippie movement was just getting underway in
New
York when Ecology and Revolutionary Thought was published,* he said.
(13)

In 1964 it appeared in Comment in New York and in New Directions
in Libertarian Thought. It was republished in England in Anarchy in
1966, and thereafter it circulated as a widely distributed reprint,
before
being anthologized in Post-Scarcity Anarchism in 1971 and in
subsequent editions. In 1965 he penned another pioneering article,
*Towards a Liberatory Technology,* and many other provocative
articles
and books followed. Bookchin's reputation as one of the most
enlightening founders of the ecology movement, however, was later
eclipsed as the movement shunned his growing dogmatism and hostility
to all other radical ecologies.

Bookchin said *I think it is fair to say that my writings on
ecology
and anarchism were the first radical political writings on ecology.
They
became rather popular with the New Left. People don't remember the
origins of radical ecology; they think Ralph Nader or maybe Barry
Commoner produced it and influenced the New Left. This is quite
erroneous; in fact, the true history of radical ecology has yet to be
written.* (14)

Fantasy as Facing Reality
In reconstructing the facts of the origin of radical ecology,
however,
we should not overlook the impact of fantasy, particularly The Lord
of
the Rings. As Angie Errigo has noted recently, *The hippy counter-
culture
adopted the trilogy as an unofficial set text, and its popularity
continued
with the environmental movement that followed on from the hippy era.*
(15)

By working its enchantment on the popular consciousness, the
trilogy created a fertile soil for the theoretical vanguards of
social ecology,
deep ecology, bioregionalism, and ecosocialism. San Francisco was the
fantasy capital of the New Age, and as Charles Perry said in 1984:
The Haight-Ashbury provided a lot of the manpower [sic] for the
ecology movement that bloomed in the late sixties.* (16)
In the new radical ecology movement there persisted a fruitful
dialectic
between the Tolkien mode of re-enchantment of nature and the Bookchin
mode of scientific enlightenment.

Scholars of different persuasions today argue furiously over
Tolkien's
ambiguous social philosophy, some claiming him for the Papacy's
Counter-Reformation, others for the Monarchical Restoration, and
still
others for the Austrian school of economics. These conservative
readings
would have brought hobbit giggles in the past. There can be little
doubt
about the way the Oxford antiquarian was interpreted in the counter-
culture of the mid-1960s, and the key was Tolkien's deeply felt
concern
for the relationship of all creatures to the environment. *The idea
of
Tolkien as a prototype green activist,* according to Angie Errigo,
*dates
back to the late 1960s and early 1970s.* (17)

Will the real Frodo Baggins please stand up?
This must have been the real point in the widespread mistaken
identity
of the legendary halfling of hobbit town, who believed very simply
and
without any qualification that *Freedom means everything free.* (18)
In March 1967 the 23 year old Eugene (Emmett) Grogan of the San
Francisco Diggers, known for his battles against poverty and
exploitation,
was described by Warren Hinckle as the new Frodo, *A one-man crusade
for purity of purpose, ...the conscience of the hippie community.*
(19)








Emmett Grogan, rogue of the Haight Hobbiton


In his autobiography Grogan described his reaction: *As soon as
Emmett saw that March issue of Ramparts, he knew it meant trouble.
And
he became more certain of the ticklish situation it was to cause,
after he
read the two pages of copy which described him in unreal,
outlandishly
romantic terms, as the Frodo Baggins of the Haight-Ashbury and
roguish
hero and kingpin of the Diggers.* (20)

The Legend of the Diggers
The anonymity that the Diggers prized was blown away by such
extravagant publicity. Who were the Diggers? The Berkeley Barb
reported
on Oct. 21, 1966, shortly after the group came together:
In the afternoon, at a little before four, they come down
Ashbury,
cross Oak and gather around a Eucalyptus tree in the Panhandle.
They wear wide eyes, tattered clothes, and talismans around their
necks. Some are in their teens, most in their twenties, and a
few are
closing in on forty.
They talk about anything, smile about everything and do what they
want to do with the food that they bring to each other.
They are THE DIGGERS. And everyday at four o'clock they provide
anybody with anything to eat. (21)

Since then the story of the San Francisco Diggers, urban
guerilla
theatre gone underground, has been told hundreds of times and
embellished into folklore and revolutionary myth, as Grogan foresaw.
A
leftwing newapaper in Paris in 2000 ran a nostalgic series of
articles
declaring:
In 1966-67, unlike the hippies of San Francisco, they were
revolutionary anti-establishment protesters. When nothing more
seemed possible there, they disappeared into nature, founded
communities, and took a new departure into radical ecology. (22)

Radical ecology, however, was already a concern among the
founders
of the group, who had met and crystalized out of the S.F. Mime Troupe
actors, including Peter Berg, Peter Cohon, and Emmett Grogan, whose
friend Billy Murcott arrived from New York in early August, 1966. He
named the group after the original Diggers and wrote the first
edition of
the Digger Papers. Murcott believed that people had internalized
material
values and cultural premises about the sanctity of private property
and
capital so completely as to have become addicted to wealth and status.

The original Diggers were peasants who had banded together to
fight
the Enclosure Movement in Cromwell's England, Peter Coyote wrote. The
King had confiscated the common grazing land to raise his own sheep
to
supply wool for his new mills. The people tried to take them back,
arguing that no one had a right to appropriate private property for
themselves, and the King sent Cromwell and his soldiers against them.
They were nicknamed The Diggers because as the sun rose on them
every morning, they were seen burying the dead of the last night's
battle.
(23)

The Green Hun
*Wars against ecology are suicidal*, could have been the dictum
of the
author of Lord of the Rings, but it appeared in Peter Berg's Digger
manifesto, Trip without a Ticket, an indictment of industrial
ideology
inherited from the 19th century and its culture-machine, originally
published by the Diggers in the Winter of 1966-67. (24)

The new science of life was not exactly common coin. Berg
recalls
*When I was with the San Francisco Diggers nearly 30 years ago, Paul
Krassner of The Realist magazine wanted to put our street
communications out as the Digger Papers. In one of those essays I
used
the word ecology. He had never heard it. Krassner was an intelligent,
urbane New Yorker who had to go to the dictionary to look up the word
ecology.* (25) He would find it defined as the totality or pattern of
relationships between organisms and their environment, and as the
name of the special discipline that took up its study.

In 1972, Berg left to observe the first conference on the
environment
of the United Nations in Stockholm, and he discovered that his
concerns
were shared by militant Green Party supporters all over the world. He
talked with Gary Snyder and founded Planet Drum, an umbrella group of
bioregionalists. (26)

A year later Berg met the esteemed ecologist, Raymond Dasmann,
who
was also interested in counter-cultural movements as a vehicle for
more
ecologically-oriented values. The two wrote and published
Reinhabiting
California, in The Ecologist in 1977, defining a bioregion as both a
geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness. (27)

Careful readers of the Lord of the Rings envisage the maps that
Tolkien
drew, which may have been influenced by the concept of ecosystem that
a fellow Oxfordian, Sir Arthur George Tansley, had developed in his
theory
of ecology. (28) As Angie Errigo says, *That would, of couse, make
Middle-
Earth the first fully realized fantasy ecosystem.*

While these concepts are always under review as ecological
science
evolves, there is little doubt that Tolkien's impact in the sixties
contributed
to the emergence of a new consciousness about the relation of
organisms
and the environment.

Tolkien_Ecology-subscribe@yahoogroups.com


**********************************************************************
***********
Footnotes:

1. Peter Coyote, The Free-Fall Chronicles: Playing For Keeps, The
Digger Archives
http://www.diggers.org/freefall/forkeeps.html

2. Barry "Plunker" Adams, Where Have All the Flower Children Gone?
Rad!cal Vision,
http://www.wildrockies.org/peacetribes/where/where1.htm

3. Humphrey Carpenter, Ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Boston:
Houghton-Miflin Co., 2000, p. 262.

4. The Inklings, http://www.secondspring.co.uk/society/term13.htm

5. Margarita Carretero-Gonzalez, ...And then came the Fall: On the
nature
of Evil in JRR Tolkien's and JK Rowling's arch-villains, Roundtable
remarks at Fourth Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness, Prague,
2003. www.wickedness.net/ejv1n3/book.pdf

6. Warren Hinckle, The Social History of the Hippies, Ramparts
magazine, Vol. 6 No. 9, March 1967, p. 25.

7. Peter Coyote, Coyote Howl, The Official Peter Coyote Web Site.
http://www.petercoyote.com/howl.html

8. J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye, New York: Grove Press.

9. Jack Kerouac, On the Road, New York: Penguin USA, p. 307.

10. Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and
Watersheds,
Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995, p. 10.

11. Raymond F. Dasmann, The Destruction of California, New York:
Collier Books, 1965.

12. Peter Coyote, Peter Coyote Surviving in the Hollywood
Wilderness,
Interview wuth the Orlando Sentinel, February 5, 1987.
. http://www.petercoyote.com/sentinel.html

13. David Vanek, Interview with Murray Bookchin, Harbinger, Vol. 2
No. 1, 2002. http://www.social-
ecology.org/harbinger/vol2no1/bookchin.html

14. Ibid.

15. Angie Errigo, et al., The Rough Guide to the Lord of the Rings,
London: The Penguin Group, 2003, p.27.

16. Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History, New York: A
Random House Rolling Stone Book, 1984, p. 280.

17. Angie Errigo, op cit., p. 27.

18. Allen Cohen, Additional Notes on the S.F. Oracle for the Haight-
Ashbury in The Sixties CD
http://www.rockument.com/webora.html

19. Warren Hinckle, op cit., p. 25.

20. Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps, Boston:
Little,
Brown and Company, 1972, p. 314. www.diggers.org/ringolevio/ring314.
html. Warren Hinckle, op cit., pp. 25-6. Also see: Will the real
Frodo Baggins please stand up? London OZ 3 (March- April 1967).

21. George Metevsky [pseudonym], Delving the Diggers, Berkeley Barb,
Oct. 21, 1966, p. 3.
http://www.diggers.org/diggers/digart2.html#Delving%20the%20Diggers

22. Liberation newspaper (Paris, France), Culture section (Monday,
25 December 2000), p. 20-21.

23. Peter Coyote, The Free Fall Chronicles: Playing for Keeps.
http://www.diggers.org/freefall/forkeeps.html

24. Peter Berg, Trip without a Ticket, The Digger Papers (August
1968).
Originally published by the Diggers, ca. Winter, 1966-67. Reprinted
by
the Communication Company SF 2nd Edition 6/28/67. Included in The
Digger Papers, August, 1968.
http://www.diggers.org/digpaps68/twatdp.html

25 Peter Berg, Talk at Watershed.
www.nationalwatercenter.org/ on_waterfront_2.htm

26. Edouard Waintrop, The Green Hun of San Francisco, The Digger
Archives, http://www.diggers.org/waintrop.htm.

27. Don Alexander, Bioregionalism: The Need for a Firmer Theoretical
Foundation.
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/content/v13.3/alexander.html

28. Angie Errigo, op cit., p. 279.