Green Pioneer

What I want to know is this:  Where are these people today?

They must be in their 50's or 60's by now. Did they disband? Are there still some surviving 'settlements' tucked away somewhere? Did they sell out? Did they somehow mix or morph into the generic 'green' movement that's happening today?

If anyone has some insights here, please come forward. We settlers of the next generations need you!

The excerpt below is taken from a book we checked out from the library, Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter by Lloyd Kahn.


The New Settlers of New Mexico


During the cultural revolution of the '60's, many young people with inquiring minds and adventurous spirit set out to create new lives in rural areas of America. New Mexico, with its open spaces, cheap land, and sparse population, drew thousands of new settlers. It was a time of optimism, faith, and yes - drugs - but also a lot of hard work building and repairing adobe houses, raising children, tending animals, and living communally in the psychedelic years.

Irwin Klein was a photographer from NY who shot black and white photos with a Leica during five visits of about three months each to NM from 1966-71. he was working on a book he called The New Settlers of New M.exico. Irwin died a tragic death in 1974.

Here are excerpts from the introduction to Irwin's book, along with his beautiful photos. This will bring tears to the eyes of many who were there in those years, a time before the harsh realities of life intruded on youthful idealism and gentle optimism.

Though some photographs were shot on communes, most of them are of people living alone, in couples, families, or small groups in the little Spanish-American towns in the backcountry. It is sometimes hard to distinguish between a group of friends who share certain resources and spend a lot of time together and a commune, but I think that a commune has to have a sense of consciously shared responsibilities and probably, a certain formal structure. Most of my subjects live in what I would call settlements rather than communes.

Many of these people are children of the urban middle class who have abandoned the drug ghettos of large cities, though some come from rural backgrounds. There are dropouts from the universities and relatively ‘straight’ walks of life and a few old beatniks. As I explored the evolving situations, certain patterns and themes unfolded. There seemed to be a rite of passage from innocence to experience, and a development away from the image of the hippie toward older American archetypes like the pioneer and the independent yeoman farmer.

Some might look upon this as just a photo collection of hippies. While it’s true that the pictures reflect the style and décor of a particular moment which is already passing, what interested me more was that the adventure I depict is part of a timeless movement, the perennial attempt of human beings to renew the pattern of their lives. My subjects are trying, with varying degrees of seriousness, to develop a viable way of life outside our urban technological complex, drawing whatever resources they can muster from our common past and disintegrating culture. [Italics mine]

My own role was as much that of a participant as an observer. I came to NM with much the same motives as the people I photographed. In almost every case a certain bond of friendship or intimacy was established before I began working. The New Settlers is part family album, part document, part myth. I consider it as much a collective expression as my own work.

[Perhaps these are the first contemporary Green Pioneers!]