For many of its proponents, the sustainability movement continues a long American tradition encompassing the simple rural virtues extolled by Thomas Jefferson, the romance of nature sung by Henry David Thoreau, the wilderness movement inspired by John Muir’s walks into the High Sierras, the national forestry policies crafted by Gifford Pinchot, and the robust outdoorsmanship exemplified by Teddy Roosevelt and the Boy Scouts. “Sustainability” connects to these antecedents, but has more direct roots in the turbulence of the 1960s and early 1970s, when middle-class reform mingled with upper middle-class radicalism. Moderate initiatives such as the civil rights movement, mainstream environmentalism, and the Great Society clashed or combined with the anti-Vietnam War movement and the campus-based New Left and revolutionary student movements. All of these in turn blended with the nihilistic, antinomian popular youth culture of the Woodstock generation.