This is really a little get to know me better post. As stated in the title, I love hippies. Like your traditional idea, tree hugger, peace and love, care for the earth kind of hippies. They are great people who are welcoming and accepting and usually some of the nicest people you will find. I love all of those things. I think everyone should be more accepting, even in disagreement, and everyone could stand to be nicer in general. I mean really, it is completely possible to fundamentally disagree with everything someone believes and still be civil and kind to them. Idealistic agreement and kindness are not mutually exclusive.
That last part leads me to why I always say damn those hippies! While I agree with so many of the hippie ideals, I despise the common methods of hippy implementation. For example I think it is great to plant tons of fruit trees and edible landscaping, and implementing permaculture practices, but instead of looking for a public place to try and do this or try and find someone to donate land, I bought a house and do this at my house. If you want to improve the land and the ecosystem make an oasis of ecological diversity then BUY the land and do it. You don't have to seek permission or hope people don't mess with the system in a public place, etc.
I am also a huge free market capitalist (please hold your cheers or jeers). This ideal bleeds over to my gardening where I am very Darwinian. If I plant two plants next to one another and one thrives and the other struggles I rip that straggler out. Even better, I hope the strong one suffocates the little one and gives a more abundant yield from that area. I feel like a lot of hippie type folk will design a system and then want it to work so badly that a clearly struggling system is willed into perpetual struggling existence. I am not so proud as to try and will a struggling system I design into perpetual under-performance. I rip that crappy design out and start over. I'm trying to design systems of abundance that operate on a low continual input basis. Sometimes that means destroying my pet project and starting over because dang it, it just didn't work. As much as I try and plan, sometimes the best observations and designs only come from observing a system that doesn't work.
I guess my hope is to have compassion and empathy like the hippy, but look at the system like an engineer. Hippineer or enginippy, you get the idea.
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