From the Summer of Love to Nelson British, Columbia — American Counterculture Today North of the 49th

Say “Summer of Love” and so many images come to mind — “far out” lingo, tie dye and flower power, San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district, the Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park where you’d sway to local bands like the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. But for a time and place that changed a generation, it’s amazing just how fleeting all this was. From what seemed like endless pot-fueled possibilities for 30,000 or so hippies converging on San Francisco, to total flame out in about 10 months. All amid intense political discord over the Vietnam war, heated civil rights battles and what devolved into hard drug abuse. American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator Tod Gitlin called all this a cyclone in a wind tunnel. In other words, too volatile not to self destruct.

But what if you took this cyclone of hippie spiritual seekers and draft dodgers out of the charged American wind tunnel of political and racial strife at the time. And what if you transplanted a piece of it into an absolutely unpolarized remote idyllic British Columbian town — what would all this look like some 50 years later? Listen in and find out…