Dedication: To the Original German Hippies!

I hereby dedicate this class to those German hippies who by rejecting the Industrial way of life and going back to nature, founded the Lebensreform movement in Europe.

These inspired pioneers, with a new vision of communal life, founded alternative organizations, communes, sanatariums and health food stores. One even started the American School of Naturopathy.

Lucky for us, many of them immigrated to America, where their new ideas spread like wildfire especially in Southern California where they influenced a new generation of "Nature Boys".

These extraordinary, health conscious Germans awakened Americans to how their health was suffering by overconsumption of industrially processed foods. They introduced a number of new paradigms of health based upon holistic ideas about restoring nature's balance in our lives and bodies.

People like Dr. Benedict Lust, Arnold Ehret, Hermann Sexauer, Maximillian Skinger, Bill Pester and many others brought this exciting philosophy of life from Europe, opening schools, clinics, health food stores, and teaching their ways to the likes of eden abez, one of the Nature Boys, who wrote the #1 hit song "Nature Boy".

Their concepts of fasting, raw foods, vegetarianism, organic gardening, nudism, living in balance with nature, hot springs bathing, etc. caught on so well and were adopted so naturally by the American Hippies, as to seem their own inventions.

But a debt of gratitude and acknowledgement of their contributions is long overdue.

For more info about these wonderful people and how they inspired the Health Food movement and the Hippie movement, please read:



Children of the Sun by my friend Gordon Kennedy.

Or read his article Hippie Roots and the Perennial Subculture

May their legacy live on in new generations of health conscious hippies...

 

For a long time I have thought that it was because Germany pioneered chemical farming that Rudolph Steiner came up with the idea of bio-dynamic farming as a reaction noticing how food did not taste like it used to. He formulated many other ideas such as theosophy. There are a number of Steiner schools in Australia offering an alternative type of education.