From the late '60s to the mid '70s, nearly a million young people went back to the land. Nowhere was the urge to reconnect with nature more keenly felt than in San Francisco, where droves of young people were suddenly fleeing a city overrun by heroin, speed, and bad vibes. Cops were shooting down Black Panthers in Oakland and the military was tear-gassing students in People's Park in Berkeley. Vietnam veterans were looking for a salve for their PTSD. Faithful Marxists aimed to put their ideals to the test. Some just wanted to get high in the woods.
Great Cdn tradition
Residents taught themselves to farm, practiced free love, and built their own homes. (Lol, one outta three ain't bad I suppose ;).
The audacious confidence of building one's own house according to one's own vision tends to be reflected in back-to-the-landers' other creative pursuits. Laird Sutton is an artist, Methodist minister, and sexologist who has spent his life intermingling these disciplines. For years he commuted into San Francisco from his ranch in Bodega, an intentional community about an hour-and-a-half drive north of San Francisco. He built his home there in 1968 and has continued to tinker with it over the years. His front window, made of curved plexiglass, like a cockpit, overlooks the hillside; it once displayed a collection of ancient erotic art. One of a handful who remain on the community's land, Sutton lives with his 15-year-old Labrador, Maggie (whose bloodline he has traced back to J.R.R. Tolkien's own dog), and a library of sexological literature.
Lloyd Kahn, the former editor of the “Shelter” section of the Whole Earth Catalog, still lives on the half acre he and his wife purchased in Bolinas, a coastal community in Marin County, just north of San Francisco, in 1971. Now 86 years old, with bushy white hair, he is, after Buckminster Fuller, the most famous proponent of geodesic domes. His Domebook, volumes one and two, sold hundreds of thousands of copies before he pulled them from print, renouncing geodesic domes as impractical—they can't be sealed against wind and weather, and barns were simply better structures. His agent couldn't dissuade him. “I didn't want any more domes on my karma,” he says.
Kahn now largely espouses simple stud houses, with vertical walls and simple roofs, inspired by the conventional farm structures he would see on the side of the road. “I had to admit I was wrong in front of a quarter of a million people,” he says. “It was great. People are so disinclined to admit mistakes. That's part of learning. If you're experimenting, there are going to be failures. You acknowledge them and go from there.”
Oh crap!,.. this is Cali!. Too late to edit. Hmm..
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
