Hippies and cowboys

There's much to learn from cowboys and greenies, Lisa Scott finds.

Last weekend was surreal to say the least, not quite Kafkaesque (no-one turned into a beetle), but definitely Hunter S. Thompson-on-acid peculiar as it featured a fashion parade, risky activities undertaken at heights, and being serenaded by a pair of actual cowboys. Because being single isn't all drinking red wine and crying at the moon while wearing a ratty blue dressing gown.

Cowboys wear big hats and loud shirts and call you dahlin'. Some people think they are silly, but those same people don't often rope themselves to an animal that can weigh up to a tonne and move its back muscles and legs independently, hoping to last eight seconds. With courtly manners and a respect for women stemming from a time when there weren't many around, strong and macho to boot, cowboys are dead sexy.

Cowboy songs are unusual (both kinds, country and western), in that the harmonies are heavenly yet the lyrics are often very dark. One I recall particularly, a Garth Brooks song, featured a cheating wife, "Papa loved mama, but mama loved men'', who was mowed down by papa's truck. Poor mama.

As for me: a big old Texas grin on my face, eating chops while sitting across the table from two hot men singing to me, I was one happy li'l lady.

Not happy: anyone who wants to catch an eel in Lake Forsyth, or Te Roto o Wairewa, where the water is so poisonous it kills little dogs who drink it. Lake Ellesmere in Canterbury is also famously fouled, having for years exceeded recreational guidelines for faecal coliforms (that's poo to you and me), and the Waikato River, once pristine, is now murky green-brown by the time it gets to Hamilton.

Agricultural activities are causing/have caused much of the problem; nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilisers and stock excrement running off or seeping through farmland. There are about 11,400 dairy farms in New Zealand, counting small non-commercial holdings, the big ones exuding 3.6 tonnes of nitrogen each, on average, per year. With fewer marshes and wetlands, which act as natural kidneys filtering out nutrients, they are leaching into streams, rivers and lakes once healthy, full of plants and fish, now quiet and clogged with blooms of toxic algae whose ominous spread blocks out all light, and life.

All this stuff isn't news to anyone with ears. In fact, people have been shouting warnings about the state of our waterways for years (and this article shouldn't take away from the awesome restoration work of Waikato dairy farmer Stu Muir, bringing whitebait ponds and formerly stagnant tributaries back to life in his part of the country); the problem is, the shouts of alarm were coming from hippies, and nobody ever listens to hippies.

It could be the way they dress: layers of variegated motley, that nubby brown cloth from Thailand, sandals, non-conventional hair. It could be the lacklustre way they protest: sweetly, peacefully, holding slightly damp hand-crayoned signs. It could be that they tend to be into sharing, bartering or growing their own, against businesses so big they squash little and local, and use that awful baking soda toothpaste. Many don't even eat meat, which makes it easy to think they're loonies.

Whatever it is, hippies have always been the Cassandras of the modern world. "The Vietnam War is bad,'' they said. "Shut up, you dirty [expletive] hippy,'' said America. "Nuclear power plants are dangerous,'' they said. "Safe as houses,'' said Russia. "The one at Chernobyl is powering the entire - oh, wait.''

Green homes, organic food, chemical-free cleaning products, stop slaughtering dolphins, drilling for oil might not be a super idea, electric cars are a thing: it was hippies who said it first, and everyone laughed or rolled their eyes or pretended not to be related.

Now there is but one conclusion you can draw from the astonishing (albeit bittersweet) pro-environment sea change now happening in our culture and (reluctantly, nervously) in the halls of power. Only one way to take the chorus of "it's the right thing to do'' coming from giant clothing manufacturers scared of the sweatshop taint; one thing we must all acknowledge in our wary, jaded, globally warmed universe: the hippies were right all along.

So if this column has a moral, and I feel something in my life should, it's love a cowboy, but listen to a hippy.