The 40th anniversary of Woodstock has come and gone, and the 50th anniversary is 10 years down the road. Peace, love music and drugs were the mainstay of the original music festival in 1969, but something else came out of that, something that was about as cosmic as the festival was itself, and it is called change.

Those drugged out hippies which sat there in upstate New York at Yasgurs’ farm, who listened to the vibes coming off the stage from legends like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, CSNY, Country Joe and Fish—who supplied the letters for the Fish call, “Give me an F, give me a U…” etc—moved on after that, but with a new awareness. They all believed that they could make things happen to change the world, and guess what? They did!

It started slowly enough with the protests on college campuses against the Vietnam war. It was the first time in American history that ordinary people’s voices influenced violent American foreign policy. It affected the nation so much, that the president who got us into the quagmire of Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, saw the rioting in the streets against the war and refused to run for another term of office, because he knew he could not win. It was the first major victory of the Woodstock Generation.

The second major victory was the election of Jimmy Carter and his environmentally friendly administration. He forecasted the dire need to find alternative forms of energy, and tried to get us off of our foreign dependence on oil. The Woodstock Generation elected him and his policies, but during the next election, the old establishment reared its ugly head and we elected Ronald Reagan and his Reaganomics, or as his VP George Bush once called them, voodoo economics. Although we returned to some of the darker days of environmental ignorance, change was still in the air.

Slowly but surely, cars began to get better fuel mileage and burn cleaner, with less harmful pollutants coming out of tailpipes. Ozone killing chlorofluorocarbons were banned in the US as was the raptor killing pesticide DDT—which caused the top predators in the food chain, namely birds of prey, to absorb so much DDT into their systems that when the females laid eggs, the eggs became so brittle that they cracked under her weight.

Other changes came as organic food went from being a cottage industry to going mainstream, recycling became commonplace, alternative means of power generation came back into vogue, and species of animals like whales and the bald eagle were saved from extinction.

All of these changes were brought about by the Woodstock Generation, that collection of hippies, yippies and dippies, leading the way on the front lines for a better way of life.

In one way or another, we are all members of that generation, we are all a member of the vast changes taking place, and we are all members of that movement for peace and love that started more than 40 years ago. We have elected an environmentally active president, and say what you will about any other policy that is put forth, the Obama administration is second to none when it comes to the environment and making it better. He has presented sweeping reforms for the use of alternative forms of energy, giving tax incentives and rebates to get the ball rolling. And it’s working. Solar and windmill production is up over last year, and for all the talk of a recession in the business of US economics, the alternative energy factions had none, and in fact, continued growing by leaps and bounds.

The original Woodstock Generation started the ball rolling for change on college campuses so long ago, and all of us, no matter when we were born, must always remember where it began, and we must always remember to keep that legacy of change alive.