Cuz Voltaire said so

First of all, this.

So. In an article titled "What Was the Hipster?" Mark Grief discusses the hipster trend that he claims lasted from 1999-2009 in two distinct phases. This version of hipsterism, he says, "referred to an air of knowing about exclusive things before anyone else."

Later, he defines the post-2004 brand of hipsterism as "green hipsterism" or "Hipster Primitive," which incorporated an "Edenic nature-as-playground motif" and a fascination with "rudimentary or superannuated technologies," along with fashion choices like flannel, lumberjack beards and unnecessary scarves.

In light of that, dear, dear hip kids of 2011, I'd like to engage in a little game called "hipper than thou," or, "transcendentalists were into nature before you were." Brought to you by my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, from a lecture/essay called "Man the Reformer."

 

Oh, you thought you were the first ones to become self-aware consumers? Ahem. “It is only necessary to ask a few questions as the progress of the articles of commerce from the fields where they grew, to our houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities.”

Oh, you thought you were the first ones to point the finger at corporate greed and corruption? "The general system of our trade … is a system of selfishness; is not dictated by the highest sentiments of human nature; is not measured by the exact law of reciprocity; much less by the sentiments of love and heroism, but is a system of distrust, of concealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but of taking advantage.” 

Bet you thought you were pretty clever when you decided to eat only local organic produce and sign up for a plot at your local urban garden, huh? Hmm. “If the accumulated wealth of the past generations is thus tainted,—no matter how much of it is offered to us,—we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves into primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part, with his own hands, in the manual labor of the world.”

Yeah, and you brag at parties about all the new-old crafts you've taken up, because you think it's more "authentic" to work with your hands, don't you? “A man should have a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, our delicate entertainments of poetry and philosophy, in the work of our hands.”  

So yeah. Wal-dog and I were into gardening, vegetarianism, locavorism, organic food, and pretty much everything else way before you were.