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Time for a confession: like many of us who care passionately about the environment, I’m a child of the Sixties. Or, to be more exact, of that rough decade (in more senses than one) that was bracketed by the release of Love Me Do by the Beatles in November 1962 and ended with the death of Jimi Hendrix in September 1970.

What a year that was… the first Earth Day, the passage of the Clean Air Act, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (by a Republican president!), the last use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. And all those books on the shelf! Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Mis-Education… R. D. Laing’s Politics of Experience… the two-year-old copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, the stitching already coming apart from overuse. And above all, perhaps, the eloquently titled bestseller The Greening of America, by Charles Reich, which was first published in the New Yorker in the very same month they were laying Jimi in the ground.

Forty years later, what we remember most about Reich -- to the extent we remember him at all -- is his call for the creation of a new "Consciousness III,"  a flaky, countercultural concept that involved a lot of time listening to the Grateful Dead and consuming large amounts of homegrown marijuana. But there was a lot more to Reich than that caricatured memory. He was a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and a distinguished Yale Law School professor (one of his students, ironically, was Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito).

Reich deplored the lack of strong federal action to protect the environment. But he went way beyond that. "Green" was a broader term for him than it is to us today, encompassing not just environmentalism but a seamless package of values that also included feminism, gay rights, racial equality, and an end to military conflict, rampant consumerism, and overweening corporate power. The society Reich envisioned would start with individual consciousness, but end up with a wholesale reformation of our cultural and political institutions.

A little more than forty years on, what has happened to Reich’s vision? And in 2020, when The Greening of America hits its half-century, where we will be? I can almost imagine some of the news stories we may be reading:

* Just days after Exxon-Mobil announce quarterly profits of $37 billion, two K Street lobbyists are convicted on charges of paying six-figure kickbacks to members of the Senate Energy Committee to approve substantial tax breaks to benefit Exxon’s advanced algae biofuels division. The judge sentences the pair to three months of community service, telling them that he is exercising leniency in recognition of their commitment to a clean energy future and the promotion of energy independence.

* A consortium of five megachurches holds its annual assembly in Houston. In addition to resolutions reiterating opposition to same-sex marriage and support for the carrying of concealed weapons during services, church leaders approve a plan to pave all church parking lots with permeable asphalt to recycle stormwater.

* Lawyers for OrganoBigbox confirm that the giant chain of suburban retailers and fast food outlets will press ahead with its $25 million lawsuit for copyright infringement of its federally registered trademark, I’m Lovin’ that Green Stuff ®, by Reich Community Farms of Humboldt County, California.

As to the prospects for Consciousness III, Reich told an interviewer last September, there wasn’t much to be optimistic about. "It’s viewed as something like a fantasy or a dream that people woke up from with a headache," he lamented.

While Reich’s ideas might not give me a headache, they did feel as obsolete as Richard Nixon. Yet my mental images of 2020 didn’t leave me feeling depressed; ambivalent was a better word, or accepting, perhaps because they felt quite plausible. After all, if we want to scale up the greening of America to the point where it permeates the cultural mainstream, it’s going to happen in ways we never suspected in those far-off days when we were listening, stoned, to Dark Star and Purple Haze. Consider that the Pentagon was seen as the devil incarnate in the days of Agent Orange; now it’s light years ahead of any other institution in developing clean energy alternatives.

A decade from now, we could well be saying the same about the likes of Exxon. And that will indeed be a revolution -- if not the kind of which we once dreamed.