This chapter emphasizes actions at the regional scale, specifically the West Coast hip neighborhoods of the Bay Area during the 1960s. The runaway crisis of the late 1960s and the People’s Park standoff in 1969 are the focus of this chapter, which explores the role that “the West” and “nature” each played in the counterculture imagination and in the emergence of the popular ecology movement on the streets of Berkeley. This chapter stresses again the more intimate scale of the body and the influence that mobile, sometimes sick, and recalcitrant youth bodies played in the remaking of public space and ideas of autonomy as youth and their adult allies fought for “the right to the city.” The flood of rootless, placeless teens in public space, parks, and new “youth ghettos” forced local municipal renegotiations of young people’s legal status, contributing to broad national changes to the very meanings of youth, youth public health accommodation, and environmental activism during a decade marked by such contests.

This chapter explores how the dawn of the nuclear age introduced new ways of thinking about environmental risks and children. Fears of radiation pollution set new terms and new meanings that precarious youth helped to make more concrete. The chapter emphasizes how concerns for youth and ecology moved together, driving the work of federal and citizen scientists who traced the paths of radioactive isotopes at different scales. Through the bodies of children at ever-increasing distances, Americans came to understand a new set of shared environmental risks. By concentrating the local and global releases of radioisotopes in their thyroid glands, blood, and bones, children drew together pollution and fears that could no longer be kept secret or separate from the relative safety of white middle-class domestic life. To postwar Americans, radiation was vague, invisible, and hopefully distant. How it insinuated itself – as metaphor and material experience – at the youthful heart of the postwar domestic dream helps to explain the power of the postwar popular ecology movement.