I feel that it’s necessary to make a distinction between several different groups who seemingly all get conflated with each other. These groups are hippies, hipsters, and then a new group which I just invented a word for (though others may have used it also) - eco-hipsters. Let me elaborate.
Eco-hipsters are people I’ve always been vaguely aware of, but just now have started to get to know. These are basically mid-twenties people who are into local, small-scale agriculture, environmentalism, biking rather than driving, and other such things.
How are they different from hippies? I’ll explain. I feel like hippies, at least locally, are distinctly, for a lack of a better word, dumber. They’re mostly interested in having a good time, drinking, smoking pot, and listening to music. They may cop an environmentalist or activist persona, but they don’t really act on it. They all seem to speak in a drawn-out, slow, inarticulate way - the typical “yeeeaaahhh maaaaaan” thing. They hang out at head shops a lot, and can often be seen playing Ultimate Frisbee.
The eco-hipsters aren’t like this; they actually do things. Right now, some of them are organizing a cooperative garden and orchard on a plot of land that they purchased. Yes, they actually purchased a plot of land and they are physically working the land. And they have meetings where they sit around and discuss their plans in an organized way. I know, because I was there. And I didn’t see any pot being smoked. The room didn’t smell like pot. There were no empty beer bottles on the table. It was an actual meeting.
These people also speak in an articulate way. They enunciate their words properly and they seem to have pretty good vocabularies. They also look fairly good: none of them have dreadlocks, they don’t smell bad, and though they’re not particularly concerned with style the way true campus hipsters are, they do at least seem like they groom themselves. A lot of these guys have huge bushy beards, but short hair, which is a look that you see a lot on “regular” hipsters, but not on “hippies,” who are more likely to have long hair and long beards, neither of them particularly kempt.
There’s overlap between the eco-hipsters and the “standard” hipsters, but not between either group and the hippies. On Facebook, I’ll look at the profile of one of these eco-hipster types, and notice that we have a lot of “standard hipster” friends in common, people I knew in college. But they’re never friends with the “hippie” types who I’m friends with, the guys into the jam band scenes and ultimate frisbee games and weed, weed, weed.
Also, there’s the bike thing. Hipsters and eco-hipsters both love bikes, not necessarily fixed gear bikes (although this is the stereotype) but the standard, traditional-style road bike. The more mechanically-oriented among them might also have motorcycles, invariably old Honda or similar street bikes. They don’t typically have cars, though. Hippies, on the other hand, will usually have rusty piece-of-shit cars or pickup trucks, totally covered with bumper stickers.