Joel Makower attended Woodstock 1969 and later wrote what became its definitive first-person history — "Woodstock: The Oral History" — a compilation of accounts from performers, organizers, and attendees that captured the festival in the voices of the people who lived it. By the time we spoke with him, he had become one of the leading voices on green business, advising Fortune 500 companies on environmental strategy.
The connection between those two parts of his career is not incidental. Woodstock occurred eight months before the first national Earth Day — the event that launched the modern environmental movement. For Makower, both events drew from the same well: a generation that had come of age believing that things could be fundamentally different, and that collective action could make them so.
When we spoke with Makower on the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, he was observing a moment he had been waiting decades to see: corporate America finally beginning to move on environmental issues, driven not by ideology but by economics and technology.
That kind of change takes a generation or two. We couldn't have done what we're doing now five years ago, let alone forty.
— Joel Makower
What struck him most about the shift was how quietly it was happening — not through public campaigns or declarations, but through operational decisions made inside large organizations:
Companies are doing more walking than talking in this instance. Most of the steps in going green are being done quietly.
— Joel Makower
The economic crisis of 2008-2009, which might have been expected to push environmental concerns aside, had in his view accelerated them instead — because reducing waste and improving efficiency turned out to be the same project:
Makower pointed to the auto industry's turn toward electric vehicles and the steady reduction in material use across manufacturing — beer cans using a third less aluminum, packaging getting lighter — as examples of change that had accumulated quietly over decades and was now visible. He saw the Woodstock generation's values not as having failed, but as having taken the time they required.
"Woodstock: The Oral History" remains one of the most important documents of the festival — not a retrospective written from the outside, but a mosaic of first-person voices assembled while many of those voices were still young enough to remember exactly how it felt. Makower's dual vantage point — participant and chronicler, counterculture child and green economy strategist — gives him a perspective on Woodstock's legacy that few others share.