county prohibitions could be seen as a success. Mendocino is now cited internationally as a center of the organic movement and a catalyst for anti-GEO movements that have, in some cases impeded their growth, particularly in California where GE crops have actually been ordered to be destroyed by a federal judge. Civic agriculture Mendocino is famous for being a bastion of rural counter-culture where many liberal activists and members of California’s hippie generation led a back-to-the-land movement during the 1970s. The Measure H campaign reaffirmed these sensibilities and has been studied as an example of "civic agriculture." The agenda-setting phase of the policy cycle was highly localized. Public policy experts and social historians contend that the implications of the "GMO free Mendocino" movement were beyond the empirical basis of the ordinance or the larger political debate regarding GEOs. The social forces animating the conflict were embedded in localized rural values of stewardship and decentralization. The community’s self conception as a synthesis of its counter-cultural legacy and rural working class ethos fostered a powerful sense of local collective action that was pitted against the perception of top down "command and control" of local agriculture by a distant monolithic nexus of multinational power. See also Genetic engineering in the United States References 2004 in California 2004 in the environment Genetically modified organisms Genetic engineering in the United States Mendocino County, California California law Environmental issues in California Environmental law in the United States