[1] Born on October 1, 1937, in Jamaica, Queens, New York, Berg was raised in Florida after moving there at age six, which was where he first became interested in the environment as a child.
[2][5] According to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2011, he "was the primary writer for the Diggers, penning terse, scathingly funny anticapitalist position papers and exhorting the city to prepare for the coming mass arrival of young hippies now known as the Summer of Love.
"[2] In The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin recounts Berg leading a small group of Diggers in June 1967 to disrupt a speech by Tom Hayden at a gathering for the Students for a Democratic Society, with Berg declaring "Property is the enemy, burn it, destroy it, give it away," while other Diggers shut out the lights and recited poetry.
[6] In 2007, Berg told CBS News, "The media, to a large extent had created this 'hippie' who was a person making a 'V for Victory' sign with a silly grin, and wearing 50 buttons that said this and that.
[3] In the 2006 book Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s, Berg told oral historian Jeff Kisseloff, "More and more it occurred to me that the most important question to consider was the position of human beings in natural systems.