ABSTRACT
Earth day, April 22, 1970, signaled that America had entered a new era. Held the same spring that the Black Mesa strip mine first provoked Marc Gaede into action, it verified the radicalization of a generation. Indeed, it was the biggest environmental demonstration in history. An agonizing epiphany occurred: the protest generation lost faith not only in the prevailing political order but in the very nature of reason itself. This phenomenon — moral doubt and suspicion of reason — was not new. In ancient times the Greeks also feared intellect and sought an objective foundation for values. And they found an answer, a philosophy that endured for nearly two thousand years. But their theory rested on assumptions about nature that, by the 1960s, few still believed in. Every ideology ever conceived has rested on a simple idea, a picture of reality so captivating, so convincing, that it could serve as a lens for viewing all of reality.
