Kirkpatrick Sale
Kirkpatrick Sale is an American journalist, historian, and environmental writer known for his influential role in shaping the modern environmental movement. With educational roots at Swarthmore College and Cornell University, he has focused his career on the themes of bioregionalism, decentralization, and a critical perspective on technology and the concept of progress. Sale’s extensive body of work includes notable titles such as *Rebels Against the Future* and *After Eden*, where he explores the relationship between human societies and their environments.
A central tenet of Sale's philosophy is the critique of what he sees as the inappropriate and unsustainable trends in technology and human relations over the past seventy thousand years, culminating in a warning about potential catastrophic outcomes if these trends continue unchecked. He believes that humanity thrives best when aligned with the ecological constraints of their specific regions, advocating for a more decentralized and equitable distribution of power both among humans and in relation to the natural world.
While sometimes characterized as a Luddite or anarchist, Sale has also held positions with reputable publications and organizations, reflecting a complex engagement with contemporary issues. His later work, including *The Collapse of 2020*, indicates a nuanced evolution of his views, acknowledging the persistence of society while still emphasizing the need for significant changes to prevent future crises.
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Kirkpatrick Sale
IDENTIFICATION: American journalist, historian, and environmental writer
In a long career as journalist and activist, Sale has helped shape the modern environmental movement through his writings emphasizing human scale, bioregionalism, decentralization, and a thoroughgoing critique of technology and the idea of progress.
Kirkpatrick Sale was educated at Quaker-associated Swarthmore College and at Cornell University, where he majored in history and journalism. This educational background underlies Sale’s long-standing efforts to forge links between environmental and social justice concerns—efforts reflected in the many books he has produced in his career as journalist and historian, from The Land and People of Ghana (1963) and SDS (1973) to Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution—Lessons for the Computer Age (1995) and After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination (2006). Although sometimes portrayed as a simple Luddite, anarchist, and secessionist, he has served as editor with The New York Times Magazine and The Nation and is a member of both the E. F. Schumacher Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The trajectory of Sale’s career as environmental writer and activist can perhaps be best understood in terms of the importance of a Schumacher-influenced “appropriateness” in Sale’s thought and writings—most important, appropriateness in tools, scales, and relations among humans and of humans with other species and the nonhuman generally. His works trend toward a critique of what might be called the technoglobal dominance of the human species, the dangerous failings of which are, at root, all ultimately failures of appropriateness.
Although for Sale technology is never neutral, tools in themselves are less an issue than the prior history built into them by the culture that made them. Cultures that increasingly elevate the technological and material—to the exclusion of environmental, social, civic, and other “irrelevant” values—produce increasingly inappropriate and unsustainable technologies. As a bioregionalist who believes that human beings live best when they are aware of and live within the constraints of the regions in which they find themselves, Sale views the increasingly global scale of human technological culture also as increasingly inappropriate to long-term sustainability. The increasingly dominant (and increasingly inappropriate) power position of a relatively few human beings within the human species and the increasingly dominant position of Homo sapiens as the “crown of creation” in the natural world are at odds with horizontal and decentralized power relations among human beings and between the human species and the rest of nature—these are key elements of Sale’s thought concerning what is appropriate and sustainable.
The broad “revolutions” of the past seventy thousand years—the introduction of big-game hunting among hunter-gatherers, the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the digital revolution—are, for Sale, all intensification of the same pattern of increasing inappropriateness in human tools, scales, and relations, a vast “boom” leading inevitably to a catastrophic “bust” on the same scale—unless action is taken in time.
Whether he is discussing the industrial capitalism of the past few centuries or the growing technoglobal dominance of Homo sapiens over the past seventy thousand years, Sale presents a message that mingles apocalypse and optimism. The forces he presents as arrayed against the change to a more appropriate way of living always seem to be unstoppably and invincibly leading humankind to global catastrophe—but this is precisely where the relevance of history to the future comes into play. Although humanity may be suffering a second, digital revolution in the present, we still have before us the model of the nineteenth century Luddite revolt against the first industrial revolution. Although we live in a technoglobally dominant Homo sapiens world, we still have the nearly two-million-year run of the more appropriate world of Homo erectus to inspire us. Sale, as historian, reminds us that the past was not the same as the present, and this makes legitimate the hope for appropriate change, since the future need not be merely a continuation of the present.
In his work The Collapse of 2020 (2020), Sale walked back some of his views. He moved to Ithaca, New York, to be closer to family, and purchased a computer and television. However, Sale noted that he would never buy a smartphone or microwave. In that same work, though Sale continued to warn against the dangers of modern society, he admitted that the fact that society still existed showed that some of his earlier views were incorrect.
Bibliography
Levy, Steven. "A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society?" Wired, 5 Jan. 2021, www.wired.com/story/a-25-year-old-bet-comes-due-has-tech-destroyed-society/. Accessed 23 July 2024.
Katz, Eric, Andrew Light, and David Rothenberg, eds. Beneath the Surface: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Deep Ecology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Schumacher, E. F. Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. 1973. Reprint. Point Roberts, Wash.: Hartley & Marks, 1999.
Thayer, Robert L., Jr. LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.