Kirkpatrick Sale – författare

In After Eden, Kirkpatrick Sale answers these questions in a radically new way. Integrating research in paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, he points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of Homo sapiens’ estrangement from the natural world. Sale contends that a new, recognizably modern human culture based on the hunting of large animals developed in Africa some 70,000 years ago in response to a fierce plunge in worldwide temperature triggered by an enormous volcanic explosion in Asia. Tracing the migration of populations and the development of hunting thousands of years forward in time, he shows that hunting became increasingly adversarial in relation to the environment as people fought over scarce prey during Europe’s glacial period between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. By the end of that era, humans’ idea that they were the superior species on the planet, free to exploit other species toward their own ends, was well established.

After Eden is a sobering tale, but not one without hope. Sale asserts that Homo erectus, the variation of the hominid species that preceded Homo sapiens and survived for nearly two million years, did not attempt to dominate the environment. He contends that vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today—in some tribal societies, in the central teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the core principles of the worldwide environmental movement—offering redemptive possibilities for ourselves and for the planet.

First, the poetry is for the most part traditional in form, with rhyme and rhythm, though the lengths and metric schemes are often inventive. In an age dominated by free and sometimes wholly unpoetic verse-like playing tennis with the net down, as Robert Frost famously said-these poems for the most part adhere to conventional lyric principles and stand out as examples of how fluid and unforced the language can be even as it follows those strictures.

Second, the subject matter of almost all the poems is deeply personal, with intimate portraits of the most basic, and sometimes the most anguishing, emotions. This represents a side of the author that has never been on display so completely before, though those familiar with his historical and critical works will see in them resonances of the same sensibility and passion. Thus while it is unusual to see an author noted for historical writing and a critique of the modern industrial epoch explore so intimately the sense and sensibility of an individual feeling like love, Sale has previously written of the need for an impassioned relationship to the earth as a necessary fundamental of an ecological society.

Some previous critical assessments of Sale''s work:

--"Acute and tough-minded"-Larry McMurtry--"I am filled with admiration"--Joseph Heller--"Poems of the highest order and deepest passion"--John Paulits--"Lucid, vigorous a delight"--The New Yorker

Big government, big business, big everything: Kirkpatrick Sale took giantism to task in his 1980 classic, Human Scale, and today takes a new look at how the crises that imperil modern America are the inevitable result of bigness grown out of control—and what can be done about it.

The result is a keenly updated, carefully argued case for bringing human endeavors back to scales we can comprehend and manage—whether in our built environments, our politics, our business endeavors, our energy plans, or our mobility.

Sale walks readers back through history to a time when buildings were scaled to the human figure (as was the Parthenon), democracies were scaled to the societies they served, and enterprise was scaled to communities. Against that backdrop, he dissects the bigger-is-better paradigm that has defined modern times and brought civilization to a crisis point. Says Sale, retreating from our calamity will take rebalancing our relationship to the environment; adopting more human-scale technologies; right-sizing our buildings, communities, and cities; and bringing our critical services—from energy, food, and garbage collection to transportation, health, and education—back to human scale as well.

Like Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, Human Scale has long been a classic of modern decentralist thought and communitarian values—a key tool in the kit of those trying to localize, create meaningful governance in bioregions, or rethink our reverence of and dependence on growth, financially and otherwise.

Rewritten to interpret the past few decades, Human Scale offers compelling new insights on how to turn away from the giantism that has caused escalating ecological distress and inequality, dysfunctional governments, and unending warfare and shines a light on many possible pathways that could allow us to scale down, survive, and thrive.