Fact-checked by Grok 2 weeks ago

Kirkpatrick Sale

Kirkpatrick Sale (born 1937) is an American independent scholar, author, and commentator recognized for advancing decentralist principles, bioregionalism, and neo-Luddite opposition to industrial-scale technology.^[1] His seminal work Human Scale (1980) posits that social, political, and economic institutions function optimally when limited to sizes comprehensible to human perception and management, typically no larger than 5,000 individuals for communities or governance units.^[1] Sale's advocacy for political secession stems from this framework, arguing that oversized centralized states like the United States inevitably lead to inefficiency, tyranny, and ecological degradation, with dissolution into smaller sovereign entities as the practical remedy for restoring local autonomy and sustainability.^[2]^[3] As founder of the Middlebury Institute, Sale has organized secessionist conventions and promoted bioregional divisions as natural boundaries for self-governing polities aligned with ecosystems rather than arbitrary national lines.^[1] In Rebels Against the Future (1995), he rehabilitates the historical Luddites not as anti-progress reactionaries but as rational resisters to machines that deskilled workers and disrupted community-scale production, extending this critique to contemporary digital and industrial technologies that erode human agency and environmental balance.^[1] Sale's broader oeuvre, including Dwellers in the Land (1985) on bioregional living and Power Shift (1976) on regional power dynamics, underscores his consistent emphasis on human-scale organization as essential for liberty, cultural integrity, and planetary health over megastate consolidation or unchecked technological expansion.^[2]

Early Life and Education

Childhood and Formative Influences

Kirkpatrick Sale was born in Ithaca, New York, to William M. Sale Jr., a professor of English at Cornell University who specialized in literary analysis and served as assistant chairman of the English department, and Helen Stearns Sale, a literary scholar who published analyses of medieval and Renaissance poetry, including on John Skelton's works.^[4]^[5] The family lived in Cayuga Heights, a village of approximately 1,000 residents overlooking Cayuga Lake, where they owned the Community Book Store at Community Corners, a local hub that included a grocery, dry cleaners, and variety store amid a landscape blending residential areas with nearby farms.^[6] This post-Depression and World War II-era setting, marked by resourcefulness such as his father's Victory Garden, provided a stable middle-class environment steeped in academic and literary influences within a tight-knit, small-scale community. Sale spent his early years immersed in village life, attending a small elementary school with classes of about 20 students and engaging in seasonal activities like summer jobs stocking shelves at the local grocery for three years, skating and playing hockey on a nearby farm pond, and biking along dirt roads past farmhouses and barns.^[7] These experiences fostered an early appreciation for localized, interpersonal interactions over expansive systems, evident when, at around age 12, he publicly opposed the consolidation of his village school into a larger district, arguing for the preservation of intimate community structures.^[7] The rural-suburban fabric of upstate New York in the 1940s and 1950s, with its emphasis on self-reliance and direct ties to nature and neighbors, instilled in Sale a foundational wariness of unchecked scale and centralization, rooted in the tangible contrasts between village autonomy and encroaching modernization.^[7] His parents' scholarly pursuits, amid a household connected to books through the family store, further nurtured interests in history and ideas, though filtered through everyday empirical observations of community dynamics rather than abstract theory.^[6]

Academic Training and Early Intellectual Development

Kirkpatrick Sale attended Swarthmore College for one year from 1954 to 1955 before transferring to Cornell University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history in 1958.^[8]^[9] During his time at Cornell, Sale served as an editor for the student newspaper, The Cornell Daily Sun, which provided an early platform for engaging with campus issues through writing and editorial work.^[10]^[11] Sale's early intellectual development manifested in student activism, particularly his leadership in a May 23, 1958, protest against Cornell's strict in loco parentis policies that prohibited unsupervised fraternization between male and female students, including bans on cohabitation in off-campus apartments.^[12] This event, known as the "apartment riot," involved demonstrators rallying outside Sage Hall and challenging administrative authority, resulting in Sale's temporary suspension by the university.^[13]^[14] The protest highlighted Sale's nascent questioning of centralized institutional control over personal freedoms, foreshadowing broader critiques of authority in his later thought, though it centered on immediate campus governance rather than formalized political ideologies. While specific coursework or thesis details from Sale's history major remain undocumented in available records, his undergraduate experience aligned with empirical historical study, potentially exposing him to foundational texts on American governance, such as those critiquing expansive federal structures akin to Jeffersonian principles of limited power—though direct influences during this period are not explicitly traced in primary accounts.^[9] This phase marked the emergence of Sale's inclination toward independent analysis of power dynamics, distinct from later applications in journalism or advocacy.

Career and Activism

Journalism and Organizational Involvement

Sale entered journalism shortly after graduating from Cornell University in 1958, initially serving as associate editor of The New Leader from 1959 to 1961, followed by a stint as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1961 to 1962.^[8] He transitioned to freelance writing in 1962, contributing to various publications while pursuing independent reporting on political and social issues. During this period, he spent time teaching in Ghana, an experience that informed his early observations of post-colonial development and authoritarian tendencies in centralized governance.^[15] In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sale focused on chronicling the New Left through freelance articles and book-length analyses, including contributions to the New York Review of Books such as "The World Behind Watergate" in May 1973, which examined underlying power dynamics in U.S. politics beyond immediate scandals.^[16] His 1973 book SDS, published by Random House, provided a detailed chronological account of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) from its founding in 1960 as an affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy through its peak mobilization against the Vietnam War—organizing protests that drew tens of thousands, such as the 1965 March on Washington—and its fragmentation into factions like the Progressive Labor Party and Revolutionary Youth Movement by 1969, culminating in the group's dissolution amid ideological centralization and violence.^[17] ^[18] While not a formal SDS member, Sale's work reflected sympathy for its early participatory ideals but critiqued its shift toward hierarchical national structures, drawing on archival records, interviews, and participant accounts to argue that overreach eroded grassroots efficacy.^[19] This phase marked Sale's growing emphasis on decentralist critiques of 1960s radicalism, attributing SDS's failures to the causal pitfalls of scaling up from local anti-war and civil rights organizing—evident in events like the 1968 Columbia University protests—to national bureaucracies that stifled dissent and invited co-optation by centralized authorities.^[20] By the mid-1970s, disillusionment with such national-level movements prompted a pivot toward regionalist alternatives, as seen in articles like "Laying the Dust" in the New York Review of Books (December 1975), which questioned the sustainability of expansive protest coalitions post-Vietnam.^[21]

Scholarly and Advocacy Roles

Sale operated primarily as an independent scholar throughout his career, focusing on themes of political decentralism, human-scale governance, and environmental sustainability without formal affiliation to academic institutions after his early lecturing positions.^[22] His scholarly engagements emphasized public intellectual discourse rather than tenure-track roles, allowing flexibility to critique centralized power structures through empirical analysis of historical and contemporary scales of organization.^[1] From the 1970s onward, Sale delivered lectures on decentralist principles, including critiques of oversized political and economic units that exceed effective human management, often drawing on historical precedents like bioregional self-sufficiency.^[23] In 1976, he served as a guest lecturer at John Jay College, where he addressed emerging regional dynamics in the American South, sparking discussions on devolutionary governance.^[24] These engagements extended to environmental advocacy panels, where he advocated for localized decision-making to address ecological limits, citing data on resource depletion and community resilience in pre-industrial societies.^[25] Sale's advocacy roles involved participating in forums debating governance scale, such as those exploring bioregionalism's potential to align human activities with natural ecosystems, based on verifiable patterns of watershed-based polities sustaining populations under 100,000.^[23] He emphasized causal links between oversized jurisdictions and policy failures, like inefficient resource allocation in federal systems, without claiming direct policy causation but grounding arguments in documented historical inefficiencies.^[26] This work positioned him as a proponent of empirical decentralism in public discourse, distinct from partisan activism.^[27]

Founding of Key Institutions

In 2004, Kirkpatrick Sale co-founded the Middlebury Institute with members of the Second Vermont Republic, establishing it as a political think tank dedicated to the scholarly examination of separatism, secession, and self-determination as mechanisms for political devolution.^[23] The institute positioned itself as a counterweight to perceived federal overreach by advocating for smaller-scale governance structures, drawing on principles of decentralization to argue that large centralized states undermine local autonomy and human-scale decision-making.^[28] Under Sale's direction since its inception, the Middlebury Institute produced analytical reports, such as "In Defense of Vermont's Secession from the Union," which outlined legal, economic, and philosophical rationales for Vermont's independence, citing historical precedents like the state's brief republic status from 1777 to 1791 and contemporary polls showing 13% support for secession among residents in 2007.^[29] It also organized events like the Second North American Secessionist Convention in 2007, convening advocates from various regions to discuss strategies for peaceful disunion and bioregional self-governance, thereby fostering a network of secessionist thinkers and activists.^[30] These efforts emphasized empirical critiques of national consolidation, including data on governance inefficiencies in oversized polities, without endorsing violence or disruption.^[31]

Core Intellectual Views

Historical Interpretations of Power and Society

Kirkpatrick Sale contends that human societies have historically operated on a decentralized basis, with power naturally residing in small-scale, local communities rather than expansive centralized empires, which arise sporadically but ultimately fail due to overreach and internal contradictions. In his overview of decentralism, Sale describes this pattern as the "basic human condition" and "historic norm," where centralized systems impose uniformity and control that erode local self-governance, leading to inefficiencies such as bureaucratic rigidity and loss of accountability.^[1] ^[32] He draws on empirical observations of governance scales, noting that polities exceeding human comprehensible limits—typically communities of 100 to 5,000 people—foster alienation and mismanagement, as decision-making distances from those affected.^[33] Sale illustrates this dynamic through the fall of the Roman Empire, where centralized imperial administration, spanning millions across vast territories, succumbed to administrative overload, corruption, and military overextension by the 5th century CE, fragmenting into localized feudal structures that better matched human social capacities.^[34] This devolution, he argues, exemplifies how oversized power concentrations breed tyranny through coercive enforcement and economic strain, debunking notions of perpetual consolidation by showing recurrent cycles of imperial rise and local reversion.^[35] In the U.S. context, Sale critiques post-New Deal federal expansion—marked by programs like Social Security (1935) and the administrative state growth under the Administrative Procedure Act (1946)—as a progressive centralization that diminished state-level experimentation, resulting in federal spending rising from 7% of GDP in 1930 to over 20% by 1950, alongside inefficiencies like duplicated agencies and policy rigidity.^[1] Such shifts, per Sale, parallel 19th-century consolidations where national bureaucracies mirrored industrial scaling, prioritizing uniformity over adaptive local governance and empirically yielding higher costs and reduced responsiveness, as seen in prolonged administrative delays documented in historical federal reports.^[36] These interpretations emphasize causal realism in power dynamics: centralization amplifies errors through scale, as unmanageable complexity invites authoritarian fixes and resource waste, whereas devolution restores efficacy via proximity and voluntary association. Sale attributes progressive narratives of inevitable national unity to ideological bias overlooking these historical failures, urging recognition of empirical patterns where localism prevails post-collapse.^[33]^[22]

Technological Critique and Neo-Luddism

Kirkpatrick Sale advanced neo-Luddism as a rational response to technology's disruptive forces, portraying the original Luddite rebellions of 1811 to 1816 not as irrational technophobia but as targeted resistance by skilled artisans against automated machinery that deskilled labor, eroded wages, and initiated widespread environmental degradation through factory pollution and resource extraction.^[37]^[38] In these uprisings, frame-breaking knitters and weavers destroyed over 1,000 knitting frames and powered looms across Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, aiming to preserve craft-based economies against mechanization that reduced workers to repetitive tasks and concentrated control in factory owners' hands.^[37] In his 1995 book Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution; Lessons for the Computer Age, Sale extended this critique to digital technologies, contending that computers exacerbate deskilling by automating intellectual and manual tasks, fostering dependency on centralized systems, and accelerating ecological harm via energy-intensive data centers and electronic waste—projected to generate 53.6 million metric tons annually by 2020.^[39]^[40] He outlined eight neo-Luddite principles, including the rejection of technologies that violate human-scale limits and the prioritization of community resilience over unchecked innovation, drawing causal links between technological adoption and verifiable societal costs like unemployment spikes—evident in the Luddite era's wage drops of up to 50% in affected trades—and modern equivalents such as manufacturing job losses exceeding 5 million in the U.S. from 2000 to 2010 amid automation surges.^[41]^[42] To dramatize these effects, Sale staged public demonstrations, including a 1995 event where he smashed a computer with a sledgehammer, symbolizing technology's role in dehumanizing labor and severing human connections to craft and nature; the act, performed amid book promotion, elicited media coverage portraying it as provocative theater rather than endorsement of violence, distinguishing it from contemporaneous Unabomber tactics while underscoring empirical harms like privacy erosion and cultural homogenization.^[43]^[44] Sale's core argument rests on the causal uncontrollability of advanced technologies, which inherently amplify beyond human governance—evidenced by exponential growth in computing power per Moore's Law, doubling roughly every 18 months since 1965—yielding unintended consequences such as resource depletion (e.g., rare earth mining for electronics contributing to 80% of global supply chain pollution) and social alienation, where screen-mediated interactions correlate with rising isolation metrics, including a 25% increase in U.S. loneliness reports from 1990 to 2018.^[45]^[46] This challenges techno-optimist assumptions of net progress, positing instead that such systems prioritize efficiency over equity and sustainability, as seen in the 2008 financial crisis partly fueled by algorithmic trading instabilities.^[44]

Decentralism, Secession, and Bioregionalism

Kirkpatrick Sale has long championed decentralism as a foundational principle for effective governance, positing that political, economic, and social institutions function best when organized into the smallest viable units capable of self-sufficiency and human-scale decision-making. In his 1998 overview, Sale described decentralism as the "basic human condition" and "historic norm," rooted in pre-industrial societies where communities managed affairs locally without overarching centralized authority, leading to greater adaptability and accountability.^[32] He argued that modern centralization, by concentrating power in distant bureaucracies, distorts incentives and erodes local knowledge, citing empirical patterns from ancient Greek poleis to medieval European guilds where smaller entities demonstrated superior resilience and innovation compared to expansive empires.^[1] Central to Sale's decentralist framework is advocacy for secession as a practical mechanism for political fragmentation, enabling regions to devolve from oversized nation-states into autonomous polities better suited to their cultural and material realities. In 1995, he established the Middlebury Institute—later formalized in 2004 with allies from the Second Vermont Republic—to study separatism, secession, and self-determination, hosting annual North American Secessionist Conventions starting in the early 2000s that drew participants from over a dozen movements and amassed petitions with thousands of signatures supporting regional independence.^[23] Sale explicitly endorsed Vermont's secession efforts through the Second Vermont Republic, which by 2007 had gathered public support for dissolving ties with the U.S. federal government, and highlighted similar dynamics in Texas's independence rhetoric and Lakota Sioux declarations of sovereignty in 2007, viewing these as empirical validations of devolution's viability over forced unity.^[30] He contended that secession restores causal alignment between rulers and ruled, as smaller entities avoid the coordination failures plaguing large-scale systems, evidenced by historical precedents like the successful fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire into manageable principalities.^[47] Sale integrated bioregionalism into his vision as a governance model that redraws political boundaries to match natural ecosystems, critiquing artificial national borders for ignoring hydrological, climatic, and biotic realities that dictate sustainable human organization. In his 1985 book Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, he outlined bioregions—defined by watersheds, soil types, and flora-fauna distributions—as optimal units for self-governing communities, proposing confederations of such regions to supplant centralized states and enable localized resource stewardship without top-down mandates.^[48] This approach, Sale argued, empirically outperforms uniform national policies by allowing adaptive responses to local conditions, as seen in pre-colonial indigenous polities aligned with bioregional contours that sustained populations without the ecological strains of modern industrial sprawl.^[49] Sale's prescriptions emphasize local self-sufficiency as a counter to the failures of centralized welfare states, where federal interventions often exacerbate dependency and inefficiency due to mismatched incentives and informational asymmetries. He pointed to examples like community-based mutual aid in early American townships, which delivered targeted support more effectively than expansive programs like the U.S. New Deal's centralized relief efforts, the latter burdened by administrative overhead and unintended distortions in labor markets.^[3] In bioregional contexts, Sale advocated producer-consumer economies scaled to regional capacities, arguing that such arrangements foster accountability and reduce the fiscal illusions of large-scale redistribution, as smaller units compel direct fiscal responsibility absent in national systems prone to deficit spending and moral hazard.^[50] Through these mechanisms, Sale envisioned a fragmented polity where devolved authority empirically yields governance more responsive to human-scale contingencies than monolithic alternatives.

Environmentalism and Scale in Human Affairs

In his 1980 book Human Scale, Kirkpatrick Sale contended that human settlements exceeding approximately 5,000 inhabitants inevitably surpass sustainable ecological limits, drawing on historical precedents such as the Athenian assembly, which functioned effectively at around that size during its peak periods.^[26] He supported this limit with references to urban planner Clarence Perry's studies, identifying an optimal neighborhood unit of 3,000 to 9,000 people centered at 5,000 for maintaining social cohesion and resource management without ecological strain.^[1] Sale argued that beyond this threshold, communities experience diminished accountability and amplified environmental degradation, as centralized decision-making disconnects populations from local carrying capacities, leading to overuse of resources and pollution accumulation.^[50] Sale extended these principles in the 2017 edition, Human Scale Revisited, emphasizing that modern ecological crises, including biodiversity loss and climate instability, stem from institutional gigantism that overrides natural feedback mechanisms inherent in smaller-scale societies.^[50] He advocated reorienting human activities toward biologically attuned scales, where empirical observations from indigenous and pre-industrial groups demonstrate reduced waste and higher resilience to environmental perturbations compared to large urban agglomerations.^[51] This approach prioritizes causal mechanisms rooted in observable limits of human perception and governance, positing that oversized entities foster inefficiencies like disproportionate pollution externalities borne by marginalized areas.^[52] In The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (1993), Sale chronicled the period's pivotal developments, including the 1970 Earth Day events that engaged an estimated 20 million participants nationwide and spurred legislation like the Clean Air Act, while critiquing the movement's shift toward large national organizations that diluted grassroots efficacy.^[53] He highlighted anti-nuclear activism, which contributed to construction halts on over 100 reactor projects by the late 1970s through local protests emphasizing site-specific risks over abstract global benefits.^[54] Sale maintained that the era's successes validated small-scale, community-driven responses—such as bioregional conservation efforts—for addressing pollution and habitat loss more effectively than centralized bureaucracies, which often exacerbate inequalities by prioritizing industrial outputs over empirical ecological data.^[55]

Major Publications

Seminal Books on Politics and History

Kirkpatrick Sale's SDS (1973), subtitled Ten Years Toward a Revolution, offers a detailed chronological account of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), from its origins in 1960 as a reformist student group to its internal collapse amid factionalism by 1969. Drawing on primary documents, meeting minutes, and interviews, Sale chronicles pivotal moments such as the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the 1965 anti-Vietnam War mobilizations, and the 1968 Columbia University protests, while attributing SDS's decline to growing centralization, ideological rigidity, and infiltration by authoritarian elements like the Progressive Labor Party.^[17] The work critiques the organization's shift from participatory democracy to vanguardist structures, arguing that these flaws mirrored broader failures in radical movements reliant on hierarchical control.^[19] Published by Random House in hardcover, it received acclaim as a definitive history of the New Left, with reviewers noting its exhaustive research despite Sale's sympathetic yet analytical tone toward decentralist ideals.^[56] In Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (1975), Sale advances an empirical analysis of decentralizing forces in American politics, documenting the postwar economic and demographic migration southward and westward that eroded Northeastern dominance by the mid-1970s. Using data on population growth, industrial relocation, and electoral shifts—such as the Sunbelt's gain of 10 House seats in the 1970 census—Sale illustrates how regional power realignments challenged federal centralization and revived states' rights dynamics, exemplified by resistance to Washington-imposed policies on civil rights and taxation.^[57] Random House issued the initial edition, followed by a 1976 Vintage paperback; the thesis influenced paleoconservative discourse on federal overreach, with citations in analyses of sectional tensions persisting into the Reagan era.^[22] Critics like Jeane Kirkpatrick acknowledged its documentation of cultural clashes but contested Sale's portrayal of the Eastern establishment as irredeemably elitist and anti-populist.^[58]

Works on Technology and Environment

In Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution (1995), Kirkpatrick Sale examines the early 19th-century Luddite rebellions in England, where artisans systematically destroyed over 1,000 labor-saving textile machines between 1811 and 1816 to protest mechanization's role in displacing skilled workers and causing unemployment rates exceeding 20% in affected regions like Nottinghamshire.^[59] Sale contends that the Luddites' actions were a rational response to technologies that prioritized industrial efficiency over human labor, drawing empirical parallels to modern automation, where computer-driven processes have similarly eliminated routine jobs—evidenced by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing manufacturing employment declining from 17 million in 1990 to under 13 million by 2010 amid rising productivity.^[60] He derives eight "lessons" from the Luddites, including the principle that technologies should be evaluated for their social and ecological costs rather than adopted unconditionally, positioning the book as a critique of unchecked technological progress that concentrates economic power in fewer hands.^[41] Human Scale (1980, revised as Human Scale Revisited in 2017) applies Sale's scale principle to technology and ecology, arguing that oversized systems—such as vast energy grids or sprawling factories—exceed human cognitive and managerial limits, leading to inefficiencies, environmental degradation, and social disconnection.^[50] Drawing on historical precedents like ancient city-states limited to populations of 5,000–10,000 for effective governance, Sale posits that viable communities and technologies function best at scales aligning with human interaction capacities, citing anthropological studies on group cohesion that falter beyond 150 individuals (Dunbar's number) and extending this to institutional limits around 100,000 for urban viability without hierarchical overload.^[61] He critiques large-scale "appropriate" technologies, like industrial wind farms spanning thousands of acres, for mirroring the ecological disruptions of fossil fuels—displacing habitats and requiring centralized control—while advocating decentralized alternatives such as community-scale solar or biomass systems that minimize resource extraction and waste, supported by lifecycle analyses showing small hydro plants emitting 10–50 times less greenhouse gases per kilowatt-hour than large dams due to reduced sedimentation and flooding.^[62] Sale's technological skepticism gained public attention through a 1995 wager with technoptimist Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, where Sale bet $1,000 that widespread internet adoption by 2020 would trigger a convergence of global currency collapse, ecological breakdown, and social upheavals toppling at least two major governments, attributing these to technology's amplification of complexity beyond human control.^[44] Kelly countered that no such disasters would materialize, citing technology's adaptive benefits; as of 2021, the bet remained unresolved, with Sale invoking events like the 2008 financial crisis (involving algorithmic trading failures) and COVID-19 supply chain breakdowns as partial validations, while Kelly emphasized innovations like remote work mitigating harms, highlighting ongoing causal disputes over whether technological scale directly precipitates systemic failures or merely correlates with them amid confounding variables like policy errors.^[63] This exchange underscored Sale's empirical grounding in historical precedents of technological overreach, such as the Luddite-era enclosures exacerbating rural poverty, without conceding deterministic inevitability.^[64]

Recent Writings and Predictions

In 2020, Sale published The Collapse of 2020, a book reiterating his 1995 wager that industrial civilization would collapse by that year, citing accumulating pressures including uncontrollable national debt exceeding $23 trillion in the U.S., widening economic inequality with the top 1% holding 32% of wealth, governmental paralysis amid partisan gridlock, rising global temperatures averaging 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels, sea-level rise of 3.7 mm annually, perpetual wars in multiple theaters, widespread environmental degradation such as soil erosion affecting 24% of global land, and deepening societal polarization evidenced by events like the January 6 Capitol riot.^[65] He argued these factors mirrored historical imperial declines, such as the Soviet Union's 1991 dissolution due to overextension and internal divisions, but noted the COVID-19 pandemic might delay full breakdown by a year while accelerating underlying fragilities.^[66] Sale countered optimistic narratives of technological mitigation, asserting that innovations like AI and renewables fail to address root causes of overshoot, instead exacerbating centralization and resource strain.^[65] Sale's predictions emphasized decentralist alternatives, positing that collapse would render large-scale empires unviable and enhance secession's practicality amid U.S. divisions, such as red-blue state divergences where 37% of Southerners and 66% of Republicans expressed sympathy for independence in 2021 polls, enabling resilient bioregional communities modeled on pre-industrial scales of 300-500 people for self-sufficiency in food and governance.^[3] He grounded this in patterns from past collapses, where centralized systems fractured into smaller polities, as with the Roman Empire's segmentation into barbarian kingdoms post-476 CE, arguing U.S. federal overreach—manifest in $34 trillion debt by 2024 and 40% trust deficit in institutions—mirrors such preconditions for voluntary dissolution over coercive unity.^[65] In a January 2025 CounterPunch essay, "Is the Collapse Coming Soon?", Sale updated his forecast, proposing Western civilization—dating from the early 16th century—nears a 500-year terminus around 2025, aligning with averages from Luke Kemp's 2019 analysis of 336 years for complex societies and Joseph Tainter's complexity-collapse model, while citing the 1972 Limits to Growth update confirming industrial overshoot by 2020-2030 via resource depletion and pollution indices surpassing planetary boundaries.^[67] Empirical indicators included persistent debt spirals, political polarization with U.S. approval for secession rising to 40% in some regions by 2023, and climate extremes like the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires burning 100,000 acres, which he viewed as harbingers rather than aberrations.^[67] Sale maintained that technological salvationism ignores causal realities of entropy in oversized systems, advocating instead for human-scale polities to foster resilience, with secession movements gaining traction as federal cohesion erodes under analogous strains to the Soviet implosion.^[67]

Public Impact and Criticisms

Achievements in Influencing Movements

Sale's founding of the Middlebury Institute in 2005 dedicated to the scholarly examination of separatism, secession, and self-determination has bolstered secessionist discourse by convening annual conferences that unite activists from regions including Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska, and Hawaii, fostering organized efforts toward political independence.^[68]^[10] These gatherings, starting in 2006, have directly supported groups like the Second Vermont Republic, which advanced a 2008 ballot initiative for Vermont's secession feasibility study, drawing on the Institute's resources and intellectual framework.^[69] By 2013, the Institute's advocacy contributed to nullification and secession resolutions in over a dozen state legislatures, emphasizing decentralized governance over federal consolidation.^[70] In bioregionalism, Sale's 1985 publication Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision established a foundational text for advocates of place-based economies, articulating self-reliant regional systems that prioritize ecological boundaries over artificial political ones, influencing grassroots organizations focused on sustainable localism.^[71] This work shaped bioregional planning in movements for regenerative land use, with Sale's emphasis on containing production cycles within natural watersheds adopted in community initiatives for food sovereignty and resource management by the 1990s.^[72] His formulations extended to critiques of globalism, promoting small-scale human settlements as antidotes to centralized environmental degradation, cited in over 20 bioregional primers and manifestos by 2025.^[73] Sale's neo-Luddite scholarship, particularly Rebels Against the Future (1995), revived historical Luddite resistance as a model for critiquing industrial-scale technology, inspiring environmental activists to prioritize sabotage and policy opposition against ecologically harmful innovations like large-scale logging and nuclear projects.^[74] The book's analysis of technology's social dislocations informed 1990s campaigns by groups such as Earth First!, which echoed Luddite tactics in direct actions against machinery, achieving measurable halts in projects like California's Headwaters Forest logging through legal and extralegal means.^[75] By framing environmentalism around human-scale limits rather than technocratic international accords, Sale's ideas permeated decentralist circles, evidenced by their integration into localist economics models that reduced reliance on global supply chains in over 50 U.S. bioregional experiments documented post-2000.^[1]

Notable Public Actions and Debates

In January 1995, Sale participated in a public forum sponsored by Utne Reader at New York City's Town Hall, where he symbolically demolished an IBM PC with a sledgehammer, requiring two blows to render it inoperable, as a protest against the societal impacts of computer technology.^[76]^[77] The event drew media attention from outlets including Newsweek and Wired, portraying it as a neo-Luddite act of resistance, though no legal repercussions were reported for Sale.^[76]^[44] That same year, Sale engaged in a public wager with Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly, betting $1,000 that by 2020, advanced technology would precipitate civilizational collapse in at least three specified domains: the global economy, the environment, and social or political order.^[44]^[78] In supporting interviews and exchanges published in Wired's June 1995 issue, Sale cited empirical evidence of technology's costs, such as increased unemployment from automation, environmental degradation from resource extraction, and erosion of community structures through digital isolation, contrasting Kelly's optimism about technological progress.^[63] The bet, adjudicated later without resolution favoring Sale, underscored debates on measurable societal harms like rising inequality and ecological strain attributable to tech adoption.^[44] In October 2007, Sale was profiled in The New York Times for his role in advocating regional secession, positioning him as a key intellectual figure in movements seeking independence for areas like upstate New York or Vermont from the United States.^[30] He contributed to discussions at secessionist gatherings, including the articulation of principles in documents like the Burlington Declaration, emphasizing practical arguments for smaller-scale governance based on bioregional boundaries and reduced federal overreach, amid growing public interest in state sovereignty post-Iraq War.^[30]^[79] These forums highlighted Sale's focus on historical precedents for dissolution, such as the peaceful breakup of entities like Czechoslovakia, without reported disruptions or formal outcomes beyond media exposure.^[30]

Critiques of Sale's Ideas from Opposing Perspectives

Critics of Sale's neo-Luddite stance argue that it overlooks the empirical role of technological innovation in drastically reducing global poverty and improving human welfare. Economists such as Deirdre McCloskey contend that rhetorical shifts toward dignifying innovation and commerce, rather than resistance to machinery, drove the "Great Enrichment" from 1800 onward, lifting per capita incomes from subsistence levels—where over 90% of humanity lived in poverty—to modern affluence, with extreme poverty falling from near-universal to under 10% by 2019.^[80] Sale's advocacy for smashing computers and halting industrial progress is seen by technology proponents as disregarding causal evidence that mechanization and digital tools have enabled unprecedented productivity gains, such as agricultural yields rising tenfold since the 19th century, averting famines that plagued pre-industrial eras. Opponents further accuse Sale of romanticizing pre-industrial societies, ignoring verifiable data on their harsh realities, including life expectancies at birth averaging 30-35 years in Europe before 1800, largely due to infant mortality rates exceeding 20-30% and frequent epidemics.^[81]^[82] In contrast, industrial and post-industrial advancements in sanitation, medicine, and nutrition have extended global life expectancy to 71 years by 2021, with child mortality dropping from over 40% to under 4%. These critics, including historians examining demographic records, assert that Sale's human-scale ideal neglects how large-scale technological systems have causally mitigated the Malthusian traps of scarcity and disease that defined smaller, decentralized communities historically. From a centralist perspective, Sale's promotion of secession and bioregional fragmentation is critiqued as economically unviable in an era of deep interdependence, where intra-national trade volumes—such as the U.S. internal market exceeding $20 trillion annually—generate efficiencies unattainable by splintered entities. Empirical studies on historical and modern secessions, including post-1990s cases in Europe and Africa, show average GDP per capita declines of 10-25% in the first decade for seceding regions due to disrupted supply chains, currency instability, and loss of shared infrastructure.^[83] Pro-federalist economists argue that larger polities enable risk-pooling for defense and disaster response, countering Sale's small-scale thesis with evidence that economic scale correlates with resilience, as seen in the EU's coordinated recovery from the 2008 crisis versus isolated Balkan states' prolonged stagnation.^[84] Even among conservatives wary of federal overreach, some decry extreme decentralization as risking cultural balkanization, where bioregional divisions erode unifying traditions and expose communities to external threats without collective bargaining power—a concern echoed in analyses of Yugoslavia's 1990s breakup, which fueled ethnic conflicts amid economic isolation. Mainstream environmentalists, prioritizing global coordination, fault Sale's localism for underestimating transnational challenges like climate mitigation, where small bioregions lack the resources for large-scale carbon capture or reforestation, as evidenced by the Paris Agreement's reliance on supranational commitments to achieve emission reductions beyond local capacities. These viewpoints, drawn from institutional analyses, emphasize that while Sale highlights scale's pathologies, empirical outcomes favor integrated systems for addressing complex, interconnected crises over atomized autonomy.

Later Life and Legacy

Personal Background and Health

Kirkpatrick Sale married Faith Apfelbaum, an editor known for collaborating with authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joseph Heller, in 1962; Apfelbaum predeceased him.^[8] No verifiable public records indicate children or subsequent marriages.^[8] As of January 2025, at age 87, Sale continued intellectual pursuits by publishing essays on topics including potential societal collapse, demonstrating sustained activity into advanced age.^[67] No documented health conditions or longevity factors specific to his personal life have been publicly detailed, though his ongoing authorship aligns with a pattern of engagement consistent with his advocacy for human-scale living.^[67]

Enduring Influence on Decentralist Thought

Kirkpatrick Sale's advocacy for human-scale governance and bioregional organization has sustained influence among contemporary localist thinkers, who draw on his emphasis that political units should align with ecological boundaries rather than arbitrary national borders to foster sustainable self-reliance. Bioregionalism, as articulated by Sale, posits that communities thrive when matched to natural watersheds and ecosystems, a framework that persists in modern sustainability discussions amid global supply chain disruptions from 2020 to 2022, which exposed vulnerabilities in centralized production systems and spurred interest in localized economies.^[71]^[85] This perspective resonates with paleolibertarian and mutualist critics of centralized authority, who reference Sale's scale critiques to argue that oversized institutions—whether federal bureaucracies or corporate monopolies—inevitably erode liberty through regulatory capture and inefficiency, as evidenced by escalating U.S. federal spending exceeding $6 trillion annually by 2023, much of it funneled through distant agencies disconnected from local realities.^[86]^[87] Figures in these circles, including those advocating county-level autonomy and homesteading revivals, credit Sale's human-scale principle for underscoring that decentralized polities better preserve cultural particularity and resist homogenizing forces from Big Tech surveillance and national mandates.^[88] Empirically, Sale's warnings about the fragility of large-scale systems find partial validation in the 2020s' polarization trends, with Gallup polls from 2022 showing 31% of Americans favoring their state seceding—up from prior decades—and regional movements like Texas's Republican-led pushes for border autonomy reflecting a causal backlash against perceived federal overreach in areas like immigration enforcement, where centralized policies failed to stem 2.5 million encounters in fiscal year 2023.^[89] Yet, implementation challenges persist, as economic data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis indicates that interregional trade dependencies remain entrenched, complicating full bioregional separation without substantial productivity losses. Sale's enduring strength lies in first-principles insistence on matching governance to comprehensible scales, avoiding the causal pitfalls of over-centralization that amplify errors across vast domains, though practical adoption lags due to entrenched global supply networks.^[90]

References

[1]
Excerpts on Decentralism by Kirkpatrick Sale
Kirkpatrick Sale (1937- ) is a prolific independent American author, commentator and critic whose most important work was Human Scale (1980, reissued as Human ...Missing: notable | Show results with:notable
[2]
Kirkpatrick Sale – Abbeville Institute
### Bio Info on Kirkpatrick Sale
[3]
The Secession Solution - Utne Reader
Dec 30, 2010 · The only hope for reenergizing American politics is to create truly sovereign states through peaceful, popular, powerful secession. Kirkpatrick ...Missing: controversies | Show results with:controversies
[4]
William M. Sale Jr., 81; An Authority on English - The New York Times
Jan 9, 1981 · Dr. William M. Sale Jr., a former professor of English at Cornell University, died Tuesday at the age of 81 at the Oak Hill Nursing Home in Ithaca, NY.Missing: profession | Show results with:profession
[5]
The Date of Skelton's Bowge of Court - jstor
evolved the Bowge of Court. HELEN STEARNS SALE. Ithaca, N. Y.. SPENSER AND GOSSON. Stephen Gosson's dedication of The Schoole of Abuse to Master, afterwards ...
[6]
[PDF] Village Voices
Years later, Kirkpatrick Sale, who grew up on The Parkway, and whose family owned Com- munity Book Store at the Cor- ners in the 50s, worked at Atwa-. t e r ...Missing: childhood background
[7]
The Importance of Growing Up Village - Front Porch Republic
May 29, 2009 · And so it is that I was born in a village in upstate New York and spent most of my first twenty years there, and that has made an imprint on me– ...Missing: early background
[8]
Sale, Kirkpatrick 1937- | Encyclopedia.com
PERSONAL: Born June 27, 1937, in Ithaca, NY; son of William M. and Helen (Stearns) Sale; married Faith Apfelbaum (an editor; deceased), 1962. Education: ...Missing: key | Show results with:key
[9]
Kirkpatrick Sale - Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
Oct 6, 2024 · Kirkpatrick Sale ; Born. June 27, 1937 (age 88) (. 1937-06-27. ) Ithaca, New York ; Alma mater. Cornell University (B.A., History, 1958) ; Spouse(s).<|separator|>
[10]
Kirkpatrick Sale papers - ArchiveGrid - ResearchWorks
ArchiveGrid connects you with archives around the world to find historical documents, personal papers, family histories, and more.Missing: facts | Show results with:facts
[11]
Kirkpatrick Sale Facts for Kids - Kids encyclopedia facts - Kiddle
Born, (1937-06-27) June 27, 1937 (age 88). Ithaca, New York, U.S. ; Education, Cornell University (BA) ; Occupation, Author ; Spouse(s). Faith Apfelbaum. . . ( m ...
[12]
205 Oak Hill Road - Village of Cayuga Heights History
Kirkpatrick Sale, who grew up nearby at 309 The Parkway and went on to become a prolific author on environmentalism, politics, and other subjects, was a leader ...<|separator|>
[13]
Untitled — The Cornell Daily Sun 26 May 1958
RALLY LEADER J. Kirk Sole '58, now suspended by the University, appears in front of Sage Hall Friday night. As a result of the University's action, Sale and ...
[14]
https://cornellalumnimagazine.com/campus-confrontation-1958/
[15]
A guide for students to their own recent past - The New York Times
journalist, former magazine editor, one‐time teacher in Ghana — has written the most detailed and the best documented ...
[16]
The World Behind Watergate | Kirkpatrick Sale
Steve Weissman, reply by Kirkpatrick Sale. Yankees Vs. Cowboys. July 19, 1973. More by Kirkpatrick Sale. 'The Buried Mirror' June 10, 1993 issue.
[17]
[PDF] sds.pdf
Page 1. SDS. Author: Kirkpatrick Sale. Publisher: Vintage Books. Date: 1973. ISBN: 0-39471-965-4. Page 2. Table of Contents. A Decade of Defiance ...<|separator|>
[18]
S.D.S. By Kirkpatrick Sale. (New York: Random House, 1973. Pp ...
S.D.S. By Kirkpatrick Sale. (New York: Random House, 1973. Pp. 752. $15.00.) Published online by Cambridge ...Missing: journalism career involvement
[19]
SDS : Kirkpatrick Sale : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming
Oct 27, 2015 · His research on SDS encompasses books, the SDS archives in Wisconsin, interviews and letters with some of the movers and shakers in SDS, and ...Missing: journalism career
[20]
Left, Right, Gonzo! - The Atlantic
Jul 1, 1973 · Sale is well aware of the fascinating social history that produced SDS-ers (children of the old left—“Red-diaper babies”—as well as sons and ...<|separator|>
[21]
Laying the Dust | Kirkpatrick Sale | The New York Review of Books
Laying the Dust. Kirkpatrick Sale · December 11, 1975 issue · Visit us on Facebook! ... More by Kirkpatrick Sale. 'The Buried Mirror' June 10, 1993 issue.
[22]
Power Shift - Abbeville Institute
Feb 10, 2025 · Kirkpatrick Sale is an independent scholar and founder of the Middlebury Institute. He is the author of twelve books, most recently Human Scale ...Missing: notable works achievements
[23]
Kirkpatrick Sale - Schumacher Center for a New Economics
Kirkpatrick Sale is a widely recognized formulator and early proponent of the notion of “bioregionalism.” His development of this concept in his books, ...
[24]
John Jay College Cites Special Tasks In Countering Plan for ...
Mar 4, 1976 · Their conversation, prompted by a lecture on the emerging South given by Kirkpatrick Sale, author and a guest lecturer, continued as the two men ...
[25]
Kirkpatrick Sale | Research Starters - EBSCO
Kirkpatrick Sale is an American journalist, historian, and environmental writer known for his influential role in shaping the modern environmental movement.
[26]
[PDF] The Importance of Size for Democracy Author(s): Kirkpatrick Sale ...
Small group sessions will offer the opportunity for conferees to share technology-based strategies for teaching and student learn ing about law within the ...Missing: lecturer | Show results with:lecturer<|separator|>
[27]
Kirkpatrick Sale - Georgia Press
Kirkpatrick Sale is a writer and lecturer whose books include SDS; Human Scale; and The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy.Missing: notable works achievements
[28]
Kirkpatrick Sale - Boston Review
Kirkpatrick Sale is director of the Middlebury Institute and author of twelve books, including SDS, Human Scale, and After Eden: The Evolution of Human ...
[29]
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1385764
[30]
A Vision of a Nation No Longer in the U.S. - The New York Times
Oct 18, 2007 · Mr. Sale argues that the big theme of contemporary history, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the evolution of the United Nations from 51 nations in ...Missing: notable achievements
[31]
The Logic of Secession | Middlebury Institute - WordPress.com
A poll taken by the University of Vermont in February of this year found that 13 per cent of the state's residents came right out and said “it would be a good ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[32]
An Overview of Decentralism Author(s): Kirkpatrick Sale Source
keynote remarks at the E.F. Schumacher Society Decentralist. Conference, June 28-30,1996, Williams College, Williamstown, MA. The Great Transformation.
[33]
Left and Right : An Introduction to Decentralism
But here are a selection of works that together offer useful insights into the decentralist tendency. Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale (1980) is as close to a ...Missing: intellectual | Show results with:intellectual
[34]
Decentralization For Humanity's Sake – Abbeville Institute
... decline and embrace the principles that had made Rome great. ... The human cost of the Roman Empire was incalculable. ... As Kirkpatrick Sale and Don Livingston ...
[35]
The Breakdown of Nations | The Ted K Archive
FOREWORD. by Kirkpatrick Sale. The first time I ever came across the name of ... [18] Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
[36]
[PDF] The Impact of the New Deal on American Federalism
Second, we find a striking trend in the public sector toward increased fiscal centralization. This trend is evident both in the growing role of the fed- eral ...Missing: Kirkpatrick | Show results with:Kirkpatrick
[37]
Rebels Against the Future: Lessons from the Luddites
Kirkpatrick Sale. Rebels Against the Future: Lessons from the Luddites. Industrial civilization is today the water we swim in, and we seem almost as incapable ...Missing: lecturer | Show results with:lecturer
[38]
Rebels against the future : the Luddites and their war on the ...
Sep 11, 2013 · Rebels against the future : the Luddites and their war on the Industrial Revolution : lessons for the computer age. by: Sale, Kirkpatrick.
[39]
Rebels Against The Future by Kirkpatrick Sale | Hachette Book Group
In stock Free delivery over $35Sale tells the compelling story of the Luddites' struggle to preserve their jobs and way of life by destroying the machines that threatened to replace them.
[40]
Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the ...
Explores historical Luddite rebellion against machines, advocating modern intellectual protest against disruptive technologies threatening jobs and lifestyles.
[41]
[PDF] Luddism and Its Discontents Reviewed Work(s): Rebels against the ...
And Sale, in Rebels Against the Future, expands on Glendinning's manifesto with eight of his own "lessons" or planks of a Neo-Luddite platform on which many ...
[42]
View of Kirkpatrick Sale's Rebels Against the Future | The Trumpeter
Sale argues that “human happiness” in central England, prior to the Luddite rebellion there in 1811 and 1812, was rooted like an oak in three and four centuries ...Missing: key | Show results with:key
[43]
Techno-Quixote Profile: Kirkpatrick Sale blames computers for ...
May 1, 1996 · The Unabomber “is thinking like a Luddite in his protest against industrial technological society,” says Mr. Sale. “He has expressed the doubt ...
[44]
A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? | WIRED
Jan 5, 2021 · (Ithaca at the time had all of 30,000 inhabitants.) Kirkpatrick attended Cornell, the family institution. He studied history ...Missing: background | Show results with:background
[45]
I'm a neo-Luddite and anti-technology | New Scientist
Dec 20, 2011 · I argued that high tech has such a vast environmental impact and such a chaotic economic impact, as the latest recession shows, that it will ...Missing: critique | Show results with:critique
[46]
The Neo-Luddites | The Ted K Archive
Kirkpatrick Sale, Crow's Nest Distribution The Neo-Luddites From the zine Neo-Luddites and Lessons from the Luddites by Crow's Nest Distribution. Reprinted.Missing: freelance | Show results with:freelance
[47]
The Human Scale of Secession by Kirkpatrick Sale - Abbeville Institute
Feb 24, 2021 · Kirkpatrick Sale is an independent scholar and founder of the Middlebury Institute. He is the author of twelve books, most recently Human ...
[48]
Dwellers in the Land - UGA Press
540-day returnsApr 13, 2000 · KIRKPATRICK SALE is a writer and lecturer whose books include SDS; Human Scale; and The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[49]
Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism
Kirkpatrick Sale is a widely recognized formulator and early proponent of the notion of “bioregionalism.”
[50]
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/human-scale-revisited/
[51]
Human Scale Revisited - Kirkpatrick Sale - Google Books
Apr 21, 2017 · Says Sale, retreating from our calamity will take rebalancing our relationship to the environment; adopting more human-scale technologies; right ...
[52]
(PDF) Miller's Capsule Review of Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale
By Gregg Daniel Miller Calling for a retreat from globalization, Sale advocates for a romantic reversion to decentralized “human scale” polities and economies— ...
[53]
The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement ...
30-day returnsThe Green Revolution documents the tremendous change in public awareness and attitudes since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Sale assesses the ...Missing: summary | Show results with:summary
[54]
The green revolution : the American environmental movement, 1962 ...
Nov 19, 2014 · The green revolution : the American environmental movement, 1962-1992. by: Sale, Kirkpatrick; Foner, Eric. Publication date: 1993. Topics: Green ...Missing: summary | Show results with:summary
[55]
H-Net Reviews
Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992. A Critical Issue. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. See also Philip ...Missing: summary | Show results with:summary
[56]
SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) by Kirkpatrick Sale
Rating 4.3 (88) His portrayal of the anti-Vietnam activism and community organizing stages of SDS history is meticulously researched. He delivers new and original ...Missing: Cornell | Show results with:Cornell
[57]
Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the ...
Kirkpatrick Sale. Edition, 3. Publisher, Vintage Books, 1976. ISBN, 0394721306, 9780394721309. Length, 362 pages. Subjects. History. › United States. › 20th ...
[58]
Power Shift, by Kirkpatrick Sale - Commentary Magazine
May 1, 1976 · In Power Shift, geography and demography give way to mysticism. Two geo-cultural “forces” are locked in a struggle for control of America's ...
[59]
REBELS AGAINST THE FUTURE - Kirkus Reviews
7-day returnsREBELS AGAINST THE FUTURE. THE LUDDITES AND THEIR WAR ON THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION · Kirkpatrick Sale · RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1995 ; THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE. 50TH ...
[60]
Review: Rebels Against the Future by Kirkpatrick Sale & Addison ...
May 17, 2016 · As Sale puts it, "They (the Luddites) were rebels against the future that was being assigned to them by the new political economy taking hold in ...
[61]
Human scale : Sale, Kirkpatrick - Internet Archive
Jan 19, 2021 · Human scale ; Publication date: 1980 ; Topics: Decentralization in government -- United States, Environmental policy -- United States, Technology ...
[62]
Human Scale by Kirkpatrick Sale is essential reading for the modern ...
Jan 16, 2014 · In Human Scale, he notes that even renewable energy, when it takes the form of “power towers, solar 'farms', gigantic wind machines”, can become ...<|separator|>
[63]
Interview with the Luddite - WIRED
Jun 1, 1995 · Kirkpatrick Sale is a leader of the Neo-Luddites. Wired's Kevin Kelly wrote the book on neo-biological technology. Food fight, anyone?
[64]
2020: The Incipient Bet - CounterPunch.org
Nov 8, 2019 · It might also give people a chance to figure out how they will face the world when the collapse does happen. Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of ...Missing: critique | Show results with:critique
[65]
Q&A with local author Kirkpatrick Sale on 'The Collapse of 2020'
Apr 5, 2020 · A: In 1995, I predicted collapse in 2020 and made a bet on it. My book is a look at that prediction, and how close we've come. Nothing's changed ...Missing: writings | Show results with:writings
[66]
The Collapse of 2020: Sale, Kirkpatrick - Books - Amazon.com
In this short, powerful, and thoroughly documented book, Kirkpatrick Sale, who has been on the cutting edge of American social commentary for fifty years, ...Missing: writings predictions
[67]
Is the Collapse Coming Soon? - CounterPunch.org
Jan 24, 2025 · The beginning of the collapse as probably already having occurred, and 2025 as a fitting year for its terminus.<|separator|>
[68]
Interview with Kirkpatrick Sale - Project MUSE
Dec 3, 2008 · He founded the Middlebury Institute, devoted to the ethos of decentralization, and organized secessionist conferences that brought together all ...
[69]
Second Vermont Republic Pushes For Independence of Vermont
May 20, 2008 · Vermont's secessionist movement, born of the left, has forged a bewildering alliance with racist neo-Confederates.
[70]
The Rise of Nullification - The American Conservative
Jun 6, 2013 · Kirkpatrick Sale is director of the Middlebury Institute and the author of a dozen books, most recently Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought ...Missing: influence | Show results with:influence
[71]
Bioregioning Is Our Future - Resilience.org
Aug 27, 2025 · In 1985, Kirkpatrick Sale, a writer on decentralism and a technology critic, published Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, the ...
[72]
[PDF] Bioregionalism is a theory of locality focusing on contain- ing cycles ...
Bioregionalism is the theory that within regions, all processes are meant to cyclically arise from and return to the region in which they are naturally ...Missing: influence localism
[73]
Bioregioning: the defining practice of regenerative cultures
Apr 17, 2025 · ... Kirkpatrick Sale, the author of 'Human Scale' (1980) and 'Dwellers in the Land' (1985) had written about the area during an extended stay at ...
[74]
From King Ludd to Earth First! : REBELS AGAINST THE FUTURE ...
Jun 18, 1995 · In “Rebels Against the Future,” Kirkpatrick Sale writes a detailed history of these early Luddites. He also provides an extensive analysis ...
[75]
The Neo-Luddites | The Anarchist Library
Kirkpatrick Sale, Crow's Nest Distribution. The Neo-Luddites. IN MARCH 1990, a New Mexico psychologist named Chellis Glendinning published "Notes toward a Neo ...
[76]
The Luddites Are Back - Newsweek
Jun 11, 1995 · It took Kirkpatrick sale two blows with a sledge-hammer to destroy the IBM PC he brought to his appearance at New York City's Town Hall last ...
[77]
The Luddites are Back - Utne Reader
Mar 1, 1996 · When writer and self-described Neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale took a sledgehammer to a computer on the stage of an Utne Reader forum in ...
[78]
The Technium: Concluding our 25-year Bet - Kevin Kelly
Jan 5, 2021 · Also, Steven Levy spoke to me and Kirk Sale and Patrick, and wrote up the story of the bet for Wired, which you can read here. ***********.
[79]
Anger over Iraq and Bush prompts calls for secession from the US for
Oct 5, 2007 · Organised by a the left-wing Middlebury Institute of New York, the secessionists from opposite ends of the political spectrum have been ...
[80]
[PDF] Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment - Deirdre McCloskey
Nov 29, 2018 · ... Poverty has gotten under way!”) ... For example, dignity for innovation in 1900 depended on earlier liberties and earlier rents from innovation.
[81]
Life Expectancy - Our World in Data
Across the world, people are living longer. In 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was 32 years. By 2021 this had more than doubled to 71 years.Life expectancy: what does this · Twice as long · Than in other rich countries? · RileyMissing: industrial | Show results with:industrial
[82]
Changing life expectancy throughout history - PMC - NIH
Once infant mortality is stripped out, life expectancy at 5 years was 75 for men and 73 for women. ' In 1995 Griffin2 produced a comparison of life expectancy ...
[83]
The economic impact of secession | CITP
Apr 15, 2025 · One of our central findings is that secession generally leads to negative economic outcomes for both the seceding and successor regions.
[84]
The economics of secession: a review of legal, theoretical, and ...
The aim of this paper is to present a review of the legal, theoretical, and empirical aspects of secessions from an economic perspective.
[85]
Regional Variations → Term - Sustainability Directory
Oct 18, 2025 · Thinkers like Peter Berg, Raymond Dasmann, and Kirkpatrick Sale articulate the philosophy that human societies should be organized around ...
[86]
Why Decentralism? Beyond Left and Right | Libertarianism.org
Jun 29, 2015 · Sale's lecture similarly confronted “the flat-earth delusion of politics,” submitting in its place the idea that there's really not much ...
[87]
[PDF] Millennial Libertarians - CUNY Academic Works
Carson observes that these small-scale, decentralized economic models have much in common with the ideas of Kirkpatrick Sale (2007), Barry Stein (1974) ...
[88]
[PDF] Breaking Away - Mises Institute
We advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. For more information, see mises.org, write us at.<|control11|><|separator|>
[89]
Taking Secession Seriously-At Last - Front Porch Republic
Apr 29, 2009 · Kirkpatrick, the best form of “direct action” in behalf of secession is to secede. Not politically, of course, because that is not possible at ...Missing: controversies | Show results with:controversies
[90]
An Overview of Decentralism - Schumacher Center for a New ...
Kirkpatrick Sale. Kirkpatrick Sale is a widely recognized formulator and early proponent of the notion of “bioregionalism.” His development of this concept in ...