Kirkpatrick Sale
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Kirkpatrick Sale (Ithaca, New York 1937) is an independent scholar and author who has written prolifically on environmentalism, technology and political decentralism. He has been described as "a leader of the Neo-Luddites"[1] and "the theoretician for a new secessionist movement."[2]
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[edit] Life and Work
Sale graduated from Cornell University, majoring in history, in 1958.[3][4] He served as editor of the student-owned and managed newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. Sale was one of the leaders of the May 23, 1958 protest against university policies forbidding male and female students fraternizing and its "in loco parentis" policy. Sale and his friend and roommate Richard Farina, and three others, were charged by Cornell. The protest was described in Farina's 1966 novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me.[2]
Upon graduation, Sale married Faith Apfelbaum (Cornell, 1958) who later worked as an editor with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Amy Tan. She died in 1999.[5]
Sale worked initially in journalism for the leftist journal, New Leader and the New York Times Magazine, before becoming a freelance journalist. He spent time in, and wrote his first book about, Ghana. His second book, SDS, was about the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society. Subsequent books explored radical decentralism, bioregionalism, environmentalism, the Luddites and similar themes.[4] He has continued to write for publications like The Nation, Counterpunch.Org, The New York Review of Books, Utne Reader and Mother Jones.
[edit] Secessionist Activism
In 2004 Sale, working with members of the Second Vermont Republic, formed the Middlebury Institute which is dedicated to the study of separatism, secession, and self-determination. Sale is director of the institute. In 2006 Middlebury sponsored the First North American Secessionist Convention, which attracted 40 participants from 16 secessionist organizations, and was described as the first gathering of secessionists since the Civil War. Delegates issued a statement of principles of secession which they presented as The Burlington Declaration. Sale was interviewed by the New York Times in October 2007 regarding the Second North American Secessionist Convention, co-hosted by the Middlebury Institute. Sale told the interviewer: “The virtue of small government is that the mistakes are small as well...If you want to leave a nation you think is corrupt, inefficient, militaristic, oppressive, repressive, but you don’t want to move to Canada or France, what do you do? Well, the way is through secession, where you could stay home and be where you want to be.”[6] The convention received worldwide media attention. [7][8][9]
[edit] Controversies
In 1995, Sale made a public bet with Kevin Kelly that by the year 2020, there would be a convergence of three disasters: Global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. The bet was turned into a claim on the FX prediction market, where the probability has hovered around 25%.[10][1]
In his 1990 book The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, Sale argued that Christopher Columbus was an imperialist bent on conquest from his first voyage. In a New York Times book review historian and Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Committee memberWilliam H. McNeill wrote about Sale: "he has set out to destroy the heroic image that earlier writers have transmitted to us. Mr. Sale makes Columbus out to be cruel, greedy and incompetent (even as a sailor), and a man who was perversely intent on abusing the natural paradise on which he intruded."[11] The book Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History presents a debate between Sale and Robert Royal, vice president for research at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who insisted that Columbus was a courageous risk-taker who advanced knowledge about other parts of the world.[12]
Sale has described personal computers as "the devil's work"[2] and in the past opened personal appearances by smashing one. During promotion of his 1995 book Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution Sale debated Newsweek Magazine senior editor and technology columnist Steven Levy "about the relative merits of the communications age."[13] However, Sale currently uses a computer in his secessionist organizing.[2]
News stories about the Second North American Secessionist Convention, co-sponsored by Sale's Middlebury Institute, mentioned the controversial Southern Poverty Law Center's allegations that the other co-sponsor, The League of the South, was a "racist hate group." Sale responded: "They call everybody racists. There are, no doubt, racists in the League of the South, and there are, no doubt, racists everywhere."[7][8] The Southern Poverty Law Center later criticized the New York Times' October 2007 Peter Applebombe interview of Sale for not covering its allegations.[14]
[edit] Books
- After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination, Duke University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8223-3938-0
- The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream, Free Press, 2001.
- Why the Sea Is Salt: Poems of Love and Loss, iuniverse, 2001.
- Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age, Addison Wesley, 1995.
- The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992, Hill and Wang, 1993.
- The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, Knopf, 1990.
- Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985. ISBN 0-87156-847-0
- Human Scale. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1980. ISBN 0-698-11013-7
- Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment. New York: Random House, 1975.
- SDS, Random House, 1973. Vintage Books edition (paperback) 1974. ISBN 0394478894
- The Land and People of Ghana, Lippincott, 1963, 1972.
[edit] Writings on-line
- Mother of All: An Introduction to Bioregionalism
- The Columbian Legacy and the Ecosterian Response
- Unabomber's Secret Treatise: Is There Method In His Madness?
- The Imposition of Technology
- Five Facets of a Myth
- The Neo-Luddites
- The New Ecology Movement
- Ecosteries
- Schumacher and Survival Economics
- What the War is All About
- An End to the Israeli Experiment? Unmaking a Grievous Error
- Imperial Entropy: Collapse of the American Empire
- Blue State Secession
- End of Empire, End of Civilization
- Middlebury Institute links to "Collapse of the American Empire," "Breakdown of Nations," "Small Is Powerful," "Lessons of 9/11," "Things Fall Apart," "Seeing Red - and Seeing Blue," "The Case for American Secession," "October 25, 2005 Convention Speech"
- An Overview of Decentralism, Keynote Remarks at E. F. Schumacher Society Decentralist Conference, June 28-30, 1996, Williams College, Williamstown, Ma.
[edit] Interviews
- Interview on Luddism at primitivism.com
- Luddism in the New Millennium, David Kupfer interview
- Kevin Kelly interview (WiReD), 2004.
- The Bioregionalist Vision, Julie A. Wortman interview
- Apostle of Catosptrophe, Derek Turner interview, Quarterly Review, 2007 (PDF).
- A Vision of a Nation No Longer in the U.S., Peter Applebaum interview, New York Times, 2007.
[edit] References
- ^ a b Kevin Kelly, Interview with the Luddite, Wired Magazine, 1995.
- ^ a b c d Peter Applebombe, A Vision of a Nation No Longer in the U.S., New York Times, October 18, 2007.
- ^ Richard and Mimi Farina "fan site".
- ^ a b Thinkquest Bioraphy Kirkpatrick Sale.
- ^ Bruce Weber, Obituary: Faith Sale, 63, a Fiction Editor Known as a Writers' Advocate, New York Times, December 13, 1999.
- ^ The New York Times, October 18, 2007.
- ^ a b Bill Poovey, Secessionists Meeting in Tennessee, Associated Press, October 3, 2007.
- ^ a b Leonard Doyle, Anger over Iraq and Bush prompts calls for secession from the US, Independent, UK, October 4, 2007.
- ^ WDEF News 12 Video report on Secessionist Convention, October 3, 2007.
- ^ FX Claim NLud
- ^ William H. McNeill, Review of Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise, New York Times, October 7, 1990.
- ^ Larry Madaras, James M. SoRelle, Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in American History, McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2002.
- ^ Kirkpatrick Sale-Steven Levy Debate At New Jersey Institute of Technology Will Address Merits of Technology, February 1998.
- ^ Mark Potok, New York Times Feature on Sale Left Out a Fact or Two, October 23, 2007.
