Bøker av Kirkpatrick Sale

Emancipation-freeing the slaves-Hell? The Emancipation Proclamation-one of the sacred icons of American history-a tragedy? How can this be? That was the opinion of Frederick Douglass, the most important African American leader of the 19th century, who proclaimed, "I denounce the so-called Emancipation." Douglass wrote: "I admit that the Negro...has made little progress from barbarism to civilization, and that he is in a deplorable condition since his emancipation. That he is worse off in many respects, than when he was a slave, I am compelled to admit..." Indeed, social statistics of 1900 indicate that material quality of life was lower for most black Americans than under slavery.. Kirkpatrick Sale marshals much forgotten evidence to cast this glorious part of American history in a realistic and critical light. Emancipation, yes. But as a military measure during a cruel war of invasion? Slavery once existed throughout the Western Hemisphere, but almost everywhere except the United States, it ended peacefully. Emancipation with no thought or plan for the unprecedented situation to be managed? With no real sympathy or interest in the people freed except their usefulness in controlling and exploiting the conquered South? (Some Northern leaders denounced the Proclamation as an atrocity and an estimated 200,000 Northerners deserted or evaded service in a war for African Americans rather than for the "Union.") Perhaps never in history, Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates, has a benevolent act been so tainted with impure motives and disdain of consequences. Abraham Lincoln has a lot to answer for, says the author. His flawed proclamation doomed Americans to a century and a half of racial conflict and disparity that is still with us.NOTE: This is AUTHORIZED REISSUE of Kirkpatrick Sale's 2012 self-published book Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation 150+ Years Ago.

An introduction to the concept of bioregionalism, an alternative way of organizing society to create small-scale, ecologically sound, individually responsive communities with renewable economies and cultures. Emphasized throughout are communal ownership of and responsibility for land.

"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."--

Combining insights from paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology, Kirkpatrick Sale points to the beginning of big-game hunting as the origin of humans' damaging estrangement from the natural environment.