Kirkpatrick Sale

**Kirkpatrick Sale** (born in Ithaca, New York, June 27, 1937) is an independent scholar and author who has written about political decentralism, environmentalism, luddism and technology. People say he has a "philosophy unified by decentralism" and as being "a leader of the Neo-Luddites,", an "anti-globalization leftist," and "the theoretician for a new secessionist movement."

## Early life and career

Sale grew up in Cayuga Heights, Ithaca, New York, and would later say of the village that he "spent most of my first twenty years there, and that has made an imprint on me–on my philosophy, social attitudes, certainly on my politics–that has lasted powerfully for the rest of my life." He graduated from Cornell University, majoring in history, in 1958.

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._

In 1958 he collaborated with Thomas Pynchon on an unproduced futuristic musical called "Minstrel Island."

Upon graduating in 1958, Sale married Faith Apfelbaum. She later worked as an editor with Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Amy Tan. Faith died in 1999.

Sale worked initially in journalism for the leftist journal _New Leader_, "a magazine founded in 1924 in part by socialists Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs," and the _New York Times Magazine_. He then became a freelance journalist. He spent time in Ghana and wrote his first book about it. His second book, _SDS_, was about the radical 1960s group Students for a Democratic Society, of which he was a founder. The book "is still considered one of the best sources on the youth activist organization that helped define 1960s radicalism." In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Subsequent books explored radical decentralism, bioregionalism, environmentalism, the Luddites and similar themes. He "has been a regular contributor to progressive magazines like _Mother Jones_ and _The Nation_ for the better part of his writing career," and has continued to write for those publications, as well as for _The American Conservative_, _CounterPunch_, _The New York Review of Books_, and the _Utne Reader_. Sale presented public affairs programming for WBAI in the early 1980s and has made appearances on alternative radio over the years.

### History

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 member of the Christopher Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee Committee William 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." 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.

### Technology

Sale "has written extensively and skeptically about technology," and has said he is "a great admirer" of anarchoprimitivist John Zerzan. He has described personal computers as "the devil's work" and in the past started public speeches by smashing one. During promotion of his 1995 book _Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution_, Sale debated with _Newsweek Magazine_ senior editor and technology columnist Steven Levy "about the relative merits of the communications age".

Sale has said that he does not "care much for popular music outside some of the Tin Pan Alley era tunes of the early 20th century." For example, "he once heard a 'racket' in a nightclub during ... the 1960s from some 'young man' everyone told him was a 'big deal.' That 'young man' turned out to be Bob Dylan." Kirk recalls that "he’d never heard anything so awful in his life."

In 1995, Sale agreed to a public bet with Kevin Kelly that by the year 2020, there would be 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%.

### Secession

Sale believes that people should be able to break apart large nation-states into small pieces (secession). Sale has been called "one of the intellectual godfathers of the secessionist movement."  He argues that the major theme of contemporary history, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union to the expansion of United Nations membership from 51 in 1945 to  nations today, is the breakup of great empires. People on both left and right call for smaller, less powerful government.

In 2004, Sale and 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 American Civil War. Delegates issued a statement of principles of secession which they presented as the "Burlington Declaration".

In October 2007, the _New York Times_ interviewed Sale about 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." He went on to say, "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.”  The convention received worldwide media attention.

News stories about the Second North American Secessionist Convention in 2007 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." The Southern Poverty Law Center later criticized the New York Times' October 2007 Peter Applebombe interview of Sale for not covering its allegations.

Sale wrote the foreword to Thomas Naylor's 2008 book _Secession: How Vermont and all the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire._ Sale continues to speak on secession and other issues around the nation.

## Books

- _The Land and People of Ghana_. Lippincott (1963)
- _SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution_. New York: Random House (1973). . .
    - Softcover edition. New York: Random House (1974). .
- _Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment_. New York: Random House (1975).
- _Human Scale_. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan (1980). .
- _Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision_. San Francisco, Calif.: Sierra Club Books (1985). .
- _Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy_. New York: Knopf (1990).
- _Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992_. New York: Hill and Wang (1993). .
- _Rebels Against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age_. Boston, Mas.: Addison Wesley (1995). .
- _Why the Sea Is Salt: Poems of Love and Loss_. San Jose, Calif.: Writers Club Press (2001). .
- _Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream_. Los Angeles, Calif.: Free Press (2001). .
- _After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination_. Duke University Press (2006). .
- _Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation 150 Years Ago._ Sale (2012). .
- _Human Scale Revisited_. Chelsea Green (2017).
- _Collapse of 2020._ Outskirts Press (2020).
- _No More Mushrooms: Thoughts on Life Without Government_. Autonomedia (2021).

## Other websites

- Prof. Martin Ryder's page on Luddites and neo-Luddites with information on Kirkpatrick Sale  - University of Colorado at Denver, School of Education
- _Booknotes_ interview with Sale on _The Fire of His Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream_, November 25, 2001.

## Infobox (person)

- **name**: Kirkpatrick Sale
- **image**: Kirkpatrick Sale 1988 (cropped).jpg
- **caption**: Kirkpatrick Sale in 1988
- **birth place**: Ithaca, New York
- **alma mater**: Cornell University
- **nationality**: USA
- **occupation**: Journalist, scholar, and author