Dwellers in the Land

by Kirkpatrick Sale

Book Overview

Imagine a world structured around ecological and cultural diversity rather than national and political parameters. In response to present and impending ecological and economic crises, Kirkpatrick Sale... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820322059
• ISBN13: 9780820322056
• Release Date: April 2000
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Length: 248 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

a 1991 classic introduction to biogregionalism

Weary of the American dream, of the nightmarish destination of the natural world, I looked for another way of life and discovered bioregionalism. All sources pointed to this book, a 1991 classic introduction. And rightly so: it covers the economic, political, and societal necessities for change: things that have not gone of out date over the past two decades. The fact is our planet cannot sustain the American consumerist lifestyle for six-plus billion people. This book presents a better way.

an antidote to rootlessness

If you've come to suspect that most of the world's problems--pollution, warfare, crime, transnational piracy, mental illness--are inherent in a civilization in decline, you might like this vision of small, face-to-face communities living in respectful accord with the natural world.The author makes the same point as ecopsychologists and the great whale researcher Roger Payne: built by millions of years of evolution to live in close contact with the wilderness, we who have penned ourselves behind fences and buildings carry with us a ten-thousand-year-old wound....a self-inflicted wound of aching alienation (hence our tendency to alienate--to marginalize--other people).Read this book, then tour the decidedly un-zoolike San Diego Wild Animal Park while seeing how you feel there. For some this might offer a glimpse of a sanity so centering that you can feel it throughout your body.

A remedy for short-sighted environmental policies

Kirkpatrick Sale has written a vision of the future that should be drilled into politicians' subconscious and taught in grade school. Sustainable, sane, ecologically minded bioregions. I was particularly struck by his definition of "querencia"--"a deep, quiet sense of inner well-being that comes from knowing a particular place of the earth, its diurnal and seasonal patterns, its fruits and scents, its history and its part in your history . . . where, whenever you return to it, your soul releases an inner sigh of recognition and relaxation." Sale is a wonderful writer, balanced in perspective, and able to distill complex problems into a form that the average mind can comprehend, despite all the arguments pro and con. Read it.