Page 4 RAIN April 1982 Kirk Sale Weighs Human Scale Human Scale, by Kirkpatrick Sale, 1980,558 pp., $8.95 from; Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale is a whale of a tale! In it. Sale (author of SDS and Power Shift] shows how our society's headlong rush to giantism for the sake of efficiency, economy and better ways to serve human needs has actually produced inefficiency, waste, unnecessary expense and damage to the body and spirit of the people. In sum, the myth of size has failed its promise. The remedy for our megaturmoil, as one might guess from the title, is human scale decentralization of government, cities, education, agriculture, and the economy. Provocative and well-written. Human Scale supports its conclusions with evidence from history, architecture, government, industry, media, and countless other sources. The resulting 600 page volume, just released in paperback, has been aptly described by Lewis Mumford as "encyclopedic." It hardly seems "human scale" to the busy reviewer! So we were pleased (and somewhat relieved!) to have Kirk Sale visit us a few months ago to share ideas on bioregions and community self-reliance. Kirk and I reversed roles in back-to-back interviews. We talked first about Knowing Home (which was later broadcast on radio station WBAl in New York), then about Human Scale in the conversation printed below. -Mark Roseland RAIN: What led up to writing Human Scale ? Sale; It represents the gathering of things I've been thinking about for 15 years—the failures of socialism, the failures of capitalism, the disjunction between all the things I learned in school about America as a democracy and the real life of America which was no democracy. But I had no way to put a handle on these things. My second book was a history of the SDS. "Having control over the decisions that affect their lives" is a line from the Port Huron Statement. That became a way for me to see politics. If you could get politics to a scale where people could control decisions, they could decide what land of governance and what kind of economics they wanted. I started writing Human Scale in 1975.1 really wanted to talk about how communities, cities and regions can control their own lives. There doesn't need to be a federal government at all and
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz