April 1982 RAIN Page 5 we don't need the power of the state. The human scale is the level at which people have a vote and can say what is to be done with the food, resources, products and energy of the region they live in. I wanted to write a book that talked about anarcho-communalism without saying "anarcho-communalism." RAIN: Isn't anything that human beings do human scale? What makes a solar collector more human scale than a nuclear reactor? Sale: Because a solar collector is controllable by a human. RAIN: So you are saying there are measurable dimensions to human scale? Sale: Yes. That is what much of the book is about. You can find out the optimum size for anything. The optimum size for a city is 50,000 to 100,000 people. When you get a city of seven million like New York, there is no democracy at all, and it is unmanageable. RAIN: What would be your ideal vision of human scale, if the majority of people in this country or the world were to embrace the idea? What would the world look like? Sale: America would be decentralized. The population would be dispersed into self-sufficient communities. I've just written a novel that described a human scale future, what America looks like in 2050 after the 20-year transition period that took place between 2000 and 2020 when it was decided we had gone wrong, that pollution was killing us, that we had no topsoil because it was all eroded. RAIN: That sounds like Ecotopia. Sale: Yes, it is. Mine is somewhat more of a novel. In the book, some people want to live in cities. Some want to live in communities of 10,000, which I find the optimal community size. The hero lives in that kind of community. There are some communities which are capitalist, some which are virtually monarchical, some which have no money at all. But they are all basically self-sufficient. That is my vision of a future America. I don't know if it will come so soon. It better, or else we may not survive. In this future, everyone would understand, because they understand the bioregion, that they have to be self-sufficient and non-polluting. But aside from that they could live any vision they chose. The other basic principle would be free travel. If you didn't like the community you were in, you could find one that was more congenial. Instead of making everyone try to believe goodness, it would be better to let communities be evil if they choose. RAIN: What is to keep one community from waging war on another? Sale: That's what the whole second part of the book is about. There is a war threat by one community which wants a river access. A community downriver has a dam, built 50 years before. They need the dam. I chose a river because all through history people have fought over rivers. What prevents war in this instance is heroics by the hero. What had prevented war up to that point was an alliance of communities in the bioregion, 13 communities allied for defense of each other and to control any disputes within. As the story explains, there had been a bitter war in Southern California when it was determined that the Los Angeles bioregion could support 200-300,000 people, but certainly not eight million. The people of Colorado kept their water. RAIN: They forced them out? Sale: Part of bioregional self-sufficiency means people have control over their own water. I see such a world struggling with lots of problems. RAIN: Other problems have been mentioned. Are you really going to have culture in a town of 10,000? And what is to prevent the worst side of decentralism, everybody hoarding and going back to parochialism? Sale: The first question is answerable by saying that throughout history small places have created wonderful culture. Look at the cities of the Italian Renaissance. They were all 50-60,000 in size. Today what you have in places like New York is cultural colonization. People are brought from all over the country for the entertainment of a few rich people. I find that odious. About parochialism, there is no way to prevent it. I would take my chances. I think it is better to let people solve their own problems in their own way. Any self-regarding community will move toward democracy and a consensual system simply because it is the most efficient. If you have a "prince" the information going up to the top is always skewed by hierarchy and orders coming down are always skewed by that same hierarchy. RAIN: So you're envisioning that there will be all these little communities, that if in my community there are some people who are Ku Klux Klan members, they will leave and form a community where they are the predominant group. Sale: Yes. We should allow for the existence of evil. Any system that tries to make everybody into a good person is bound to fail. RAIN: How do communications technology and microcomputers fit into your vision? Sale: Computers are the product of a rapacious capitalist system. I cannot believe they can be used neutrally. If computers just arrived out of the blue one day then you might say a rational citizenry could take them and use them properly. But computers came as part of a very complex technological-political system. They are not benign. They are part and parcel of the system that has produced them. Technology always expresses the values of the system that creates it. This notion of Alvin Toffler's, that simply by sitting "We should allow for the existence of evil. Any system that tries to make everybody into a good person is bound to fail." back and using these computers we will be able to solve all our problems, seems very much like the notion of "Consciouness Three" that Charles Reich had—if we simply all put on blue jeans we will change America. Toffler's is a more sophisticated version of the same thing. It says you don't have to do anything structurally; just use the computers and they will create the decentralized future we want. The whole image of The Third Wave suggests that we just have to lie back and let the wave overtake us. We don't have to do any work to create a world we want. This is the reason the book sold so well. It has this comforting message. But it is no truer with The Third Wave than it was with The Greening of America. RAIN: Back to your decentralist vision, do you suggest that even in a capitalist system people will develop a democracy? Sale: In the ideal community, the citizens select what it is that will be made. They will have control over the products that are produced and the way they are produced. But it seems you could have exchange of goods through capitalism with profits going to individuals, a steady-state capitalism. At a small scale it's not going to do anyone any damage, even at a city level. When things get too big, everything changes exponentially. When something is just a little bigger than it should be, all its systems are affected. That is why scale is so important. DO
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