Description
Book SynopsisCombining 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.
Trade Review“
After Eden is broadly and punctiliously researched and urgently argued. Its central idea may be disputed but not ignored. Kirkpatrick Sale has always been both a deeply countercultural thinker and also immensely cultured.”—Lionel Tiger, author of
The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women“Kirkpatrick Sale has been enlightening us on the issue of scale for a generation now, and in this new book he uses the concept to help us understand our own consciousness. A fascinating book!”— Bill McKibben, author of
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future“The things that Kirkpatrick Sale writes about are near and dear to me—things that I have spent most of my adult life thinking deeply about. Seldom would I have the confidence to reach judgments from the evidence as boldly as does Sale, but I suspect that he is right in most of his conclusions.”—Steven E. Churchill, Department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Duke University
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After Eden offers not only a detailed and integrated view of human history, but also encouraging glimpses into tools people might muster towards addressing the predicament we have all, in one way or another, inherited from history.” -- Chellis Glendinning * Resurgence *
“Kirkpatrick Sale is the outstanding radical writer of the English-speaking world today. . . . He reaches some mind boggling conclusions, but what is riveting is the route by which he travels: how man the hunter-gatherer moved on to become the agriculturalist, and then man the urban city dweller, all the time stressing how the basic psychic cords of his nature from his earliest stages have continued to persist and how their failure to prevail can only be as transient as they may prove tragic.” -- John Papworth * The Ecologist *
“This is a highly readable book. The value of this study is that it investigates an achievement that many take for granted (humans becoming the dominant species on this planet). This work, both well researched and documented, also provides extensive notes.” -- Larry Benson * Environmental History *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1
1. The Dawn of Modern Culture: 70,000-50,000 Years Ago 11
2. The Conquest of Europe: 55,000-20,000 Years Ago 37
3. Intensification and Agriculture: 20,000-5,000 Years Ago 71
4. The Erectus Alternative: 1,800,000-30,000 Years Ago 105
Notes 139
Source Notes 145
Bibliography 175
Acknowledgments 179
Index 181
