Politics On A Human Scale

In Politics on a Human Scale, Jeff Taylor examines political decentralization in the United States, including agrarianism, states’ rights, the abandonment of the decentralist impulse by the national leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties, and the dissident tradition on the contemporary political scene.

Big government, big business, big everything: Kirkpatrick Sale took giantism to task in his 1980 classic, Human Scale, and today takes a new look at how the crises that imperil modern America are the inevitable result of bigness grown out of control--and what can be done about it. The result is a keenly updated, carefully argued case for bringing human endeavors back to scales we can comprehend and manage--whether in our built environments, our politics, our business endeavors, our energy plans, or our mobility. Sale walks readers back through history to a time when buildings were scaled to the human figure (as was the Parthenon), democracies were scaled to the societies they served, and enterprise was scaled to communities. Against that backdrop, he dissects the bigger-is-better paradigm that has defined modern times and brought civilization to a crisis point. Says Sale, retreating from our calamity will take rebalancing our relationship to the environment; adopting more human-scale technologies; right-sizing our buildings, communities, and cities; and bringing our critical services--from energy, food, and garbage collection to transportation, health, and education--back to human scale as well. Like Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher, Human Scale has long been a classic of modern decentralist thought and communitarian values--a key tool in the kit of those trying to localize, create meaningful governance in bioregions, or rethink our reverence of and dependence on growth, financially and otherwise. Rewritten to interpret the past few decades, Human Scale offers compelling new insights on how to turn away from the giantism that has caused escalating ecological distress and inequality, dysfunctional governments, and unending warfare and shines a light on many possible pathways that could allow us to scale down, survive, and thrive.

Presents a people-centred approach to development.

In his landmark work, Sale details the crises facing modern society and offers real solutions, laying out ways to take control of every facet of peoples lives by building institutions, workplaces, and communities that are sustainable, ecologically balanced, and responsive to the needs of the individual.

The idea that we can meet human needs and simultaneously conserve and even enhance the natural environment is an attractive one. Since the Brundtland report popularised a definition of sustainable development based on the concept of needs, there has been a widespread belief that it should be possible to achieve a good quality of life without compromising natural ecosystems. Sustainability and Wellbeing fills a gap in sustainable development studies by drawing on a range of case-studies to discuss the challenges and opportunities of using Max-Neef’s Human Scale Development (HSD) framework in practice. The first section presents the theory and the methodology of HSD in the context of related literature on sustainable development and wellbeing. The second section discusses applications of the HSD methodology with three different purposes: the design of sustainable development interventions; the engagement of researchers with communities or groups of people in sustainability processes and the consolidation of sustainable community initiatives. Finally, the third reflects on challenges and limitations of using the HSD approach to define strategies for sustainable development and concludes. This is an invaluable resource for researchers and postgraduate students in wellbeing, sustainability, sustainable development, and human development.

Steeped in US soil, this first global history of rangeland science looks to the origin of rangeland ecology in the late nineteenth-century American West, exploring the larger political and economic forces that - together with scientific study - produced legacies focused on immediate economic success rather than long-term ecological well-being. Neither scientists nor public agencies could escape the influences of bureaucrats and ranchers who demanded results, and the ideas that became scientific orthodoxy - from fire suppression and predator control to fencing and carrying capacities - contained flaws and blind spots that plague public debates to this day. The Politics of Scale identifies the sources of these conflicts and mistakes and helps us to see a more promising path forward, one in which rangeland science is guided less by capital and the state and more by communities working in collaboration with scientists. -- from back cover.

Many Americans are longing for alternative politics rooted in strong communities, recognition of limits, and respect for the natural world. These issues are not the possession of one political party. Rather, they refer to ideas rooted deeply in the best aspects of our common tradition, and they represent yearnings that many, regardless of political affiliation, share. This book articulates a cultural and political vision that leads one off the couch and into the garden, out of the shopping mall and into the farmersÆ market, and away from Washington in the direction of home. In this postpartisan call to action, political theorist Mark T. Mitchell develops the concept of the ôpolitics of gratitude,ö which revolves around four ideas: creatureliness, gratitude, human scale, and place, culminating in a distinctive, fruitful view of human nature and community at odds with the prevailing norms of individualism (and, not so paradoxically, statism), giantism, and hypermobility. Going beyond the liberal-conservative factionalism that has reduced our political and cultural discourse to clichTs and vitriol, he urges us to become responsible stewards of the earth who are committed to family and community and who abide in gratitude, taking nothing for granted. The result is a political and cultural vision that is at once local, limited, modest, republican, greenùand grateful.