Forest Man

Kirkpatrick Sale (b. 1937, he is 83 years old by now) is an anarchoprimitivist ecophilosopher and prolific author with fourteen books behind him, who is usually linked to movements like Neo-Luddism, Bioregionalism and Secessionism. In his most famous book "Human scale" (1980) he laid the foundation for his thinking, which was that humans should live in societies within human scale, in small tribes where we can control our own lives politically, economically and socially. He has spoken extensively against technology, and do not think technology will save us. He is a great admirer of the anarchoprimitivist ecophilosopher John Zerzan and his views on technology. 

 

Sale has described personal computers as "the devil's work" and in the past he has smashed one functioning computer. 

 

In 1995 he made a public bet with Kevin Kelly about industrial civilization collapsing 2020. Sale believed civilization would collapse by then, and Kelly believed technology would save us. Sale has still some time to win this bet, its date is put on 31.12.2020. Sale believes now that he was not far off in his bet. He believes that by 2030, industrial civilization will have ceased to exist, and if anybody survives this, it will be in small pockets isolated around the world, in tribes. You can listen more to his views upon these matters in this youtube interview that Hambone Littletail made with him in the end of 2019, in the Collapse Chronicles series. 

 

Is Sale right? I think he is not far off. 2030 is the time when export oil will be gone on the world market except for China and India, when China and India will consume all export oil. Without oil, the oil importing nations will collapse completely, and with them, the whole industrial civilization. These are old predictions, but unless we discover very big quantities of new oil, we better listen to them, they are not far off. I believe we can maybe add a few years to these predictions, not more. Then we have 2035 at most, when the export oil is gone. 2030-2035 it's gone. My own bet is the year 2035 for the complete cessation of industrial civilization. I have written about it before on this blog, in Swedish, here. I would say that industrial civilization could collapse already in the end of 2022, it probably will 2035, and at the very latest, it will collapse around 2050. So in other words, in my lifetime.

 

This article states that 9 % of British people believe that civilization will collapse before 2030. Among them is the famous British professor Jem Bendell.