After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination

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After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination. By Kirkpatrick Sale. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.186 pp. $69.50 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)

Start here: the human race has already committed ecocide. Adam, in the exercise of his blessing to be fruitful and multiply, has destroyed himself. Homo sapiens is an ecological dead end, living out the denouement of his comparatively short run: just a few hundred thousand years in all, a blip on the geo-historical radar screen.

Kirkpatrick Sale contends, in After Eden, that it didn't need to have happened that way. Up to a certain fixed point in time (for which he proposes a climate-changing volcanic explosion 71,000 years …