The Columbian Legacy and the Ecosterian Response

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics.

The 500th anniversary of the "discovery" of America motivates Kirkpatrick Sale, author of The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, to reassess the legacy of European settlement and domination, finding it dangerously inadequate. As a countermeasure to this heritage and as a practical step toward an ecological future, he proposes the creation of small-scale communities to be called ecosteries, modeled on the monasteries that arose after the fall of Rome but devoted in our day to ecological protection and restoration as well as the preservation of the knowledge necessary for that work.