Kirkpatrick Sale is an influential environmental writer whose work has focused on the threat that a growing, resource-hungry population poses to the environment.

Sale was born in Ithaca, New York. His father was an English professor at Cornell University who was considered something of a campus rebel. Sale attended Swarthmore College for one year before transferring to Cornell in 1955, where he majored in history and edited the student newspaper. By the time he graduated in 1958, writing had become more important to him than history and he decided to pursue a career in journalism.

Sale first worked as an editor for the New Leader, an important leftist journal. During the early 1960s, he spent time in Africa, which he believed would become the center of world attention, and then worked briefly at the New York Times Magazine. By 1968, he...