Daniel Quinn

• Name — Daniel Clarence Quinn • Born — 11 October 1935 • Birthplace — Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. • Died — 17 February 2018 • Place of death — Houston, Texas, U.S. • Occupation — Writer • Website — ishmael.org

Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Preparatory School. He went on to study at Saint Louis University, at the University of Vienna, through IES Abroad, and at Loyola University Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in English in 1957. He delayed part of this university education, however, while a postulant at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Bardstown, Kentucky, where he hoped to become a Trappist monk; however his spiritual director, Thomas Merton, prematurely ended Quinn's postulancy. Quinn went into publishing, abandoned his Catholic faith, and married twice unsuccessfully, before marrying Rennie MacKay Quinn, his third and final wife of 42 years. In 1975, Quinn left his career as a publisher to become a freelance writer. He is best known for his book Ishmael (1992), which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. Several judges disputed giving the entire $500,000 award to Quinn for Ishmael, rather than dividing the money among several authors, though judge Ray Bradbury, for one, supported the decision. Ishmael became the first of a loose trilogy of novels by Quinn, including The Story of B and My Ishmael, all of which brought increasing fame to Quinn throughout the 1990s. He became a well-known author to followers of the environmental, simple living, and anarchist movements, although he did not strongly self-identify with any of these. Quinn traveled widely to lecture and discuss his books. While response to Ishmael was mostly very positive, Quinn's ideas have inspired the most controversy with a claim mentioned in Ishmael but made much more forcefully in The Story of Bs Appendix that the total human population grows and shrinks according to food availability and with the catastrophic real-world conclusions he draws from this. In 1998, Quinn collaborated with environmental biologist Alan D. Thornhill in producing Food Production and Population Growth, a video elaborating in-depth the science behind the ideas he describes in his fiction. Quinn's book Tales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initial publisher. It is designed to be a look through the animist's eyes in seven short tales; Quinn first explores the idea of animism as the original worldwide religion and as his own dogma-free belief system in The Story of B and his autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. In February 2018, Quinn died of aspiration pneumonia in hospice care.

Quinn notably claimed that the total population of humans, like all living things, grows and shrinks according to a basic ecological law: an increase in food availability for any population yields an accompanying increase in the population's overall size. Thus, growing more food to stave off a starvation crisis only leads to more people and thus an expectation to grow even more food. Quinn worried that popular cultural thinking ignores this reality, instead regarding civilized humans as separate from and above any such law. He identified the Neolithic Revolution as the start of human overpopulation, when civilized peoples began to practice an imperialistic world-view that denigrates nature and that relies entirely upon expansionist farming ("totalitarian agriculture"), the human population growing in proportion to the decline of the rest of the world's biomass. Quinn's warnings about population, especially in relation to food availability, have often been compared to the warnings of 19th-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus. However, while Malthus warned that excess human population precariously motivates an excess of food production in order to sustain that population, Quinn considered the priorities of this assessment backwards. He instead warned that excess population is the inevitable result of access to excess food for the human organism en masse just as surely as it is for any other species, a concept which he described as one of the "ABCs" of well-established ecology, professing that no ecologist argues with the law (inevitable growth in the face of food availability) except in the case of the human, which he stated was universally regarded an exceptionalism despite "10,000 years of evidence" to the contrary in the form of the history of human population growth coincident with the rise of agriculture and the mass production of foodstuffs in excess to the needs for survival. The similarities between this concept and a Malthusian catastrophe are obvious, but Quinn states there are certain key differences. The primary problem in a Malthusian catastrophe is a population growing faster than the growth in food supply. Quinn states that population is a function of food supply, and not merely some independent variable. Quinn considers that problem is not a scarcity of food, but, rather, overpopulation. Quinn characterizes the Malthusian problem as "how are we going to FEED all these people?", and characterizes the "Quinnian problem" as "how are we going to stop PRODUCING all these people?" According to Quinn, the success of this totalitarian style of agriculture is unsustainable because we "kill all of our competitors for food" and even kill our "competitors once-removed" by attacking all of our favorite food species' competitors or predators, which he described as "practically holy work for our farmers: kill everything that you can't eat. Kill everything that eats what you eat", and so on, yielding a catastrophic loss of biodiversity and, just as directly, overshoot towards an eventual human population crash, of which the dominant culture worldwide shows very little anticipation or interest. Quinn's conclusions on population also imply the controversial notion that sustained food aid to starving nations is merely delaying and dramatically worsening massive starvation crises, rather than resolving such crises, as is commonly assumed. Quinn claimed that reconnecting people to the food made available through their local habitats is a proven way to avoid famines and accompanying starvation. Some have interpreted this to mean that Quinn was resolving to let starving people in impoverished nations continue starving, an interpretation that Quinn repeatedly refuted. Quinn coined the term food race (by analogy to the Cold War's nuclear arms race) to describe his concept of a perpetually escalating crisis of growing human population due to growing food production, which fuels an ever-escalating population. Quinn's solution to the food race—to stop producing so much food—is not generally a common-sense or intuitive response; instead he recommends counter-intuitive or "outside-the-box" thinking. Russell Hopfenberg has written at least two papers attempting to prove Quinn's ideas, one paper with David Pimentel titled Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply and Human Carrying Capacity is Determined by Food Availability. Hopfenberg has also made a narrated slide show titled World Food and Human Population Growth.

Quinn was influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following: • Takers and Leavers: "Takers" refers to members of the dominant, modern, globalized civilization and its culture, while "Leavers" refers to members of countless other cultures, without civilizational elements, existing both in the past and currently (for instance, indigenous foraging band societies and partly pastoral societies). Quinn later regretted these terms, supposing that "hierarchical" and "tribal," respectively, may be better alternatives. • Mother Culture: the personification of any culture's inherently biased elements and internalized stories that are not perceived as biased by its members • Food Race: the phenomenon of ongoing human overpopulation and its accompanying global catastrophes, in which the giving of more food to starving, growing populations paradoxically yields only still greater population growth and starvation • Law of limited competition: a biological law that "defines the limits of competition in the community of life," according to which "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them... access to food in general," meaning across-the-board; species that violate this law end up extinct • Law of Life: the universal collection of all evolutionarily stable strategies • Totalitarian Agriculture: today's dominant form of agriculture that "subordinates all other life-forms to the relentless, single-minded production of human food," unsustainable because it generates enormous food supplies that in turn generate ever-greater human population booms • The Great Forgetting: widespread historical ignorance regarding "the fact that we [humans] are a biological species in a community of biological species and are not exempt or exemptible from the forces that shape all life on this planet; this also includes our forgetting of the fact that most of human history has been based on an ecologically sound way of life (largely hunting and gathering)" • Boiling frog: "a metaphor for so many circumstances in life when people are unwilling or unable to react effectively to crises that occur very gradually or imperceptibly," used especially by Quinn to refer to creeping normality in terms of escalating environmental degradation • New Tribal Revolution: a hypothetical, sociocultural period of global change that Quinn supports, in which civilization would gradually begin to transform into a collection of more sustainable, tribally-organized societies