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Daniel Clarence Quinn (October 11, 1935 – February 17, 2018) was an American author (primarily, novelist and fabulist), cultural critic, and publisher of textbook, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as "new tribalism". He died of aspiration pneumonia.
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 anarchy, 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.[1] Moral Ground. Trinity University Press. 2010. (Wayback Machine Archive, May 23, 2016)
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, .
In February 2018, Quinn died of aspiration pneumonia in hospice care.
Other common themes included ecology, environmental ethics, culture, and an in-depth look at human population dynamics. Although Quinn himself regarded the following associations as coincidental, his philosophy is sometimes compared with deep ecology, dark-green environmentalism, or anarcho-primitivism.Zellen, Barry (2008), Breaking the Ice. From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic, Lexington Books, 2008, pg. 331
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. Quinn worried that Popular culture 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 imperialism 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.
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, which he claimed is causing the catastrophic loss of biodiversity planetwide, and, just as directly, an overshoot towards an eventual population crash, of which the civilized dominant culture shows very little anticipation or interest.Godesky, Jason (2005). " Thesis #4: Human population is a function of food supply ." The Anthropik Network. Rewild.info.
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.
Quinn described civilization as primarily a single globalization and mass culture, whose total dependence on agriculture requires ever-more expansion, in turn generating ever-more population growth Experiencing Globalization: Religion in Contemporary Contexts. Derrick M. Nault, Bei Dawei, Evangelos Voulgarakis, Rab Paterson, Cesar Andres-Miguel Suva (eds). Anthem Press. 2014. p. 12. (an escalating vicious cycle he identifies as the "food race"). As a result, he viewed modern civilization, by definition, as unsustainable. He commonly analyzed and defended the effectiveness of traditional indigenous tribal societies—regarded by anthropological research as fairly egalitarian, ecologically well-adapted, and socially secureFrank, Adam. " Is Civilization a Bad Idea?" NPR, 2011. —as role models for developing a new diversity of workable human social structures in the future.
Quinn self-admittedly avoided presenting simplistic or universal solutions, though he strongly encouraged a worldwide paradigm shift away from the self-destructive of civilization and towards the values and organizational structures of a "new tribalism". He clarified that this did not refer to the old style of ethnic tribalism so much as new groupings of individuals as equals trying to make a living communally, while still subject to evolution by natural selection.Rehling, Petra (2012) "Enemy metaphors and the countdown for mankind in the American TV series Space: Above and Beyond (1995–1996) and Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009)", in Jordan J. Copeland (ed.), The Projected and Prophetic: Humanity in Cyberculture, Cyberspace and Science Fiction. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 145-152; PDF version: p. 7 . He eventually named this hypothetical, gradual shift the "New Tribal Revolution". Quinn cautioned that his admiration for the sustainable lifestyles of indigenous tribes is not intended to encourage a massive "return" to hunting and gathering. Rather, he intended merely to acknowledge the enormous history of relative ecological harmony between humans and the rest of the environment (from which humans are never separate) and embrace the basic unit of a tribe as an effective model for human societies (just as the pack works for wolves, the hive for bees, etc.).
Quinn was influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following:
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's writings have also influenced the filmmaker Tom Shadyac (who featured Quinn in the documentary I Am); the entrepreneur Ray C. Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc. (the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpet), who began transforming Interface with more green initiatives;Hart, Craig. Climate Change and the Private Sector. Routledge, 2013. p. 174. as well as some of the ideology behind the 1999 drama film Instinct, and the 2007 documentary film . Playwright Derek Ahonen has cited Quinn as the foremost influence on his play, The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side, which attempts to dramatize the philosophies of New Tribalism.
Actor Morgan Freeman's interest in the Ishmael trilogy inspired his involvement with nature documentaries, such as ' and Born to Be Wild, both of which he narrated, while adopting from Quinn the phrase "the tyranny of agriculture"." Interview: Morgan Freeman on Narrating Born to be Wild", Coming Soon. CRAVEONLINE MEDIA, LLC, 2011.Triplett, Gene. " Morgan Freeman narrates new documentary on dwindling lemur population", News OK. News OK (The Oklahoman), 2014. Punk rock band Rise Against includes Ishmael on their album The Sufferer & the Witness reading list,Busteed, Sheila (2007). " The state of the nation: Rise Against frontman talks about war, education and the modern role model ". PlugInMusic . and its sequel, My Ishmael , inspired the name of the band Animals as Leaders.Chopik, Ivan (2010). " Tosin Abasi Interview". Guitar Messenger''. Guitar Messenger.
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