30 Facts About Daniel Quinn

Daniel Clarence Quinn was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year.

Daniel Quinn was born in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Preparatory School.

Daniel Quinn delayed part of this university education 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.

Daniel Quinn went into publishing, abandoned his Catholic faith, and married twice unsuccessfully, before marrying Rennie MacKay Daniel Quinn, his third and final wife of 42 years.

In 1975, Daniel Quinn left his career as a publisher to become a freelance writer.

Daniel Quinn is best known for his book Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991.

Ishmael became the first of a loose trilogy of novels by Daniel Quinn, including The Story of B and My Ishmael, all of which brought increasing fame to Daniel Quinn throughout the 1990s.

Daniel Quinn 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.

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.

In February 2018, Daniel Quinn died of aspiration pneumonia in hospice care.

Daniel Quinn was largely a fiction writer who explored the culturally-biased world-view driving modern civilization and the destruction of the natural world.

Daniel Quinn sought to recognize and criticize some of civilization's most unchallenged "myths" or memes, which he considered to include the following: that the Earth was made especially for humans, so humans are destined to conquer and rule it; that humans are innately and inevitably flawed; that humans are separate from and superior to nature ; and that all humans must be made to live according to some one right way.

Daniel 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.

Daniel Quinn 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, the human population growing in proportion to the decline of the rest of the world's biomass.

However, while Malthus warned that excess human population precariously motivates an excess of food production in order to sustain that population, Daniel Quinn considered the priorities of this assessment backwards.

Daniel 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 Daniel Quinn was resolving to let starving people in impoverished nations continue starving.

Daniel Quinn described civilization as primarily a single global economy and culture, whose total dependence on agriculture requires ever-more expansion, in turn generating ever-more population growth.

Daniel Quinn self-admittedly avoided presenting simplistic or universal solutions, though he strongly encouraged a worldwide paradigm shift away from the self-destructive memes of civilization and towards the values and organizational structures of a "new tribalism".

Daniel Quinn 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.

Daniel Quinn eventually named this hypothetical, gradual shift the "New Tribal Revolution".

Daniel Quinn cautioned that his admiration for the sustainable lifestyles of indigenous tribes is not intended to encourage a massive "return" to hunting and gathering.

Daniel Quinn was influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following:.

Daniel Quinn coined the term food race to describe his concept of a perpetually escalating crisis of growing human population due to growing food production, of which the former is fueled by the latter.

Daniel Quinn argues that as the worldwide human population increases, the typical international response is to produce and distribute more food to feed these greater numbers of people.

However, assuming that population increases according to increased food availability, Daniel Quinn argues that this response only ends up leading to an even larger population and thus greater starvation in the end.

Daniel Quinn compared this to the arms race in the Cold War.

Daniel Quinn states that population is a function of food supply, and not merely some independent variable.

Daniel Quinn considers that problem is not a scarcity of food, but, rather, overpopulation.

Daniel Quinn has suggested this results from international food distribution, claiming that the farms of the First World fuel population growth elsewhere.