Daniel Quinn

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Daniel Quinn
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OccupationWriter

Daniel Quinn (born 1935 in Omaha, Nebraska) is a U.S. writer. He is best known for his book Ishmael (1992), which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991.

Biography

Daniel Quinn studied at Saint Louis University, University of Vienna, Austria, and Loyola University, receiving a bachelor's degree in English, cum laude, in 1957.

In 1975, he abandoned his career as a publisher to become a freelance writer. Quinn is best known for his book Ishmael (1992), which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991. This fellowship was established to encourage authors to seek "creative and positive solutions to global problems". Ishmael is the first of a trilogy including The Story of B, and My Ishmael. The 1999 film Instinct is roughly based on the story.

Ishmael and its sequels brought ever-increasing fame to Quinn throughout the 1990s, and he became a very well-known author to certain segments of the environmental movement, the simplicity movement, the anarchist movement and Anarcho-primitivism movements. Quinn has traveled widely to lecture and discuss his books.

While response to Ishmael was mostly very positive, Quinn inspired a great deal of controversy with his claim (most explicitly discussed in the appendix section of The Story of B) that since population growth is a function of food supply, food aid to impoverished nations merely puts off and dramatically worsens a massive population-environment crisis.

Some say his argument is a modified version of Thomas Malthus, although Quinn states the problem is not a food shortage, pointing out that excess food does not go to feeding those who are starving. He suggests that current population growth is unsustainable both for human beings and other species, and that apparently benevolent policies now will wreak havoc when considered from a longer-term view. As evidence of this, he points to the extinction of 200 species a day currently being caused by human beings. Quinn has also suggested that the low fertility rates of developed nations are irrelevant as counter-evidence to his thesis, because the growing food production of developed nations is what is driving population growth in the Third World.

Quinn repeatedly states in his books that he speaks to a population as a whole, and not some artificial subsection (say, Germany). His argument is simple: more food, more humans. Not necessarily more humans in Nebraska, for example, but wherever the extra food from Nebraska is going. His argument rests on the physical fact that more food eaten directly translates to more human mass. He specifically states that starvation in problem areas is not necessary provided the extra humans are moved to areas that can sustain them. He objects to food aid that simply keeps an already unsustainable population growing.

Quinn's book Tales of Adam was released in 2005 after a long bankruptcy scuffle with its initially scheduled publisher. It is designed to be a look through the animist's eyes in seven short tales.

Related authors include Derrick Jensen, John Zerzan, Jack Forbes, Edward Goldsmith, and Fredy Perlman.

Quinn currently lives in Houston, Texas with his wife Rennie.

Bibliography

Key concepts

External links

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