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Daniel Quinn, the author most well-known for his book "Ishmael" lived from 1935 to 2018. He wrote several books among which are "The Story of B" and "Providence". Through "Ishmael", he wanted to challenge the popular attitudes that were held toward the damage that humans were causing to the environment. During the period when this book was written, there was much climate change denial, as well as denial about the adverse effects that the societal development of humans has had on all other forms of life. He studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna, and Loyola University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's degree in English. In addition to his work as a writer, Daniel Quinn also spoke to students at many universities and served on the board of listeners to bring out the voices of the victims of nuclear waste and nuclear power disasters.

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Ishmael.org, the work & philosophy of Daniel Quinn

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Daniel Quinn (1935-2018) grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Prep in 1953. He studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna, and Loyola University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in English, cum laude, in 1957.

During a twenty-year career in educational and consumer publishing in Chicago, he served as Biography and Fine Arts editor at the American Peoples Encyclopedia, managing editor of the Greater Cleveland Mathematics Program (Science Research Associates), head of the mathematics department at Encyclopedia Britannica Educational Corporation, Executive Editor of Fuller & Dees Publishing (a division of the Times Mirror Corporation) and Editorial Director of the Society for Visual Education (a division of the Singer Corporation).

Mr. Quinn is best known as the author of , the novel that in 1991 won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship, established to encourage authors to seek "creative and positive solutions to global problems." Ishmael has been in print continuously since its publication in 1992 and has been made available in more than 25 languages. Throughout the U.S. and Canada and in other countries as well, Ishmael is used as a text in a broad range of classes that include anthropology, ecology, history, literature, philosophy, ethics, biology, and psychology, at age levels from middle school through graduate level.

He followed Ishmael with an autobiography, Providence (1994), The Story Of B (1996), a novel that continues the philosophical and religious exploration begun in Ishmael; and My Ishmael: A Sequel (1997), in which it's learned that, unbeknownst to the narrator of Ishmael, Ishmael was working with another pupil, a twelve-year-old girl.

Other works include Beyond Civilization (1999), a nonfiction work that explores, among other relevant topics, tribal ways of making a living that work here and now; After Dachau (2001), a novel that critics have compared to Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, and 1984; The Man Who Grew Young, a graphic novel that tells the unique and fascinating story of a man who lives backward through time and history; The Holy (2002), a metaphysical thriller that has been compared to John Fowles' The Magus (and which won the 2003 Independent Publisher Award for Mystery/Suspense/Thriller of the Year); Tales of Adam (2005), written as part of an early version of the book that ultimately became Ishmael, illustrated by Michael McCurdy; Work, Work, Work, (2006), a children's book with Quinn's own illustrations; and If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways, in which the author investigates the source of his own ideas (which so many readers have found mysteriously alien). His short fiction has appeared in The Quarterly, Asylum, Magic Realism, and elsewhere.

This short fiction was collected in a volume called At Woomeroo: Stories (2012); another collection, The Invisibility of Success (2014) brought together two new essays, along with speeches delivered over the years; The Book of the Damned, a short, somewhat poetic version of what Mr. Quinn was working on for so many years was published in three different editions (1982, 2001, 2014); Dreamer, a novel of psychological horror, the author's first, was originally published by TOR (1988) and republished in 2013; The Teachings That Came Before and After Ishmael (2014) encapsulated the works that are intrinsically related to Ishmael and was his last published work.

He instituted the Stateville Penitentiary Writers' Workshop (1969-71) and served on the Board of Listeners of the World Uranium Hearing, Salzburg, Austria, convened in 1992 to hear testimony of victims of uranium mining, nuclear waste disposal, and nuclear power disasters around the world.

Daniel has addressed students and faculty at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Texas, Trinity University, Portland State University, Salisbury State University, Elon College, Baylor University, Texas A&M, the University of Georgia, Roger Williams University, Kent State University, Rice University, the University of Oregon, St. Louis University, and other colleges, community colleges, and high schools.

He has been a keynote speaker for conferences and meetings for groups such as The Minnesota Social Investment Forum, St. Martin's College World Population Forum, Systems Thinking in Action, Vision 2000, Iowa State University's Institute on World Affairs, the North American Association for Environmental Education, The Foundation for Contemporary Theology, and EnvironDesign3.

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Formal Daniel Quinn Biography * Ishmael.org, the work & philosophy of Daniel Quinn

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Daniel Quinn (1935-2018) grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, where he graduated from Creighton Prep in 1953. He studied at St. Louis University, the University of Vienna, and Loyola University of Chicago, receiving a bachelor's degree in English, cum laude, in 1957.

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The story of "Ishmael" takes place in the early 1990s in a city. The main character, who remains unnamed for the entirety of the book, is introduced as having had strong convictions about "saving the world". The story, taking place in the 1990s, took place during a period of time when many people were trying to emphasize the environmental struggles that were occurring due to under-regulation of industry and businesses. One of the specific environmental crises that took place during the 1990s was the hole that appeared in the ozone layer because of the significant amounts of aerosols that were being released into the atmosphere. Thankfully, this problem was resolved, but the book tries to emphasize not just the singular problems, but the root causes of the problems themselves.

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Ishmael (1992) by Daniel Quinn - Climate in Arts and History

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Ishmael by Daniel Quinn is a fictitious philosophical novel that explores the role of human culture in shaping the natural environment. It tells the story of an unnamed narrator who responds to a newspaper ad from a mysterious teacher, seeking students who wish to save the world.

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This article from Tufts University addresses one of the biggest crises that is facing life on Earth. That crisis is extinction. Globally up to a million animals are under the threat of extinction, and this is not something that would naturally happen. Extinction and endangerment to this degree is something that could only happen from outside interference, and in this case, humans are the ones who are interfering. Humans as a species have an attitude toward themselves of superiority and entitlement which makes them very dangerous with respect to the rest of the life on Earth. While some people may be fairly open in discussions about the relative value of human life and other life, there are also many who due to certain strongly held beliefs, would never even entertain the idea that humans could be worth the same as any other animal on this planet.

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A recent landmark United Nations report delivered an alarming assessment of the fate of animal life and biodiversity on Earth. According to the authors-145 experts from fifty countries-up to 1 million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades. They report how natural habitats are declining in rates "unprecedented in human history," as species extinction is accelerating "with grave impacts on people around the world now likely."

"The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever," said Sir Robert Watson, chair of the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which issued the report. "We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide."

Tufts Now reached out to Michael Reed, a professor of avian ecology and conservation biology, for his perspective on the report. His research has focused on identifying characteristics of species that put them at risk from human-caused threats; he is particularly interested in the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on extinction risk and population viability. He has also studied the impact of grazing, logging, and suburban sprawl on biodiversity.
: The report documents trend lines that reveal how unrelenting human activity is accelerating biodiversity loss. As a biologist, is that loss playing out as you thought it would?
Michael Reed: I would agree that the rate of extinction is accelerating due to human activity. That is because often the impact of human activity isn't linear. If I destroy or disrupt a habitat by 10 percent, perhaps the animals can pack in a little more. If I disrupt another 10 percent, they'll pack in a little more again. But at some point, I will cross a threshold after which they can no longer adapt and survive. After that point, there will be a sudden and rapid decline, and in many cases, extinction. There is no further chance for survival, because they no longer have the minimum amount of habitat they need to reproduce and survive.
Humans have pushed millions of species past that threshold of tolerance to the point where we now see unprecedented decline in biodiversity.
"Part of the problem with our relationship to nature is that people don't see things that change slowly," said Michael Reed. "If you walked outside one day and all the trees were gone, you'd notice. But if Norway maple trees start infiltrating and crowding out native species, you might not notice that for decades."

To have a global acceleration of extinction means we're crossing thresholds all around the world. It's why we're entering this phase called the Sixth mass extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction. The rate at which extinction would naturally occur is about one to five species per year. We're now losing species at 1,000 to 10,000 times that background rate, which is scary.
The report estimates that dozens of species are going extinct every day, with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species going extinct by 2050. Why is it important to protect planetary biodiversity?
Biodiversity is important for a lot of reasons. For one, it provides the raw resources that humans use to survive, from breeding new plants to finding new drugs. Mostly, we need biodiversity to sustain ecosystem systems; forests are essential to help clean the air, because trees are really good at carbon sequestration.

But I think biodiversity is also just good for human well-being. It makes you feel better about the world when nature is there, when you can see it and enjoy it. Some people only make economic arguments for biodiversity, and in the past ten years those arguments seem to have gotten very popular. But you don't want people to start thinking that is the only value nature and other species have. I may never see a rhino in my life, but I value that they exist.
More than 40 percent of amphibian species are at risk, according to the report. In your work, you've already documented the impacts of industrial forestry practices on amphibian biodiversity, including how salamanders persist-or don't-in areas fragmented by suburban sprawl. What makes amphibians so vulnerable?
Amphibians are highly vulnerable because they're habitat specialists. They depend on water-clean water-and without that, they are great risk of extinction. In addition to habitat loss and pollution, population declines and extinctions are linked to a widespread fungus called the chytrid fungus, which infects the skin of amphibians. It was found to be present in amphibians native to wetlands in Africa, but those amphibians are resistant to it. But it spread around the globe as people sold these amphibians as pets. So, while habitat loss is still the biggest threat for amphibians, this pathogen is a really big problem.

"I may never see a rhino in my life, but I value that they exist," said Michael Reed. Several species of rhinoceros are among the most endangered species on Earth. Photo: Ingimage
For some people, species loss might seem remote-happening in a far-off wilderness areas. But it's happening all around us, isn't it? What's at stake when we take over open spaces like fields, and turn them into condo developments or shopping malls?
Old fields, pastures, and grasslands in New England are rapidly disappearing. With widespread suburban and rural growth, we're losing those open spaces, and we're also losing the plants that sustain a very diverse populations of species. We're losing milkweeds, which is contributing to fewer and fewer monarch butterflies. We're seeing a decline in fireflies-that's habitat related, and also due to the fact that we spray for mosquitos. You can't spray for just mosquitos. Also, if you are a grassland bird, grasslands covered with solar panels are as bad as paving them over for a parking lot: you've still lost your habitat.
The report also states that the distributions of almost a quarter of threatened birds may already have been negatively affected by climate change.
Habitat loss is to me the biggest problem, but climate change is close behind; it's altering all sorts of habitats. One of the things that might be hard to think about is that climate change alters phenology, the timing of cycles in nature. You've got birds that eat caterpillars and caterpillars that eat leaves. Leaves come out when it gets warm. If the weather gets warm earlier, the caterpillars come out earlier. But birds migrating annually from Argentina don't know to come back earlier. They come back and they have missed the peak for caterpillars, their food source. There's a disconnect between the two cycles.
Do you see anything new in the IPBES report?
There are some birds that migrate to northern latitudes that want to show up just as the ice recedes, because that is when you get the first flush of plant growth, which causes a flush of insects. But if the plant growth happens earlier than normal, they miss the flush of insects. So there are direct impacts of climate change and then there are these cascading impacts on survival.

I'm glad the report is getting attention, because people need to know about extinction risk, but I didn't see anything in the report that people haven't been yelling about for years. I wonder if it is mostly preaching to the choir. If you are someone for whom this is not important on a daily basis, does this report affect you? I don't know the answer.

In some cases, maybe it does. I think of shark fin soup. People catch sharks, cut the fins off, and throw the sharks back in the water. That's pretty awful. China is the biggest market for shark fins. Some research has been done, though, that showed that most people there didn't even know they were shark fins, because they have a different name in China. And some thought the fins grew back. Concerned people started a campaign to raise awareness in China. They had NBA star player Yao Ming saying "don't do this."
Are there ways to change behavior?
In some areas, it has reduced shark fin consumption by 80 percent. It's been really effective. For some environmental problems, drawing attention to a problem has not been effective-and it's not because of a lack of education. Those people just don't value that particular wildlife. They're plenty educated. They've thought about it, and that is not what is important to them. Giving them more information is not going to change that behavior or that attitude.
Why do so many people not seem to care about what's happening to nature?
I have a friend who works at the conservation organization, Manomet, and he is good at making people understand what is at stake. He is good at talking with people who have values different from his own. He can find common ground around things they both value. There are those people who already care, and those you are never going to convince. But there is a big mass in the middle that we have to reach.
What is the long-term outlook? Are we, by wiping out millions of species, also dooming the human race?
Part of the problem with our relationship to nature is that people don't see things that change slowly. If you walked outside one day and all the trees were gone, you'd notice. But if Norway maple trees start infiltrating and crowding out native species, you might not notice that for decades. I can remember as a kid my dad telling me how he was driving through Mississippi, and he'd have to pull the car over and scrape the bugs off the headlights because he couldn't see anymore. But you don't hear about that sort of thing anymore, because insect numbers are down globally. But again, if it's slow, you don't notice it.

I don't see cataclysmic human disappearance-I just see a constant diminishing of the environment, so Earth will become a much less nice and interesting place for all of us. If we hit doom, I think it will be because we depleted our resources; the slow creep of using up resources will steadily reduce our standard of living. People will persist, but just in a more diminished world.

The report talks a lot about turning things around through "transformational change." As much as I don't like the generic phrase, I don't disagree with it. I just don't know what it means specifically and how to do it. You can't easily make people do things that are good for people ten generations from now.
Laura Ferguson can be reached at laura.ferguson@tufts.edu.
A lot of it comes down to political will. Do we have the will to do what needs to be done? Certainly, we have shown that across generations we are able to change, but time is running out. I am not sure that we can make the kind of change the report calls for in just a few decades.

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A recent landmark United Nations report delivered an alarming assessment of the fate of animal life and biodiversity on Earth. According to the authors-145 ex

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This picture depicts the brutal methods humans resort to to feed their ever growing population. This arts purpose is to show how humans will use the most horrible means necessary if it means not only surviving, but also living with more and better comforts. In this case, billions of animals are killed each year in order to sustain the demand for meat, which is extremely popular especially in the west, where it is a staple of almost everyone's diet. This shows us how even if someone wouldn't say that that they value their lives over animals, the rate of consumption and demand for it is shown by the increase over the past century in the rate of industrial animal farming.

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The film series Planet of the Apes is centered around the relationship between the decimated humans and the apes that have gained human-level intelligence due to an Alzheimer's drug. This is an interesting premise, but what makes this tie to the story of Ishmael is the nature of the conflict between the apes and the humans. When the humans are brought to the brink of extinction, they begin a conflict with the apes. They choose to fight against the apes because they believe that they deserve to control the world. This attitude is also shared by the apes, but inversed, believing that they should have complete control over the world. This goes to show how any animal with tribal instincts similar to a human's would be likely to prioritize their own life over that of another species. Ishmael specifically talks about humans because that is the group that is relevant in this story, but through this film, we can see how any human-like life would have similar species-centric thought patterns.

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The poem "The Peace of Wild Things" by Wendell Berry is a poem that highlights the author's soothing relationship with nature. This author talks about how he appreciates the beauty that he finds around a lake in the form of the water in the animals. This brings out one of the main ideas from Ishmael in that humans were intended to live with nature and under the rules of nature, not to live in constant protest of it, trying to fight against it to make their lives more comfortable. It has been shown that humans are more depressed and unhappy with their lives than they ever have been despite constant improvements in quality of life throughout the past few centuries. It has also been shown that groups who live in tandem with nature, giving and taking, live happier, more fulfilled lives on average. This is the same conclusion that Ishmael comes to from a different angle in the book. Humans, when they are not working in accordance with the laws of nature, end up negatively affecting the world, and in turn themselves.

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The Peace of Wild Things And Other Poems

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The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry - Scottish Poetry Library

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When despair for the world grows in me / and I wake in the night at the least sound / in fear of what…

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Many people choose to go vegan due to their relationships with the animals in their lives and or a strong bond with them in general. This shows an instance of humans moving towards a more equitable view of the values of human and non-human life. While this still does not mean that people believe in equality between human life and animal life, it does show that even among humans there is a wide gap in the beliefs about the relative values of lives. Of course if we were able to communicate with animals, one could assume that they would not believe that human lives have a greater value than their own. In principle this question is very human-centric, but there is really not any good way to be more inclusive with no good ways to communicate with animals.

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Explore why veganism is kinder to animals, to people and to our planet's future