Daniel Quinn Interview, Part 1 of 2

DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for the Conservation History Association of Texas. It's October 20, 2003. We're in Houston, Texas, at the home and office of Daniel Quinn, who's a philosopher and writer. He's published over seven books and they deal with some of the most basic issues of agriculture, population and some of the threats that are facing the environment and the world. And I wanted to take this chance to thank him for taking time to talk to us.

DQ: I'm delighted to.

DT: Mr. Quinn, I was hoping we could start with where your intellectual adventure might have begun, where you started confronting and trying to deal with some of these issues that you deal with in Ishmael and some of your other works.

DQ: Yeah, it began so long ago that if you used the word environment-environmentalism no one would have known what you were talking about. If you used the word sustainable no one would have known what you were referring to.

It actually started not with an issue about the environment or conservation or anything like that, but about what we teach our children in school. I was-in about 1961 I went to work for Science Research Associates where we were putting out a mathematics program beginning in kindergarten, first grade, second grade and third grade and so on. You first-kindergarten and first grade came out the first year, second grade the second year and so on.

And so I had the experience-we all remember what college was like. Some of us remember what high school was like, but very few of us remember what kindergarten, first grade and second grade were like. And so I basically went to school all over again and I was very struck by what I saw and struck by the strangeness of it. Strange to me, of course, wasn't strange to-to other people but it was very strange to me.

And I began to look into-began to think about why-why we send children to school and how school came to be in the shape that it is right now. This led me to many other things.

One of-one of the great mysteries to me at the time was that I was certainly aware that children in aboriginal societies at the age of 13 or 14 are fully competent adults with survival value of a hundred percent, whereas in our own more advanced society, children graduate from school the average citizen at age 18 with virtually zero survival value.

I thought this was very peculiar and began to wonder why it was that we dismiss the first three million years of human history as of no interest and of no value; nothing there for us to learn. I found this-and-and that live-the lives lived during that time were of no value and I-this I found unacceptable.

So I began to look into this question and look in-look back into human history and began to see that much of what we learn and teach our children is-is false. This-I was answering my own questions and went on in this way up into the mid '70s. I was working mainly in educational publishing and had for some time been in the position to control the-the content of-of a major publisher.

I mean-I don't mean control in that complete sense but I was able to influence it. And I thought I would be able to begin to infiltrate some new ideas into the curriculum, but I soon realized that that was impossible because the educational publishers serve the schools, the schools tell them what to-what to put out, period.

And so I got out of educational publishing, started my own development company, and after about three years entering a lull I wrote a book, the first version of what was ultimately to become Ishmael, sent it off to a-to an agent. The-the biggest agent in New York at the time who wrote back and said well, this is-it's certainly an interesting book, but it will never be published and I took his word for that and so started a second version.

After a thousand pages I realized I was nowhere near getting where I wanted to get, which I didn't know where I wanted to get really. So I threw away that thousand pages and started again on the third version. The same thing happened. Fourth version I did something entirely different.

Some fragments of that book will be published probably next spring in a book called Tales of Adam. Sort of a novel but not-not really a novel, not-not a good enough novel to be published,

so I put that aside and came out with a fifth version called The Book of the Damned, which since I was seemed to be unable to get to the end I said-said to myself that I would-I would simply publish it in parts and go on publishing in parts until I was-didn't have anything more to say.

And so I published it myself and it-it was quite an underground success in Santa Fe where-where I was living at the time, but I got to the end of part three and found I couldn't come up with the part four.

So I set that aside and started on version six, which was called Another Story To Be In. I finally had it, I finally knew what I had to do and I did finish that book and did have a publisher for it and we came-we had a disagreement and I'm very glad that he didn't publish it finally.

My agent in New York said basically you're-you're wasting your life. If it had been-if it were still the '70s maybe this book would be published, but no one cares about saving the world now. No one cares about that anymore, that-that's a dead issue. So I-I-it was quite a long book then, a hundred thousand words, so I cut it down to about seventy thousand words and tried to market it myself and found no interest, so that was version seven.

And then we got news of Ted Turner's, Turner Tomorrow Fellowship-Turner Tomorrow Competition where he was looking for novels offering solutions to global problems. By then everyone knew that there were global problems.

When I began, no, except for, of course, Rachel Carson's book that came out in 1960-61, something like that, and so I had Rennie, my wife, had been urging me for years to try writing the book as a novel and I had resisted the notion, one of many mistakes I've made in my life, thinking that no one would take it seriously if it was fiction, but if I was going to enter the Turner Tomorrow Competition it would have to be a novel.

That was all they were looking at. And so I sat down to rewrite it as a novel and I said earlier books had had a teacher-student dialogue in them. I said to Rennie what-what would you think if the teacher were a-were a gorilla and she said yeah, that sounds fine. That-and that's the story of how-how it came to be that there was a gorilla in Ishmael.

DT: You mentioned, just a moment ago, Rachel Carson was somebody who had written about global environmental problems and sustainability. Was that an influence on you, was her work?

DQ: Well, it was an influence on everyone, really. It-it brought the news, which was news at that time that, believe it or not, the earth cannot assimilate all the poisons that we give it. Until that time it was thought there was no limit. We could do anything.

And with DDT, what she was showing was, it doesn't work. You can't do it. So this was a revelation to everybody and, of course, this was certainly part of what I was saying in-in Ishmael and in all subsequent books is that one of-when I-when I got to Another Story To Be-To Be In I realized I was dealing with a mythology and that was what I devoted Ishmael to was an examination of our cultural mythology.

John-who is the famous mythologist? John-he's been on-he's world-famous.

DT: Joseph Campbell?

Joseph Campbell, yes, had-had lamented the fact that-that we have no mythology. And so I was-I was really taking issue with him and saying oh yes we do, but it's mythology that we don't acknowledge and we're not even aware that it is a mythology and that mythology is that the world was made for us. It belongs to us. It's a human property and we can do whatever we want to with it. And that we were created to conquer and rule the earth. That's our job.

It's part of our mythology that the world needs us and that we've done-we've done a great thing by taking it in hand and developing it. So he c-it was a mess. It was a jungle and so by humanizing it we have elevated it. God-God didn't do a really topnotch job with the world and he needed our help; this is part of our mythology.

Another part of our mythology is that humans unaccountably are immutably, irreversibly flawed, which is of course a paradox because we are flawed, but it is our place to rule the world and we are its stewards though we are irreversibly flawed. And this excuses every-all of the mistakes that we make in ruling the world. It's what you would expect, we're flawed and so in Ishmael I examined all of this-this mythology of our culture.

DT: Maybe you can help us go back just once more and set the context for Ishmael. You said that when you were working for this educational publisher, you had confronted the editors and publishers and had trouble trying to change the traditional education that young children were getting, I guess perhaps the mythology and themes they were receiving. Is that fair to say? What was the frustration? Could you give us some examples of how your alternative ideas about education for small children were turned back?

DQ: Okay, I was in charge of-I was the head of the editorial department at SVE, The Society for Visual Education, which is owned by the Singer Corporation, and what I was doing was putting out big multimedia supplementary packages with film strips, audio tapes, board games, floor games, workbooks, puppets, whatever-whatever was needed to-to accomplish the objectives that we-we set for ourselves.

And this is funny, that some-some of the-some teachers were actually worried because the kids were having too much fun. It was-it was my strange philosophy that children would learn more if they enjoyed themselves, but they-they wanted it-they were-they wanted something a little-a little less fun than what I was producing.

Ev-eventually we-we got a new president who knew nothing about education at all. He was simply a-a bean counter and he knew that he was only going to be there for a short period of time. And one day he came to me and said, Daniel, you're making the material too good. It doesn't have to be that good because kids can't tell the difference.

I knew my career in publishing was over at that point. What he meant, of course, was I'm going to cut your budget. They were tremendously successful. They made a lot of money for the company and by-but by cutting the-my budget he was going to produce a little bump in profits, which would look good on his record and he was gone in a years-year or so.

DT: Well, is there something that you can point to in the kind of educational books and games and puppets that would have made children more culturally survive, survivors? You mentioned earlier...

DQ: Yeah, well, yeah, I-I couldn't have put anything-anything completely overt into-into the text. It was-it was going to be-it was really more shading the material the way I wanted it and after all I was still far away from the vision that would inform Ishmael.

So I wasn't really ready to-to do-but-to do what I wanted to do, but I-I realized finally that that was not the place for me, that I couldn't do what I wanted to do there though I didn't know exactly what I did want to do. I was still a young man then.

DT: Maybe we should jump ahead again and talk about the vision that did inform Ishmael and when it was more fully formed. I was particularly curious about the format that you chose, it's unusual, first of that it's Socratic, that there's this debate, conversation, and it involves creatures from two different species, the gorilla and the man, the boy, it's different.

DQ: Oddly enough the-the question that people usually ask is why a gorilla, whereas the relevant question is, why not a human? And the-the fact is that if I'd used a human nobody would have paid the slightest bit of attention and there would have been no impact on readers. The fact that it was a member of another species is what made it count.

He was- Ishmael was a spokesman for the rest of the living community, trying to let us see how we would be seen by the rest of the living community, if they could see if they were intelligent.

DT: It's like putting a mirror up to ourselves.

DQ: Yeah.

DT: And what do you think this mirror has shown?

DQ: Well, as I say that one-one further part of our mythology is that humans were born to be agriculturalists and civilization builders. This arise-arose among us because of something that in The Story of B I called "The Great Forgetting." Between-when our-our ag-agricultural revolution began about ten thousand years ago.

Another five thousand years passed before anything like civilization began, before literacy appeared and during that five thousand years, of course, it was completely forgotten among the people of-of the civilized world, Europe and the Near East, was completely forgotten that we had a different past.

As far as they could tell humanity could be traced back to the birth of agriculture and the birth of civilization. So as far as they could see humans were born agriculturalists and civilization builders. They were completely unaware that another three million years of human life lay back there.

This-they were unaware also that the-the earth had been around for billions of years and that the rest of the living community had been around for billions of years. In-in the Judeo-Christian part of the mythology it all happened at once, virtually, everything came into being in its final form and there was man.

And so there was no idea that we had been preceded by life for billions of years, hundred of millions of years. These are the things that Ishmael wanted to try to make his pupils see and see what their importance was.

DT: You mention the Judeo-Christian theology and tradition. Can you discuss the story of Cain and Abel and how that might have been part of this agricultural revolution that you've been speaking about?

DQ: One of the things that I noticed early on or that came to my attention early on was that the agricultural-agricultural revolution, the birth of what we consider agriculture, occurred at the same time arguably and in the same place as the birth of agriculture as described in Genesis.

The difference is that in Genesis-in the Genesis story, agriculture is portrayed as a punishment, and so I said, why is it there portrayed as a punishment, whereas in our own culture it is portrayed as our greatest triumph, as the beginning of all of this wonderful stuff. So very-it's-it's our greatest blessing, instead in Genesis it's a curse.

And so I began to evolve a theory that, this being the case, isn't it likely that the story belonged not to people of our culture but to people of a different culture, entirely having a complete-completely different view of the world.

Of course this is-that story is followed by the story of Cain and Abel, which has always been the great mystery to people. Cain is a tiller of the field and Abel was a herder. And God accepted Abel's gift, but rejected Cain's. Why? Again, that-perhaps this is another indication that this-this story is-is being told from an entirely different point of view.

It was being told, of course, by the-by an ancient Semitic people. Okay, who were they? They were the people who lived just south of the land where agriculture began, which was among the Caucasians. What happened among, as always happened among us, is that we grow more food than we need. We want a surplus.

We must have a surplus in order to start a village, for example. And because we have a surplus our population grows and therefore we must increase food production, in order to support this increased growth and in order to support that increase in population we have to extend our-our agriculture rep-production again and so on and so on. We've been doing it for ten thousand years.

So it was inevitable that the-the people among whom agriculture began, I call it totalitarian agriculture because agriculture has been part of every society probably for hundreds of thousands of years to a c-certain extent. So it was inevitable that these people were going to come up against the Semites and want their land.

And the-my suggestion-my theory is that the story of Cain and Abel originated among the-among these ancient Semites who portrayed themselves-thought of themselves as Abel and that Cain had come to them, knife in hand, to water his fields with their blood, just as we came to North America and watered our fields with the Native Americans-the blood of the Native Americans who were here.

And what they did was to try and figure out, and of course this is over a long period of time, the agricultural revolution was probably hundreds or even thousands of years in-in the past, the actual beginning of agriculture. So they-they tried to imagine what had happened to turn their neighbors in the north into these people and they came up with this story.

These people think that they have the wisdom to rule the world. They are as wise as the gods. They think that they have eaten at the gods' own tree of knowledge, which is the knowledge of good and evil.

What does-what does that mean? Everything that the gods do is good for one but evil for another. It's inevitable no matter what they do. It's good for one but evil for another.

If the fox goes after a pheasant and catches the pheasant this is good for the fox but bad for the-for the pheasant. If the pheasant escapes and flies away then this is good for the pheasant but bad for the fox. You can go to anything and-and see it this way.

And that-by eating at the gods' own tree of knowledge they won a punishment, which was that they would now have to live by the sweat of their brow and grow their own food. That's what happened to Adam.

God said from now on you will live by the sweat of your brow and you will no longer live in Eden, which is where all the food is-is already grown, you see, and that's the way-that's the way aboriginal peoples have always lived. They've just taken what's there. You don't have to work for it.

This is probably the-when people speak of any specific part of Ishmael, cite any particular part that's of importance to them they usually talk about this exploration of the story of the Fall and the story of Cain and Abel.

DT: Could you explain a little about why this story, which is so central to Genesis and the Bible and to our whole culture, seems to have been forgotten and lost, go into this idea of The Great Forgetting that you mentioned earlier?

DQ: Well, the story of-of the Fall and of Cain and Abel, of course, I wouldn't say they were forgotten. They are probably the most universally known stories in the world. So I'm not quite sure what you mean?

DT: I would say that the forgetting of this alternative...

DQ: Oh yeah, well that would certainly account for the fact that the people of our culture have never been able to figure out what-what the stories are-what they mean? What is this tree of knowledge of good and evil? What's wrong with the knowledge of good and evil? We have the g-knowledge of good and evil. Why, you know, why would God forbid us this knowledge? It doesn't make any sense.

So, for most people it is well, God had to forbid man something and-and just to test him and so he arbitrarily picked this one tree and said you shall not eat-eat of this tree and so it was just an act of disobedience for which he was punished. Not-not realizing that three million years of history-human history existed before Adam.

Adam was the first man, so they couldn't really-they didn't have the intellectual-oh, they didn't have the information to be able to read these stories this way. I was going to say something else but I can't think of it.

DT: Was it the situation where the conquering culture usually tells the history?

DQ: That's certainly part of it. We, having become the conquerors of the world, tell the story of history our way. It all began with us. Oh I guess there-there was three million years of human history before that but that was nothing. Nothing was achieved.

It was a miserable life, dangerous life, hard life and that's what our children are learning in school. They also learn that, yes, it was three million years of history but about ten thousand years ago humans gave up living like hunters and gatherers and began growing their own food.

I've seen this in history books. I've seen it-I've seen his-historians quoted as s-saying virtually this and of course it's ab-absolutely a lie, completely false. Humanity did not give up hunting-and-gathering-life ten thousand years ago. We did and the rest of the world went on just as before as-as we found when we got to the new world. It continued all over the world.

DT: Perhaps you could give some examples of how Abel's culture did survive into modern times?

DQ: Oh well, we've pretty well extinguished them but-by now but certainly the-everyone who lived on the continent of North America and South America apart from, you know, two or three civilizations-small civilizations that were down there, were living in a way that was completely different from ours.

Hunting and gathering was the common life in-in the Americas in the new world. It was the common life in Australia, New Zealand and, of course, it can still be found there or there are still people living-I call them the leavers-leave it-leaving as leavers in-in the interior of New Zealand and the interior of Brazil and so on. But they're m-very much beleaguered, of course, at this point.

DT: Can you describe a little bit more about these two terms you often use, the leavers and the takers?

DQ: Yeah, I-I often regret having-having invented them because people have often converted them into meaning something that I don't mean. Often convert them into good people and bad people. Takers are bad people and leavers are good people, which of course is not what I meant at all.

I didn't-I wanted an-an alternative to civilized and savage, you know, because I-I-we civilized people are far more savage than-than any savage. I wanted-I didn't have a good term so I invented two terms and the meaning of the terms is this, that leavers are those who leave their hand-their g-their lives in the hands of the gods and take what the gods provide and takers are those who t-have taken their lives into their own hands because their own hands are much more trustworthy.

If they can grow their own food then they control their lives and so that's the meaning of the terms. The taker phenomenon spread from the Near East in all directions and eventually as I say, eventually reached here in the 15th century,

but always with the same character, with the belief that all the food in the world belongs to us and if we-we won't share it with our competitors we would kill them off, which is something that leavers never do. They don't have to. Whereas we want to exterminate all the creatures who would eat our food, this is-all belongs to us.

DT: Can you help us understand the spread of the taker culture maybe with a few examples of confrontations between takers and leavers?

DQ: Well, so much of it took place before history-before written history began and it's-it's impossible to describe it in detail, but other than to say that it moved-the revolution moved upward into Turkey and-and then westward into Europe and further to the East into India and China and from, of course, Europe it moved into the new world.

DT: Perhaps you could also describe some of the changes in population in the world that were furthering this spread.

DQ: What changes do you mean?

DT: The growth that you've often pointed out.

DQ: Just as-as now when places get crowded people move to some place where it's less crowded and-and then-and that they continue to grow because they continue to grow more and more food. This is-is-any species-this will-will happen to any species.

Any species is controlled by food availability. The population of any species is controlled by food availability. Every hunter knows this. Every farmer knows this. If there-if there's less food for the deer there are fewer deer.

They don't-they don't necessarily starve to death, but life becomes less easy when there is less food. They have less time to devote to finding mates, to caring for the young, to less time-have to spend more time looking for food and so on.

And as-there's a constant cycle of predation so that if-if the-there are a lot of wolves in the forest then the-the deer population is going to go down and as the deer population goes down then the wolf population is going to go down and-

and as the wolf population goes down then the deer population is going to begin to rise again and then the wolf population is going to begin to rise again. And so you have this constant tracking of-of population, but we have of course have eliminated all of-all those who pr-prey on us for the most part.

And we keep increasing our own-increasing the availability of food to ourselves and just like any other species if more food is available there will be more members of that species, but many people will deny this of humans because we're different.

DT: Can you help us understand why people mistakenly are not, think that humans, somehow, are biologically different and don't have population dynamics that are similar to wildlife?

DQ: I can't-I can't explain that one. It is-it is so deeply rooted. I mean there are-I work with a conservation biologist, Alan Thornhill, who's the head of The Society for Conservation Biology, and we have done many presentations together.

Did a video on this subject together and it's astounding to learn that many of his own colleagues dispute what we're saying. Even they think that we're special and that the-the-the dynamics of population growth and decline don't apply to us.

We will g-there is-there are people who will think that w-our population will go on even if we don't make more food. It'll continue to grow even in the absence of more food. I say to them what-what do you make people out of?

If you're going to make more people what are you going to make more people out of? Air? Shadow? Wind chime? It's got to be-they've got to be made out of food. If you're going to have more people you have got to have more food.

They-they-they just-this is really a hard-a hard nut to crack. People just-it's so deeply engraved in them it-it terrifies them. I-and I was-one night a woman, we got into this at a-after a book signing or presentation of some kind, and one woman got up and said, you are the most disgusting person I have ever known, walked out. It-it was some how an insult to her for me to say these things.

DT: What do you think the offense is?

DQ: Denial of our specialness, of our posture at the top of creation. After all, as-another part of our mythology is that creation came to a conclusion with us. When we were created what else needed to be created? It was done and that it was all over then and so we-we were the-we were what everything was working toward was us. And I'm attacking our specialness and our-our place in the hierarchy of-of life.

DT: We were talking earlier about population and some of the challenges and questions that you've gotten from establishment or traditional thinking when you've discussed your ideas about population growth and what's fueling it. Perhaps you can discuss that and compare your attitude to Malthus or some of the more conventional views.

DQ: Yeah, Malthus is still in favor, of course, he has not been-no one, you know, in the-in the general scientific population and many people have said well, you know, Malthus has already said all this.

And it took-it took me a little while to figure out that-that it was not at all the case, that Malthus and I are really saying exactly the opposite thing. Malthus was saying that population growth drives food production, and so eventually the population is had-will have to collapse because we're not going to be able to produce enough.

And I'm saying exactly the opposite, that food production drives population growth and we are going to keep on growing more and more food until it's just not possible to grow anymore food and then, of course, our population will level off or a-or possibly be in d-decline because we will have done so much damage to the earth that it won't be able to produce as much food as it did.

One-one of the main arguments is that we must grow more food, because of the starving millions and this is-this is-mystifies me because everyone knows that all levels of the population grow if there are-

if ten percent of the pop-of-of the pop-population of three billion were starving, ten percent of the six billion are going to be starving and growing more food for them doesn't do any good because it doesn't reach them and it-it doesn't reach them because the trains don't run that far or the ships don't land to those ports. It doesn't reach them because they're poor. There are no starving rich people in the world.

DT: It's a problem more of food distribution than food production.

DQ: Food distribution in the sense of having money in your pocket to buy it. If you've got-people-people who have money in their pocket are not hungry. It's poor people who are starving. Always has been and the poor are not disappearing.

Growing more food doesn't help them. All it does is make more of us and more-more of the-more people who are more affluent. Our population grows and the population of the poor grows as well.

DT: Can you talk a little bit about the dilemma of famine in North Africa succeeding on a lot of Peace Corps efforts and so on to increase food production in those areas and supposedly alleviate starvation?

DQ: Yes, well, we have helped them. Well, for hundreds of thousands of years the population of-of Africa was in complete balance with their environment, of course. What we did was to help their-help them grow their population.

Now they're no longer in balance with their en-environment and so-and so they're-they're starving. Now we supposedly we send them food, which keeps their population high and therefore perpetuates the problem of-of starvation, but of course we must send more food and we owe it to them.

We-I'm talking again of mythology of that-that we-it would be terrible for us to allow them to go back to a population level that they can actually sustain themselves. And in fact this is-this is a very risky policy for us-for us to be feeding the rest of the world because what's going to happen if ever we need that food for ourselves, what's going to happen to those populations then?

DT: You've often written that you're not in a position to let people starve or allow them to starve, that that's, I understand that we're more sort of promoting ourselves in a sort of godlike role of...

DQ: Exactly, yeah, yeah that people say that to me. We can't let them starve as though we were God, but God lets them starve, you know, I'm afraid that's the truth.

DT: What do you say to those who might criticize, you know an effort to withhold food by saying well...

DQ: Not withholding it. I'm just not sending it. Pardon, I shouldn't have...

DT: Well no, that may be the answer, but I could see critics saying that, well this is a problem that we've engendered and you know these folks are now dependent on the food supplies from our surplus.

DQ: They are, yeah, for sure.

DT: Do we abandon them now?

DQ: We can abandon them now or we can abandon them later. I m-we are going to have to abandon them eventually because our own population is growing and our own resources are being used up and right now we are eating petroleum.

All of the food that we are growing for ourselves is being grown with machinery that depends on petroleum. There aren't-there aren't horses and-and handheld plows out there anymore growing all this enormous amount of food. It's all being grown with petroleum and God help us when that petroleum runs out.

DT: Maybe you can talk about this insight that you've had, that sort of paradox, as I understand it, that agriculture produces a net loss of calories to make a calorie of food.

DQ: Oh yes.

DT: How does that work?

DQ: It works because we use up so many calories to-to produce it. I mean if-if you start, you know, right at the beginning at-at-at the birth of-of agriculture it was-it is harder to-it's much harder to plow a field, sow the whatever, harvest the whatever, store the whatever than it is to go out and-and pick it up.

Obviously, it takes more calories to do that. But the amount of calories that go into producing a can of peas is far more than are contained in the peas.

The-consider the-all of the processes that must go into it. All of the machinery that-that must be in-involved in the making of the metal for the cans, the manufacturer of that cans, the shipping of the cans, all the stocking of the cans on the shelf. All that adds up to enormously more than the value-than the calories in the-in the-in the can itself.

DT: What subsidizes this deficit of calories and energy?

DQ: Money.

DT: Money that's generated outside of agriculture.

DQ: Well, inside and outside and obviously the manufacturers of those cans are making money. I'm not quite sure I'm-I-I may not be with you on this.

DT: Well, I think you were saying earlier that it's fossil fuels that subsidizes 90 percent of calories that are required to make the can and fuel the tractor to make those peas that provide only 10 percent of the calories that's in that can and peas. Is that accurate?

DQ: Yeah.

DT: Considering how much extra effort it takes to produce that can of peas through agriculture versus picking nuts that might grow wild or some other source of food, why is there this appeal, you know, over the last ten thousand years, for agriculture? It seems like a harder road to hoe.

DQ: It is a harder road to hoe, but of course the-the benefits accrue pretty quickly and there are certainly-there are obviously benefits. When you begin to grow your own food and produce surpluses you can settle down and have yourself a village.

And before long a number of things begin to happen and you get division of labor, you get specialists, you get potters and metalsmiths and-and leatherworkers and so on and you get writing and arts and so on. You begin to get civilization in other words.

But the point I tried to make in Ishmael is that it strikes us as very mysterious that so many civilizations have been abandoned, and it doesn't strike me as mysterious because these people as I talk about in Beyond Civilization, is that every civilization is hierarchical.

You have a few at the top who live luxury-lives of great luxury and you have the middle class that lives well and then at the bot-at the base you have the suffering masses.

And what has happened in all of these abandoned civilizations I suggest is that people got sick of it and walked away because there was-they knew exactly what-what the alternative was. They didn't have to go on being s-suffering masses.

They were benefiting those people at the top and usually they-they left it-left the-what they left behind was mostly in ruins. They destroyed it. They didn't-and it looks like a revolution to me and they went back to living the way they'd been living for hundreds of thousands of years before that.

But they can't-this-this-people think this is very strange because one-one of the-one of the key elements of our culture is the notion that this is the way that humans were meant to live from the beginning. It may not have been the way they were living from the beginning. This is the way they were meant to live.

And we must keep living this way no matter what, even if it kills us, even if we destroy the world. We must go on living this way because this is the way people are meant to live and we must make everyone in the world live this way.

DT: There's an inevitability to it.

DQ: Yeah.

DT: Well, can you maybe give us some examples of cultures that abandon this sort of hierarchical intensive agriculture approach?

DQ: The Maya-Mayans, the people of Teotihuacan. I don't have the other names on the tip of my tongue.

DT: The Anasazi or Hohokam?

DQ: The Hohokam, yeah, the Anasazi. What people will note is that it's evident that there was s-s-some degradation that the environment around the Anasazi and they s-and they used that to explain why they quit, but there's been degradation of the environment around us all the time but we haven't quit.

We can't quit because this is the way people were meant to live. The Anasazi never had such an idea. They knew that there was no necessity to live this way. When-when they began to find it harder and harder to make a living doing what they were doing, they quit because they knew there was another way.

We can't quit because we don't know another way. We certainly are not going to go-go back and live in caves are we? As I always say no, we're certainly not going to do that. Can't get-six billion people can't do that and there's-no that's not possible.

DT: Then what, does it just slowly kind of come apart in bits and pieces too slow for anyone to notice in any single generation or century? Or, could we, we've come pretty close, perilously close, I would think, during the Cold War, to actually having a very quick and efficient way of ending it all, that didn't depend on gradual starvation or food supply, the brain may be thinking ahead of the body.

DQ: Well, another-another aspect of our culture is the belief that everyone else should be made to live this way. This-this is a key factor in our expansion. The Maya, for example, did not have this notion so they didn't take over the Western Hemisphere. They had plenty of time to. They could have. They didn't. It didn't occur to them that they should make everyone around them live that way, so they-they stayed where they were.

And but-we, because when we got here, to the New World we didn't say wow, this is really not a cool place, these people are happy, they, you know, they seem to be healthy and everything, we'll just leave them alone. Oh no, no, no, we came and said you're going to live the way we live and if you don't we'll kill you or h-herd you on to the reservations.

We wiped out-no one has-many arguments about how many-how many-what the native population was, but it was certainly many, many, many, many millions who would not live the way we wanted them to live and whose land we wanted for our own expansion.

I mean you just have to think that 500 years ago the European population on this-in the New World was hundreds, now it's three hundred million. It got that way because we said we want this land and we took it.

DT: And the goal wasn't just conversion, but...

DQ: Well, the-the-the notion comes from the necessity. That is we believe that everyone must be made to live this way because it's the best way to live because that way, we get their land. So it's-it's a rationalization that-that we elevate into-into a piety.

We're-the world is better off without all these forests. It's being put to-to good use now. The land was not being q-put to good use when we arrived and-and this-it was a pious act to put-put it to the plow.

DT: Let's stop there.