'Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.' Peter Farb said it in Humankind. "Yo… - Daniel Quinn

'Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.' Peter Farb said it in Humankind.
"You said it was a paradox?"
"No, he said it was a paradox."
"Why?"
Ishmael shrugged. "I'm sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man."

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About Daniel Quinn

Daniel Clarence Quinn (October 11, 1935 – February 17, 2018) 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.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Daniel Clarence Quinn
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Additional quotes by Daniel Quinn

Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to 'live against' it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we're seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian.

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