Uploaded November 2013 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago

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What are humans place in the world? What is the Law of Limited Competition?

Award winning author Daniel Quinn discusses how to save the world with teacher Aaron Wissner in an exclusive, uncut, two-hour, high-definition interview. This is part 2 of 2. Please subscribe to be alerted to new videos.

Quinn is best selling author of Ishmael, Providence, The Story of B, and Beyond Civilization. In 1990, Ted Turner offered a $500,000 prize for the best unpublished novel offering positive solutions to global problems. Quinn submitted Ishmael, which was selected as the grand prize winner, by a panel of distinguished authors, out of 2500 entries.

ishmael.org

Wissner is a teacher, writer and speaker specializing in peak oil, climate change, money and debt, and cultural transition. He is founder and president of Local Future.

aaronwissner.com

Local Future is a non-profit organization which educates the public on topics including: sustainability, localism, community resilience, renewable energy, modern economics, environmentalism and permaculture.

localfuture.org


Extended Biography of Daniel Quinn

Daniel Quinn (1935- ) 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 Ishmael, 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.