Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy.
[12] In 1998, Quinn collaborated with environmental biologist Alan D. Thornhill in producing Food Production and Population Growth, a video elaborating in-depth the science behind the ideas he describes in his fiction.
[9] Daniel Quinn was largely a fiction writer who explored the culturally-biased world-view ("mythology", in his terms) driving modern civilization and the destruction of the natural world.
He instead warned that excess population is the inevitable result of access to excess food for the human organism en masse just as surely as it is for any other species, a concept which he described as one of the "ABCs" of well-established ecology, professing that no ecologist argues with the law (inevitable growth in the face of food availability) except in the case of the human, which he stated was universally regarded an exceptionalism despite "10,000 years of evidence" to the contrary in the form of the history of human population growth coincident with the rise of agriculture and the mass production of foodstuffs in excess to the needs for survival.
", and so on, which he claimed is causing the catastrophic loss of biodiversity planetwide, and, just as directly, an overshoot towards an eventual population crash, of which the civilized mainstream shows very little anticipation or interest.
Quinn claimed that reconnecting people to the food made available through their local habitats is a proven way to avoid famines and accompanying starvation.
[28] Quinn self-admittedly avoided presenting simplistic or universal solutions,[29] though he strongly encouraged a worldwide paradigm shift away from the self-destructive memes of civilization and towards the values and organizational structures of a "new tribalism".
He clarified that this did not refer to the old style of ethnic tribalism so much as new groupings of individuals as equals trying to make a living communally, while still subject to evolution by natural selection.
[27][29] Quinn was influential in developing a vocabulary for his philosophy; he coined or popularized a variety of terms, including the following: Quinn coined the term food race (by analogy to the Cold War's "nuclear arms race") to describe his concept of a perpetually escalating crisis of growing human population due to growing food production, of which the former is fueled by the latter.
Quinn argues that as the worldwide human population increases, the typical international response is to produce and distribute more food to feed these greater numbers of people.
In 1998 Daniel Quinn and Alan D. Thornhill then of the Society for Conservation Biology made a video exploring these topics titled Food Production And Population Growth.
[45] In 2019 The Mammals, a folk band including Mike Merenda & Ruth Ungar, released Nonet with many of the songs on it inspired by Ishmael and other Quinn books, most especially Beyond Civilization.
[47] Quinn's writings have also influenced the filmmaker Tom Shadyac (who featured Quinn in the documentary I Am); the entrepreneur Ray C. Anderson, founder of Interface, Inc. (the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpet), who began transforming Interface with more green initiatives;[48] as well as some of the ideology behind the 1999 drama film Instinct,[3] and the 2007 documentary film What A Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire.
Playwright Derek Ahonen has cited Quinn as the foremost influence on his play, The Pied Pipers of The Lower East Side, which attempts to dramatize the philosophies of New Tribalism.
[49] Actor Morgan Freeman's interest in the Ishmael trilogy inspired his involvement with nature documentaries, such as Island of Lemurs: Madagascar and Born to Be Wild, both of which he narrated, while adopting from Quinn the phrase "the tyranny of agriculture".