Daniel Quinn has to be one of the greatest story-tellers of all time. He has written a few books, and the ones I've read are The Story of B, Ishmael, and My Ishmael. When I was younger, I had a few theories on what was wrong with the world. Quinn simply summed up and elaborated on my theories. I'll just share one of his explanations right now. Totalitarian agriculture is the practice of farming for a very long time and producing as much food as you can using as much land as you can possibly farm. Around 10,000 years ago, humans in the fertile crescent (mesopotamia) began this practice of "food production to the max". Every resource possible was put into the over-production of food. This led to job specification and that is how western civilization as we know it today, started. But now as we are beginning to realize that this way of life will not sustain us for much longer, we need to look for an answer to solve our problems. And what Quinn trys to explain is that we (westerners) have forgotten how to live with nature and only try to control it. We take from the earth but we don't give back. We are the takers. But before this cultural revolution of totalitarian agriculture, we were leavers. And although we have wiped out most of the leavers, there are a few left. And they are the ones who we need to look to in order to see how to save ourselves from a cultural collapse. My advice? READ BOOKS WRITTEN BY DANIEL QUINN!