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James Jay Lee's Manifesto Based on Daniel Quinn's 'My Ishmael'

by Amy Judd | September 1, 2010 at 03:01 pm

2692 views | 1 Recommendation | 2 comments

James Jay Lee, the Man Who Held Hostages Inside the Discovery Channel Building on September 1, Was Inspired By the Work of Daniel Quinn

James Lee entered the Discovery Channel building on Wednesday morning and took three people hostage. He had previously written a manifesto on his website Save the Planet Protest, detailing his demands for Discovery as he believed humans were polluting the earth beyond repair.

According to his MySpace page, Lee's interests include Daniel Quinn's books My Ishmael and The Story of B, and the number one demand on his list states:

"The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas."

Daniel Quinn won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award for the book Ishmael. This is the prequel to My Ishmael, which is about a telepathic gorilla who meets a 12-year-old girl called Julie Gerchak that wants to save the world.

As CBS describes:

The bulk of the book consists entirely of philosophical dialogues between gorilla and man, on the model of Plato's Republic. Through Ishmael, Quinn offers a wide-ranging if highly general examination of the history of our civilization, illuminating the assumptions and philosophies at the heart of many global problems.

One of the most prevalent themes in Quinn's book is the fear of overpopulation and that is a theme that runs through Lee's manifesto as well.

According to a review of My Ishmael it is a story that 'will rock you on your heels' and 'provide tantalizing possibilities for a truly new world vision.'

In a 2007 interview with EcoGeek, Quinn was asked if he thought the world was heading for certain disaster if humans continued to live the way they do.

He replied:

Only the prospect of worldwide mind-change gives me hope for the future. It has happened before, in the Renaissance. It happened in the Soviet Union, bringing about its collapse. It can happen again, and it must -- or indeed we are doomed. What gives me hope is the fact that the curve of awareness as measured by the number of books published and read on the subject has risen steadily. I (and a relatively small number of others) have AS YET been unable to shake the commonly held Malthusian vision of the relation between population growth and food production. So it continues to be seen that it is completely inevitable that our population must continue to grow to 8 billion, 10 billion, 12 billion. If this happens, I'm afraid I see no hope for our species.

Daniel Quinn told MSNBC that he had never been in touch with Lee:

“What his take on the book is, I don’t know,” Quinn said. “It’s hard to imagine how he got from reading this book to his current behavior. It certainly puzzles me.”

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acquiesce (not verified)

at 16:20 on September 1st, 2010

"Daniel Quinn won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award for My Ishmael, which is about a telepathic gorilla who meets a 12-year-old girl called Julie Gerchak that wants to save the world; it is the sequel to Ishmael."Ishmael won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award, not My Ishmael.

Jeannette Quinn (not verified)

at 06:30 on September 2nd, 2010

Please reread what was written, the author had it correct. Daniel Quinn won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award for Ishmael, which was written before My Ishmael. Trust me, I know, I'm his daughter.