The award-winning book is titled Ishmael and was written by Daniel Quinn, who attended St. Louis University.

This mind-expanding and captivating account provides a fresh perspective of the relationship between man and the world. It teaches us that the laws that work best are the natural laws, not man-made laws, and that we cannot save the world from destruction by enacting laws. To do this, we must change the way we think about the world and our place in it.

The story unfolds as a dialog between a wise gorilla named Ishmael and the narrator, who answers an ad which says: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person."

Ishmael provides us with proactive insight as to how we came to perceive human history and our culture the way we do.

As Ishmael sees it, two fundamentally different stories have been enacted during the lifetime of man: (1) One began to be enacted some 2-3 million years ago by people Ishmael calls Leavers and is still being enacted by them today; (2) The other began 10,000 to 12,000 years ago by people Ishmael calls Takers and is apparently about to end in catastrophe.

The Takers and Leavers are enacting two separate stories based on entirely different and contradictory premises. The Takers are people of our culture whom we refer to as "civilized." The Leavers are primitive, stone-age people scattered all over the world, very few of whom remain today.

Ishmael observes that our culture, the culture of the Takers, teaches us that the world was created for man. Man is the creature for whom all the rest was made: this world, this solar system, this galaxy, and the universe itself. Under this premise, the world is a human life-support system, a machine designed to produce and sustain human life. All other life and creation in this world exists for man. Since the world was made for man, then it belongs to man and we can do what we please with it. Man was made to rule and conquer the world.

The premise of the Leaver story is that man belongs to the world. Right from the beginning, everything that ever lived belonged to the world — and that's how things came to be this way in the Leaver culture. The single cell creatures that swarm in the ancient ocean belonged to the world, and because they did, everything that followed came into being. Those club-finned fish off shore of the continents belonged to the world and because they did, the amphibians eventually came into being; and because the amphibians belonged to the world, the reptiles eventually came into being; and because the reptiles belonged to the world, the mammals eventually came into being; and because the mammals belonged to the world, the primates came into being; and eventually man as we know him today came into being. That is the way the Leavers lived for three million years — as if they belonged to the world. Under this premise, creation goes on forever. Each species has the opportunity to evolve to whatever state possible.

Our culture, the Taker's view as to how things came to be this way, provides the rationalization for what appears to be the inexorable destruction of the community of life, including the devastation of the rain forest, the deterioration of the ozone layer, the pollution of the oceans and the disappearance of dozens of species of life every day.

There are several significant things the Takers do that are never done in the rest of the community of life. Ishmael explains that these are all fundamental to the Takers' civilization system. First, they eliminate their competitors, which is something that never happens in the wild. In the wild, animals will defend their territories and their kills and they may invade their competitor's territories and preempt their kills, but they never hunt competitors down just to destroy them, the way some ranchers and farmers do with coyotes and foxes. Generally, in the wild when animals hunt, they eat. When aimals go hunting, it is to obtain food, not to exterminate competitors or even animals that prey on them. Second, the Takers systematically destroy their competitors' food to make room for their own. This does not occur in the natural community, where the rule is take what you need and leave the rest alone. Third, the Takers deny their competitors' access to food. In contrast, in the wild you may deny your competitors' access to what you are eating, but you may not deny them access to food in general. The lion may say, "This gazelle is mine," but he doesn't say, "All the gazelles are mine."

One the other hand, the Leavers, and the rest of life on this planet, follow a rule that has worked well from the beginning of creation. Ishmael refers to it as the peace keeping rule. It is the rule followed by all other species and it goes like this: Take what you need and leave the rest alone. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete, but you may not wage war. This promotes order and diversity. Diversity is a survival factor for the community of life itself.

Ishmael, in his wisdom, explains that any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion. No one species shall make the life of the world its own. The world was not made for any one species. Man certainly was not made to conquer and rule it.

Ishmael observes that when man decided to diverge from the rest of the community of life, taking into his own hands the power of life and death over the world, it may be that he assured his own doom. Man's conquest of the world is itself devastating the world.

The people of our culture cling with fanatical tenacity to the specialness of man. They perceive a vast gulf between man and the rest of creation. This mythology of human superiority justifies the Takers doing whatever they please with the world, just the way Hitler's mythology of Aryan superiority justified his doing whatever he pleased with Europe. But in the end, this mythology is not deeply satisfying. Ishmael recognizes that the Takers are not happy. They are profoundly lonely people. The world for them is enemy territory, and they live in it like an army of occupation, alienated and isolated by their extraordinary specialness.

On the other hand, among the Leavers, crime, mental illness, suicide and drug addiction are great rarities.

Ishmael points out that another difference between the Leavers and the Takers is that the Leavers live in the hands of the gods. Long before Christ was born, the Leavers lived his admonition: "Have no care for tomorrow. Don't worry about whether you're going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them." The Takers, on the other hand, determined that they do not want to live their lives in the hands of the gods; they decided that they want to live their own lives in their own hands.

People who live their lives in the hands of the gods are in position to evolve because that is where evolution takes place. Pre-man evolved into early man because he did not take himself out of the competition and he was still in the place where natural selection is still going on. He was still part of the general community of life. When the Takers said, "We've had enough living in the hands of the gods, no more natural selection for us," they took themselves out of the general community of life and for all purposes ended their chance to evolve. The Takers are living in a way that is going to put an end to creation. There will be no successor to man, no successor to chimpanzees, no successor to anything alive now. It appears that the whole thing is going to come to an end with us.

Ishmael recognizes that the world is a very fine place. It was not a mess and it did not have to be conquered and ruled by man. While the world does not need to belong to man, it does need man to belong to it. Man does have a place in the world but it is not his place to rule. That is the role of the gods. Man's place is to figure out how it's possible to do that — and then to make room for all the rest who are capable of becoming what he has become, to permit an environment to allow evolution to take place.

The lesson Ishmael tries to teach is that perhaps there is no one right way to live. The Takers must relinquish the idea that they know who should live and who should die on this planet. He also reminds us that we cannot change the way people think by enacting laws. Laws do not tell us necessarily what works but rather attempt to define the one right way to live. Every one of the Leavers' ways came into being by evolution, by a process of testing that began even before people had a word for it. They did not form committees to write up a set of laws to follow. Ishmael submits that none of the Leavers' cultures were intentions, but that's what our lawgivers give us — inventions, not things that had proved out over thousands of generations, but arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live.

The only way we are going to change the way people behave toward the world is to change the way they think about the world or the way they think about the destiny of man. As long as people of our culture, the Takers, are convinced that the world belongs to them and that their divinely-appointed destiny is to conquer and rule it, then they are, of course, going to go on acting the way they have been acting for the past 10,000 years. They are going to go on treating the world as if it were a piece of human property, and they are going to go on conquering it as if it were an adversary.

Ishmael teaches that we cannot change these things with laws; rather, we must change people's minds. We need to change the way people think about the world and their role in it.

Ishmael is recommended reading for all of us who are willing to change the way we think about our world. More than anything else, we as lawyers need to realize and appreciate that we cannot solve the problems of the world by man-made laws.

(Note: The novel Ishmael, written by Daniel Quinn, was published in paperback in 1995, a Bantam/Turner Book.)