Wade Davis

Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity."

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. His work as an anthropologist and botanical explorer has taken him throughout the world from the forests of the Amazon to the mountains of Tibet, from the high Arctic to the deserts of Africa.

Davis is the recipient of numerous awards, including The David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration (2012) The Explorers Medal, the highest award of the Explorers Club (2011), the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2009), the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer's Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary non-fiction.

He is the author of more than a dozen best selling books including The Serpent and the Rainbow, later released as a feature film, and One River, which was nominated for the Governor General's literary Award for Non-fiction. His other books include The Lost Amazon, The Clouded Leopard, Shadows in the Sun, Rainforest, The Wayfinders, The Sacred Headwaters and Into the Silence. His most recent book is Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest. Davis' books have been translated into fourteen languages, including Basque, Serbian, Korean, Mandarin, Japanese and Malay, and have sold approximately 750,000 copies worldwide.

Davis's photographs have been widely exhibited and have appeared in some 20 books and more than 80 magazines, journals and newspapers, including National Geographic, Time, Geo, People, Men's Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure. Davis is the co-curator of The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes, first exhibited at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and currently touring Latin America. A first collection of Davis' photographs, Light at the Edge of the World, appeared in 2001 published by National Geographic Books, Bloomsbury and Douglas & McIntyre. A second collection is under contract for fall 2013 publication with Douglas & McIntyre.

Described by ABC's 20/20 as a real life Indiana Jones, Davis's expeditions and investigations have been the subject of over 900 media reports and accounts, including three episodes of the X-files. He has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Harpers, Fortune, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and many other international publications.

A professional speaker for nearly 20 years, Davis has captivated audiences with tales of insight and adventure at more than 300 universities and museums throughout the world, and scores of corporate events here at home in Canada and the US. His corporate clients have included Microsoft, Shell, Fidelity, Bayer, Miles, Bristol-Myers, Hallmark, Bank of Nova Scotia, MacKenzie Financial, Healthcare Association of Southern California, National Science Teachers Association, and many others. Davis has presented at the TED Conference, and he delivered the 2009 Massey lectures, Canada's most prestigious public intellectual forum.

Davis was the principal character in the 2008 MacGillivray Freeman IMAX film, Grand Canyon Adventure. His other film credits include Earthguide, Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever. Davis was the series creator, host and co-writer of Light at the Edge of the World, a four-hour ethnographic documentary series, shot in Rapa Nui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunavut, Greenland, Nepal and Peru, which is currently airing in 165 countries on the National Geographic Channel and in the USA on the Smithsonian Network. He recently completed a new four-hour series for the National Geographic, Ancient Voices/Modern World, which was shot in Australia, Mongolia, and Colombia. It is currently airing worldwide on the National Geographic Channel as the second season of Light at the Edge of the World.

Wade Davis' lecture presentations, illustrated by exquisite photographs, are a wild and moving celebration of the wonder of humanity, and the diversity of the human spirit as expressed among the more than 7000 cultures of the world.

• Extinction or Survival: The Global Biodiversity Crisis

  We are in a race against time to preserve countless species of plants and animals. Davis takes you on a journey across the globe to survey the progress.

• In the Realm of the Inca: Sacred Landscapes of the Andes

  Davis explores this ancient culture and interprets its sacred homeland Machu Picchu.

• The March of Folly

  Davis takes us on a critical examination of the war on drugs and its cultural implications.

• The Art of Shamanic Healing

  Explore ancient traditions of medicine and magic.

• The Healing Forest: The Ethnobotanical Search for New Medicines

  Ethnobotany drives the search for new medicines. Davis takes us deep into the rain forest to search for these healing plants.

• The Serpent and the Rainbow: An Exploration of Haitian Vodoun, Secret Societies and Zombies

  Explore Haitian voodoo secret societies and zombies in this stage adaptation of Davis's book and film.

• One River

  Learn about recent exploration and discovery in the Amazon rain forest.

• Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures

  Take a journey through the realm of vanishing cultures in this stage adaptation of Davis's award-winning book.

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  October 2011

  The Sacred Headwaters

  In a rugged knot of mountains in northern British Columbia lies a spectacular valley known to the First Nations as the Sacred Headwaters. There, three of Canada's most important salmon rivers - the Stikine, the Skeena, and the Nass - are born in close proximity. Now, against the wishes of all First Nations, the British Columbia government has opened the Sacred Headwaters to industrial development. Imperial Metals proposes an open-pit copper and gold mine, called the Red Chris mine, and Royal Dutch Shell wants to extract coal bed methane gas across a tenure of close to a million acres.

  
  
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  September 2011

  Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

  In a monumental work of history and adventure, ten years in the writing, Wade Davis asks not whether George Mallory was the first to reach the summit of Everest, but rather why he kept on climbing on that fateful day. His answer lies in a single phrase uttered by one of the survivors as they retreated from the mountain: "The price of life is death." Mallory walked on because for him, as for all of his generation, death was but "a frail barrier that men crossed, smiling and gallant, every day." As climbers they accepted a degree of risk unimaginable before the war. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much of it that it had no hold on them. What mattered was how one lived, the moments of being alive.

  
  
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  July 2010

  Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire

  Ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the Amazon and the polar ice of the Arctic Circle, Shadows in the Sun is a testament to a world where spirits still stalk the land and seize the human heart. Its essays and stories, though distilled from travels in widely separated parts of the world, are fundamentally about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such understanding, and the consequences of failure.

  
  
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  October 2009

  The Wayfinders

  In The Wayfinders, celebrated author and anthropologist Wade Davis offers readers an engaging and insightful firsthand account of the environmental crises threatening indigenous cultures around the globe. An ardent defence of cultural preservation, the book celebrates the rich diversity of indigenous cultures and traditions while serving as a timely reminder of the dangers modernization and globalization pose to traditional ways of life.

  
  
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  April 2008

  Grand Canyon: A River at Risk

  It’s an alarming if little-known fact: one of the world’s mightiest rivers, the Colorado, no longer reaches the sea. Every drop of its water is allocated to agriculture and communities along the way and none remains for the Colorado Delta at river’s end, a once-thriving estuary that supported North America’s most diverse biosphere. Grand Canyon: A River at Risk draws attention the river’s plight as well as to the larger issue of the looming global water crisis. It follows Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a leading advocate for water conservation and river restoration, eminent ethnobotanist Wade Davis, and their two daughters on a rafting adventure down the Colorado. Their compelling journey illuminates both the challenges and the many opportunities that exist for conserving and restoring the world’s watersheds. Combining science and adventure with glorious imagery and locations, the book delivers a message of hope and inspiration for all people of the world.

  
  
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  December 2007

  The Clouded Leopard

  For many years and through many of the world’s most remote regions, Wade Davis has traveled in search of the rare places where cultural diversity survives, untainted by the influences of globalization and modernization. The Clouded Leopard brings together the extraordinary travels that sprang from this quest. His travels emphasize the fragility of the planet yet also illuminate the places and people where the bond between landscape and spirit is preserved. Beautiful and disturbing, tragic and yet hopeful, his work sends out a timely message that cannot be ignored.

  
  
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  February 2007

  Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures

  Wade Davis has travelled the world for more than thirty years, studying the mysteries of sacred plants and celebrating the poetics of culture. His explorations of indigenous life in places as remote and diverse as the Canadian Arctic, the rain forests of Borneo and the Amazon, and the surreal cultural landscape of Haiti have taught him that many of these cultures are in danger of losing their way of life-a loss that affects humans on a global scale.  Davis's evocative text looks at the "ethnosphere"-the diversity of ways of thinking and living that traditional cultures have to teach us about our place in the world, and how we affect one another and our surroundings.

  
  
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  August 1997

  The Serpent and the Rainbow

  In April 1982, ethnobotanist Wade Davis arrived in Haiti to investigate two documented cases of zombis -- people who had reappeared in Haitian society years after they had been officially declared dead and had been buried. Drawn into a netherworld of rituals and celebrations, Davis penetrated the vodoun mystique deeply enough to place zombification in its proper context within vodoun culture. In the course of his investigation, Davis came to realize that the story of vodoun is the history of Haiti -- from the African origins of its people to the successful Haitian independence movement, down to the present day, where vodoun culture is, in effect, the government of Haiti's countryside.

  
  
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  August 1997

  The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Shultes

  In 1941, Richard Evans Schultes took a semester's leave of absence from Harvard and disappeared into the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. Twelve years later he returned, having gone places no outsider had been: mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen Indian tribes while collecting some thirty thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand novel medicinal plants and three hundred species new to science.  The Lost Amazon is the first major publication to examine Schultes' work as seen through his photographs. The book features text by Wade Davis and facsimile reproductions of Schultes' original handwritten notes from the field.

   

  
  
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  August 1997

  One River

  In 1974-75, Wade Davis and Tim Plowman traveled the length of South America, living among a dozen Indian tribes, collecting medicinal plants and searching for the origins of coca, the sacred leaf of the Andes and the notorious source of cocaine. It was a journey inspired and made possible by their Harvard mentor, Richard Evans Schultes, the most important scientific explorer in South America in this century, whose exploits rival those of Darwin and the great naturalist explorers of the Victorian age.