|
 
Davis, Wade
Botanists; Ethnobiologists; Biologists; Naturalists; Scientists;
Ethnologists
Date of birth: Dec. 14, 1953
Biography from Current
Biography (2003)
Copyright (c) by The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights
reserved.
"I'm
extremely curious," the ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis told Carla Hall for the Washington Post
(February 7, 1986). "And I love people and I love the way people
live on the planet and I love the planet itself. . . . I want to
continue to explore things and I want to see everything I possibly
can." Davis, who began a three-year term
as an explorer-in-residence for the National Geographic Society in
2000, has spent more than 25 years studying and exploring traditional
cultures, native peoples, and plant life in locales ranging from the
Canadian Arctic to the rainforests of Amazonia and Borneo. He has
written nine books, including the international best-seller The
Serpent and the Rainbow, about the voodoo culture of Haiti; the
award-winning One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon
Rain Forest; and Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the
Realm of Vanishing Cultures, a best-seller in Canada. He has also
published more than 100 scientific and popular articles, in such
periodicals as Newsweek, Outside, Harpers, the New York Times, and
Conde Nast Traveler.
Davis's greatest
concern is the diminishment of life on Earth, whether it be the
extinction of plant and animal species or the disappearance of
indigenous peoples through displacement, annihilation of their way of
life, or any other force. "I believe that [the 20th century] will
be remembered not for its wars and technological innovations," he
told John Bemrose for Maclean's (November 4, 1996), "but for the
massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity." Davis
lectures widely and is active in many organizations dedicated to the
preservation of Earth's diversity. The cultures of the Inuit of North
America, the Penan of Borneo, the Waorani of the Amazon lowlands, and
many other peoples "teach us that there are other ways of being,
other ways of organizing society, other ways of interacting with the
Earth itself," Davis told an interviewer
for Riverdeep Interactive Learning (on-line). "In that diversity,
I think you find strength. What I'm going to try to do in my tenure as
Explorer-in-Residence is to hunt around the world for those stories
that really tell us something about this diversity. In a sense, my
role is to be more of a storyteller than either a botanist or
anthropologist. I believe that it's stories that change the
world."
Wade Davis
was born in Montreal, in the Canadian province of Quebec, on December
14, 1953. Now a citizen of Canada, Ireland, and the United States, he
was raised in Victoria, British Columbia, on Canada's Pacific coast. Davis
obtained his higher education at Harvard University, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where he earned an undergraduate degree in anthropology
and a Ph.D. in ethnobotany, the science that focuses on plants and the
links between those plants and the people that live among them. He
attended Harvard in part because while fighting forest fires in
Canada, he had met a draft dodger who "had a copy of Life
magazine that had pictures of the 1969 Harvard strike in it," as
the ethnobotanist explained to Zach Dundas in an interview for the Web
site mumblage.com. "And he was so irreverent and marvelous, while
we Canadians were so quiet and obsequious. So I thought, that must be
where you go to become like him. I applied without ever having been to
the East Coast and got in." Working under the auspices of the
Harvard Botanical Museum while studying at Harvard, Davis
spent more than three years in Amazonia and parts of the Andes
Mountains, in South America, studying coca, the botanical source of
cocaine. Davis explained to Dundas how the
opportunity to do that arose: "I'm sitting in a cafe in Harvard
Square with my roommate, and there's a map of the world on the wall.
My roommate points to the Arctic and says he's going there. I have to
point to somewhere, so I point to the Amazon. Someone says, well if
you're going to the Amazon, you've gotta see Richard Schultes, the
South American plants expert [and Harvard professor]. I go see
Schultes knowing little about South America and less about plants and
I say, look, I've made some money in the logging camps and I want to
go to South America, can I help you? And he says, how soon can you go?
And before you know it, I'm living in the Amazon . . ." Davis
lived with a total of 15 indigenous ethnic groups in eight South
American countries and collected some 6,000 botanical specimens.
"In the Amazon, the obvious way to come close to the people in
the forest was through the plants themselves, the plants upon which
the people depended for every aspect of their material well-being and
spiritual well-being," Davis explained
for the Web site riverdeep.net. "So I think I became a botanist
because it was the only way I could figure out a means of
understanding the life and ways of other peoples." When asked how
he established a connection with tribesmen, nomads, and other
so-called primitive peoples, Davis told
riverdeep.net, "What really gets you places is having the ability
to break down that inherent barrier that exists between you and the
people with whom you find yourself living as a guest. And that's often
gesture, nuance, subtle things. A willingness to sleep beside people
on the stony ground, to endure the cold, to eat whatever is placed
before you--whether it's living insects or a slithering snake."
During the course of his fieldwork, Davis has
suffered bouts of malaria and hepatitis; eaten live termites; stepped
on a giant anaconda; and wandered lost, without food, across the
inhospitable Darien Gap, between Panama and Colombia. Referring to
such experiences, Davis told John Bemrose,
"You have to develop, even to the point of being naive, a kind of
blind faith in the benevolence of the world. You have to cast yourself
on its mercy."
Davis was still
working toward his Ph.D. when, in 1982, commissioned by a group
including the psychiatrist Nathan Kline (a pioneer in the use of drugs
for treatment of mental disorders) and the theatrical producer David
Merrick, he traveled to Haiti to investigate legends of a "zombi
poison." The so-called poison was supposedly made from human
bones and parts of lizards, poisonous toads, sea worms, puffer fish,
and other items; it was said to lower the metabolism of anyone who
swallowed it and paralyze his or her vital functions, leaving the
individual in a condition that could easily be mistaken for death. Davis's
supporters believed that the drug might have important applications
for anesthesiology and artificial hibernation (the latter considered
potentially useful for controlling neurological diseases). Voodoo
priests were rumored to use the drug on individuals during certain
rituals; after burying the people alive, they would later
"magically" revive them. This process was called
zombification. (Voodoo is commonly thought of as a kind of black magic
or sorcery; Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines it as a
"religion that is derived from African polytheism and ancestor
worship and is practiced chiefly in Haiti.") "I think
[voodoo sorcerers] probably see this poison as a support for what is
essentially a magical belief," Davis
told Carla Hall. "[A Haitian] is not made a zombie by a poison.
He's made a zombie by a [voodoo priest's] capturing his soul." In
addition to researching the neuropharmacological properties of the
mysterious drug and other local plants and animal substances, Davis
studied Haiti's culture, secret societies, and the historical
influences that had shaped the country. His book about his experiences
there, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), became an international
best-seller; it was translated into more than 10 languages and served
as the basis for a 1988 feature film, also entitled The Serpent and
the Rainbow. (The movie disappointed Davis
and most reviewers.) "I would hope this book would force people
to take another look at African culture, the richness of it," Davis
told Carla Hall, "and certainly curb all our sensational notions
of what voodoo is and the fear of voodoo. . . . This is a completely
legitimate religion and any of our inclinations to put it down are
really unjust." In a review of The Serpent and the Rainbow for
Library Journal (March 1, 1986), as quoted on the Web site lycaeum.org,
Winifred Lambrecht, a professor of anthropology, complained that the
book "lacks the kind of completeness that might be of interest to
anthropologists, ethnobotanists, and medical specialists. It is more
of a personal narrative, a diary of discovery, interesting to the
public at large, but leaving specialists with a number of questions
unanswered." Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times (December 21,
1985) expressed a similar view: "Mr. Davis's
own prose . . . has the effect of making [The Serpent and the Rainbow]
read like a hopped-up thriller. This in itself is not necessarily a
bad thing--indeed one rather prefers it to the desiccated, pedantic
language employed by most scholars; but it does tend to make the
reader think of the people and events in Mr. Davis's
book more in terms of a novel than in terms of sociology or real
life." Many readers and critics used such adjectives as
"exotic" and "fascinating" to describe the book. Davis's
second book, Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian
Zombie (1988), offered additional observations of Haitian voodoo.
In Penan: Voice of the Borneo Rain Forest
(1990), Davis and his co-author, the
naturalist and conservationist Thom Henley, wrote about the Penan
people, thought to be the last nomads in Southeast Asia. Nomads of the
Dawn (1995), which Davis co-wrote with Ian
Mackenzie and Shane Kennedy, also deals with the Penan people, who
fear the sun, know nothing of the ocean, and whose entire world
consists of the rainforests in which they live. The main purpose of
those two books, and one of the goals of the Endangered People's
Project, a nongovernmental organization that Davis,
his co-authors, and others formed at the time, was to draw the world's
attention to the destruction by logging companies of the Borneo
rainforests in which the Penan live. (Davis's
first trip to Borneo was arranged by Thom Henley, who had sought Davis's
help in documenting the Penan people's plight and had acquired initial
funding for the project from a Nova Scotia, Canada-based philanthropic
organization called Friends of Nature.) One River: Explorations and
Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (1996), which is both a
biography of Davis's mentor, the renowned
ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, and a history of South American
ethnobotany, was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Award for
Nonfiction, one of Canada's most prestigious literary prizes.
"Replete with the author's encounters with shamans and
charlatans, innumerable intestinal disorders, and drug experiences
good, bad, and ugly," Stephan Schwartzman wrote in a review of
One River for the Washington Post (February 2, 1997), "the trip
itself is often less rewarding than the history and biography with
which Davis has outfitted it. The elsewhere
untold story of Richard Schultes in particular outdoes Steven
Spielberg." (Among many other highly successful films, Spielberg
is the director of the Indiana Jones series, about the adventures of a
globe-hopping, pistol-packing archaeologist.) According to the Web
site rimba.com, which is maintained by Ian Mackenzie, Catherine Foster
wrote for the Boston Globe Book Review (October 28, 1996), "One
River is a magnificent, meandering journey of three generations of
intrepid ethnobotanists, scientists/explorers whose passions lay in
discovering plants that might cure ills or illuminate the lives of
others." Of special interest to many reviewers of One River was Davis's
discussion of the leaf blight that destroyed the indigenous rubber
plantations of Brazil early in the 20th century and the frightening
possibility that the fungus will reach Southeast Asia, the current
source of most of the world's natural rubber.
Davis's book The
Clouded Leopard (1998) took its title from the name of an obscure
species of cat that prowls the forests of the lower Himalayan
Mountains, primarily in Nepal and Tibet; the leopards are the subject
of one of the essays in the book. In a review of The Clouded Leopard,
John Bemrose wrote for Maclean's (November 23, 1998) "Many of the
15 essays and articles in The Clouded Leopard have been published
previously in magazines, but taken together they make a rich
celebration of what Davis fears is being lost
to the homogenizing march of western culture. . . . If there is one
quality that shines through Davis's best
work, it is wonder--and his ability to make his readers feel it, too.
For example, 'In the Shadow of the Red Cedar' describes the great
coastal forests of British Columbia--where he has worked both as a
logger and a scientist. And through a careful blending of poetic
insight and science, he summons the forests' extraordinary
complexity." Two other books by Davis
were also published in 1998: Rainforest: Ancient Realm of the Pacific
Northwest--the area where Davis grew up and
which is close to his heart--and Shadows in the Sun: Travels to
Landscapes of Spirit and Desire, a collection of essays on his
journeys and adventures with indigenous peoples around the world. (All
the essays in Shadows in the Sun are included in The Clouded Leopard.)
Davis's most recent
book, Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of
Vanishing Cultures (2001), became a best-seller in Canada. Published
in the United States in 2002, Light at the Edge of the World contains
79 photographs along with text in which Davis
discussed what he calls the world's "ethnosphere," which he
defined for the National Geographic Web site as "the sum total of
all the thoughts, beliefs, myths, and institutions brought into being
by the human imagination." "Every view of the world that
fades away, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of
life," Davis wrote in Light at the Edge
of the World, as quoted by a book reviewer for Maclean's (November 5,
2001), "and reduces the human repertoire of adaptive responses to
the common problems that confront us all." In Booklist (February
1, 2002), Donna Seaman opined, "Aesthetically powerful in both
word and image, this essential volume opens readers' eyes and
imaginations to the wonders of the earth and humanity's varied
'insights into the very nature of existence,' a bounty and legacy we
simply cannot do without."
Davis has published
more than 100 scientific and popular articles on a wide array of
topics, including Amazonian myths and religion, the biodiversity
crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the botanical
knowledge of South American Indians. He has written for Fortune, Men's
Journal, National Geographic, Utne Reader, Omni, the Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Post, and the Toronto Globe and Mail, among
other publications. Davis and his work have
inspired the making of several documentary films as well as three
episodes of the hit television series The X-Files and have been the
subjects of more than 600 print, radio, and television reports around
the world. His photographs have been widely published and exhibited at
several galleries, including the International Center of Photography,
in New York City. According to the National Geographic Web site, Davis's
recent work has taken him to Peru, Tibet, the Arctic, the Orinoco
River Delta of Venezuela, and northern Kenya.
Davis hosted and
co-wrote Earthguide, a 13-part television series on the environment
that aired on the Discovery Channel, and the made-for-television
documentary The Spirit of the Mask (1992), about images of demons and
dragons in the masks of the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest as
well as the sacred role of masks in other cultures. Davis's
other television credits include the award-winning documentaries Cry
of the Forgotten People, an account of the plight of the Moi people of
western New Guinea, and Forests Forever, a critical examination of the
Canadian government's forest policy in British Columbia. The National
Geographic Web site reported in 2002 that Davis,
with the help of the photographer Chris Rainier and two Web
specialists, was developing Cultures on the Edge, an on-line site to
raise awareness about threatened cultures around the world.
Among other venues, Davis
has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, the
Smithsonian Institution, the California Academy of Sciences, the
National Geographic Society, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Royal
British Columbia Museum, the Explorers Club, and at more than 70 major
universities, including Harvard, Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He
is a research associate at the Institute of Economic Botany of the New
York Botanical Garden and executive director of the Endangered Peoples
Project, headquartered in Vancouver. He is a fellow of the Linnean
Society, the Explorers Club, and the Royal Geographical Society of
Great Britain, and is a board member of the Banff Society, Canada's
leading institution for the arts. He also sits on the boards of
several nongovernmental organizations dedicated to conservation-based
development and the preservation of cultural and biological diversity,
among them the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecotrust, Future Generations,
Cultural Survival, and Rivers Canada. Davis's
honors include the Lowell Thomas Award from the Explorers Club and a
prize for literary nonfiction from the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based
Lannan Foundation, which is dedicated to the maintenance of diversity
and cultural freedom.
Davis is married to
Gail Percy, an artist and anthropologist; the couple have two
daughters, Tara and Raina. "My Dad, Explorer of the Planet,"
by then 13-year-old Tara Davis, appeared in
the August 18, 2001 issue of National Geographic World. Davis
and his family divide their time between Washington, D.C., Vancouver,
British Columbia, and their fishing lodge at Wolf Creek in the Stikine
Valley wilderness of northern British Columbia.-- C.F.T.
Suggested Reading: canspeak.com;
Maclean's p64+ Nov. 4, 1996, with photos, p62+ Nov. 5, 2001, with
photos; nationalgeographic.com; New York Times I p19 Dec. 21, 1985,
with photo; riverdeep.net; Wall Street Journal p53 Feb. 25, 1986;
Washington Post D1 Feb. 7, 1986, Feb. 2, 1997, on-line
Selected Books: The Serpent and the Rainbow, 1986; Passage of
Darkness, 1988; One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon
Rain Forest,1996; Rainforest: Ancient Realm of the Pacific Northwest,
1998; Shadows in the Sun 1998; The Clouded Leopard, 1998; Light at the
Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures,
2001; Penan: Voice of the Borneo Rain Forest (with Thom Henley), 1990;
Nomads of the Dawn (with Shane Kennedy and Ian Mackenzie), 1995
 |
