EXPLORER AIMS TO ENCOURAGE SOCIAL CHANGE WITH IMAGES
Victoria Times Colonist, Wednesday, February 28, 2007
By Alex Strachan

Wade Davis has seen the light at the edge of the world and it has filled him with hope.

The cerebral, soft-spoken ethno-botanist and social anthropologist from B.C. has noticed a sea change in the way people view the world around them.

Ever since National Geographic magazine made climate change its cover story in 2003, the Smithers-born, Harvard-educated adventurer, lecturer and photographer has sensed a change in the way ordinary people go about their everyday lives, from something as basic as recycling to looking at new ways of energy efficiency.

"If you look back a few years, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was considered to be a great victory," Davis said on the phone from his home in Washington, D.C. "Social change happens at remarkable speed, and it's getting faster every day."

Social change isn't limited to North America and western Europe, either: Davis noticed a shift in thinking among the educated, privileged classes during recent trips to Peru and Colombia.

"I like to be optimistic," he said. "Peter Matthiessen once said something wonderful: He said, 'Anyone who thinks they can change the world is both wrong and dangerous.' He also said, however, that everyone has an obligation to bear witness to the world. Part of what I'm trying to do, in my books and in films like Light at the Edge of the World, is pay attention to what's going on. What kind of a world are we living in? Culture is not trivial. Culture is not decorative."

Davis is the sole Canadian Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, a group of scientific luminaries that counts the primatologist Jane Goodall and oceanographer Robert Ballard among its members.

In the summers, he lives with his family close to the land in the Stikine River valley in northern B.C., with no electricity or creature comforts.

When he isn't in Washington, D.C. or in the Stikine Valley, Davis is travelling on the edge of the world, documenting the last remaining indigenous cultures.

Light at the Edge of the World is his four-part documentary series with Canadian filmmaker Andrew Gregg, about indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes, Polynesia in the South Pacific, the mountains of Tibet and Canada's north. Davis covered similar geographical and emotional terrain in his 2002 book, Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures. He hoped to capture on film in his documentary series what he was unable to convey in words.

The installment Hunters of the Northern Ice, Davis's profile of Inuit hunters in Nunavut and Greenland, airs tonight at 9 on the digital National Geographic Channel.

Television is a powerful social force, Davis believes. "I always thought of it as something that replaced the family hearth, the family campfire."

He watches, but not in the way one might expect. "I can honestly say, without in any way meaning to sound snobbish or superior, that I literally have not watched a prime-time network show on television since 1968," he said.

"And that's no exaggeration. But -- and this is a big 'but' -- that does not mean I don't like watching TV. On the contrary, I love watching TV. I find the act of watching TV one of the most relaxing things I do in my life. I do it nearly every day. There's a rarely a night I don't turn to the news or sports or watch a film."

The Serpent and the Rainbow, Davis's semi-autobiographical 1998 book about the zombie culture in Haiti, was made into a Hollywood horror film with Bill Pullman playing a character loosely modelled on Davis. The real-life anthropologist was temporarily vaulted into the popular consciousness, but it did nothing for his scientific reputation at the time.

"I went from being the darling of the Haitian community, when the book came out, to being the devil," Davis recalled ruefully. "In academic circles, I went from being courted by universities to being 'the zombie guy.'"

There was never any danger of a similar dumbing-down with Light at the Edge of the World.

Filmmaker Gregg profiled Davis for the CBC biography series Life and Times, and the two formed a fast friendship, based on their experiences working together. The decision to collaborate on the television documentary version of Light at the Edge of the World came easily.

Anthropology itself has changed, Davis insists. It's no longer about telling decorative stories about "the other."

Rather, it's about showing how those cultures exist -- and sometimes even thrive -- in hostile environments.

"We wanted to put the final spike into the heart of the old social Darwinian idea that cultures represent a progression of technological innovation, where the measure of success is invariably determined by (material gain,)," Davis said. "We wanted to point out to people that the great gift of biology is that it has proved what the philosophers always dreamt to be true, which is that we're all cut from the same genetic cloth.

"We all share, by definition, the same raw mental genes and potential. That's actually an amazing revelation. It's literally a science of the mind."


LIFE AS THEY KNOW IT
When National Geographic explorer-in-residence Wade Davis set out to capture the world's most remote cultures, he opted to show success stories rather than laments for lost societies
National Post, February 14, 2007
By Samantha Grice

Each episode of Wade Davis' four-part National Geographic series, Light at the Edge of the World, begins with his concerned voice-over: "You know, the year that I was born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on Earth," says Davis, the Canadian-born anthropologist, ethnobotanist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence. "And of the 6,000 languages spoken on Earth, fully half aren't being taught to children, which means that, effectively, unless something changes, they're dead."

Davis is worried. While issues such as the loss of endangered species and global warming already have our attention, Davis says we have yet to grasp the enormity of an even more imperiled resource, the diversity of the world's cultures.

"And the question to ask is why does it matter? It matters for several obvious reasons such as issues of human rights and just the basic fact that diversity is generally more interesting than its opposite," he explains. "But I think, at a deeper level, people are beginning to understand that culture is not trivial. It's not decorative. Culture is the blanket of moral and ethical values that we place around the individual to insulate from the barbaric heart that history has shown lies just beneath the surface of the living."

But fear not: Davis' documentaries are not hour-long laments for lost cultures. (He recognizes that has already been done to death.) Nor did Davis go out looking for quaint, exotic cultures to show and tell people in the western world.

"We are looking at the threat to culture, the consequence of culture loss, but we deliberately did not go to cultures that are disappearing," he says. "We wanted to go to cultures that had found in their adaptation a different way of thinking about existence. That was our point. To show this shallow, modern world of ours, whose history is only 300 years old within the long history of our species, that we shouldn't suggest we have all the answers for all the challenges that are going to confront us."

In the first episode, which aired last Wednesday, Davis went to Peru to look at the sacred geography of the Inca and the blend of Catholicism and mountain worship that makes up the pan-Andean culture. "The people in the Andes really do believe the Earth is animate and is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with human beings," says Davis, who did his graduate work in the Sacred Valley of Peru.

"The obvious message there is that a kid raised to believe a mountain overlooking his homeland is a mountain deity that will direct his destiny will have a very different relationship to that mountain with very different consequences for the environment than a kid on Vancouver Island who is raised to believe a mountain is just a pile of rock ready to be mined."

And Davis and his team went to Polynesia for tonight's episode to draw attention to the achievements of navigators who settled the giant Polynesian Triangle thousands of years ago in seafaring canoes with only the use of celestial navigation. "This was at a time when European sailors, in terror of the open ocean, were hugging the shorelines of continents and these people settled the largest culture sphere ever brought into existence." And yet, says Davis, the West has long clung to the academic conceit that the Poly- Nesian islands were settled purely by accident by fisherman who went adrift. "And why did we cling to that? That's one of the things we try to address in the film," says Davis.

In the third episode, "The Science of the Mind," Davis goes on a personal spiritual journey through the Himalayas of Nepal. He gets a rare audience with Trulshig Rinpoche, one of the Dalai Lama's teachers and an even rarer audience with a Buddhist nun who has been in a meditative retreat for 45 years. And the final episode, "TheHunters of the Northern Ice," addresses the effect global warming is having on the Inuit and the animals they hunt.

"Even the persistence of the notion of vanishing cultures is a very convenient term because it suggests there is nothing we can do about it," says Davis. "We say they are vanishing and that is a natural loss so let's get on with it. That is a wonderful cop-out because it avoids having to deal with the fact these aren't vanishing people, these are people being destroyed by some of the same forces that are destroying the whole planet."


HUMAN DIVERSITY DWINDLING: DAVIS MAKES CASE FOR PRESERVING INDIGENOUS PEOPLE'S WAYS
The Vancouver Province, February 7
By Dana Gee

While climate change is the big ticket concern today, The Light at the Edge of the World with Wade Davis suggests we stop for a minute and consider not only the flora and fauna, but also the world's indigenous cultures.

This new, entertaining and informative four-part series looks at the ever-increasing need to preserve indigenous peoples and their traditions, in turn safeguarding human diversity.

This series, hosted by internationally acclaimed Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and broadcaster Davis, begins in Peru -- an area very close to Davis's heart.

He spent many years there doing botanical research.

The episode titled "Sacred Geography" looks specifically at the Inca people's connection to nature and their reverence for the mountains.

The scenery is spectacular. Davis's understanding and intimate relationship with the area and its inhabitants makes for an easy-going tutorial as well as a stunning travel guide.

According to Davis, 6,000 languages were spoken around the globe when he was born in 1953. Now, more than 50 years later, only half those languages are taught to children.

"What this means is in a single generation we may be losing fully half of humanity's intellectual, social and spiritual legacy. This does not have to happen," says Davis, who for this series travelled to Latin America, Polynesia, the Himalayas and Nunavut.

During his trip to the Chinchero area of Peru, Davis -- the author of the popular The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986) -- and fellow National Geographic Explorer Johan Reinhold join up with thousands of other Pan-Andean people for a journey to a spiritual festival high in the Andes.

"Having seen so many places around the world where ancient traditions are disappearing I find it simply thrilling to be at a festival that is so vibrant and alive," Davis says about the Qoyllur Rit'i festival.

While Davis does offer an interesting view of a remarkable and robust celebration of tradition and culture, it still should not be forgotten that this type of event -- because of the narrowing of our world -- could be at risk one day if we don't see the value of preserving the incredible diversity of the planet's population.