Wade Davis | The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World | Talks at Google

Wade Davis discusses his book "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World". At risk is the human legacy-a vast archive of knowledge and expertise and a catalogue of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time. In "Wayfinders", Davis takes us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world's indigenous cultures.
Wade Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the British Columbia Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. An ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker, Davis holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunavut and Greenland.
Davis is the author of 350 scientific and popular articles and 23 books, and was 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. His many film credits include El Sendero de la Anaconda, a 90-minute feature documentary shot in the Northwest Amazon, and is available on Netflix.
Get the book here: goo.gle/3lo4Ab3.
For more information on Wade Davis, please visit daviswade.com/.
To watch El Sendero de la Anaconda, visit goo.gle/3lFE39x.
Moderated by Sandeep Giri.