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First Person: Wade Davis

Light at the Edge of the World Famed author, photographer, anthropologist, and biologist Wade Davis in Whistler for sustainability speaker series What: Sustainability Speaker Series Who: Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through t

Light at the Edge of the World

Famed author, photographer, anthropologist, and biologist Wade Davis in Whistler for sustainability speaker series

What: Sustainability Speaker Series

Who: Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World: A Journey Through the Realm of Vanishing Cultures

Where: Telus Conference Centre

When: Thursday, March 18 at 7 p.m.

Wade Davis found light in what were once considered the dark corners of the world, as he lived in wilderness and rainforests with the indigenous people of Haiti, Tibet, Borneo, Africa, the Amazon, the Arctic, the Andes and his native British Columbia.

He was sent there at first as a biologist, anthropologist and ethnobotanist to study the plants and compounds used by shamans in their ceremonies, investigating their possible use in medical procedures and pharmaceuticals. He came back with much more, including a deep appreciation for the strength, perseverance, and spiritual beliefs of indigenous people, and the way they relate to the land, their Gods and each other.

Wade Davis is the next speaker in the Whistler. It’s Our Nature sustainability speaker series, which has included eight prominent scientists, authors and business leaders over the past two years. Even among that distinguished group Davis is in a league of his own.

Davis is an Explorer-In-Residence at the National Geographic Society, with degrees in Anthropology and Biology and a Ph.D. in Ethnobotany from Harvard University.

He started his career by spending more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, and lived among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making 6,000 botanical collections.

He later went to Haiti to study the voodoo medicine used to make zombies, and he wrote about his experiences in The Serpent and Rainbow in 1986. The book became an international best seller, and was soon after released as a motion picture. He wrote about Haitian culture again with Passage of Darkness in 1988.

His other books included Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded Leopard (1998), Shadows in the Sun (1998), One River (1996), and Rainforest (1998). One River was nominated for the 1997 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction.

His most recent book is Light at the Edge of the World (2002).

Davis was worked as a guide, a park ranger, a forestry engineer and conducted ethnographic fieldwork with First Nations in northern Canada. He currently divides his time between Washington D.C. and a vacation home in B.C.’s Stikine Valley.

More than 100 of his articles have been published in a wide range of publications, including National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men’s Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Utne Reader, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Globe and Mail.

Davis has also been a popular public speaker for more than 20 years, speaking to such distinguished institutions as the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Geographic Society, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Explorer’s Club, the Royal Geographic Society, the World Bank and more than 70 major universities.

Davis is an Honorary Research Associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, a fellow of the Linnean Society, a fellow of the Explorer’s Club, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the executive director of the Endangered People’s Project. He is a board member with the David Suzuki Foundation, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Future Generations, Cultural Survival, and Rivers Canada.

Davis was also the host and co-writer of Earthguide, which aired on the Discovery Channel. Other television credits include award-winning documentaries Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever.

Pique Newsmagazine spoke to Davis by telephone from his office in Washington about his upcoming presentation and his views on sustainability.

Pique:

In Light at the Edge of the World you talk about how indigenous people are being assimilated, broken up, Westernized, and I guess that has accelerated as resource extraction goes deeper into these remote areas. What are the implications of losing these cultures and environments?

Wade Davis:

The first thing to understand is that these cultures are not failed attempts at modernity, failed attempts at being us, and these aren’t delicate, frail peoples destined to fade away as if by some natural law. In every case these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces.

If you think about it, the human population has been around as a social species for what, 125,000 years at least? The Neolithic revolution that gave us agriculture and surplus, hierarchy and specialization, etceteras… was only 10,000 years ago. Modern industrial society, out of which our paradigm of modernity has emerged, is only 300 years old.

And that shallow history doesn’t suggest to me that we have all the answers to all of these challenges that are going to confront us in the ensuing millennia.

These other cultures aren’t failed attempts at being us, they’re unique facets of the human imagination, of the human heart, and when asked the meaning of being human they respond with 10,000 different voices. It’s within that incredible array of spirit, these voices, that we find the overall human repertoire for dealing with all of the challenges that will confront us this millennia.

All cultures are profoundly ethnocentric, faithful to their own interpretation of reality, so it’s not surprising that whatever this culture of ours we call the West or modernity – whatever you want to label it – is not a nation-state so much as a paradigm sweeping the world. It’s quite natural for us not to think of this as a face of culture, but as the inexorable wave of history.

Pique:

So the West is just another culture with its own set of beliefs?

WD:

Just as we don’t view the economic system we export around the world as one idea, we see that as the only real way of doing an economy. Instead of being just one economy that represents development and inspiration of one particular culture or one way of doing things, in our cultural myopia we tend to think of ourselves as a paragon of humanity’s potential.

If the measure of that was just technological wizardry, we’d probably come out on top of that argument. But if you look through the anthropological lens at our society and the western model, and ask some basic questions, it all changes.

From the perspective of an anthropologist coming from a distant planet, you’d see many things wonderful in America and Canada, but you’d also see a place that says it reveres marriage, but that half of its marriages end in divorce… a place that says it loves its elders but only six per cent of American homes have grandparents living with grandchildren… a place that says it embraces the family, but also embraces an obscene slogan "24-7", implying total dedication to the workplace at the expense of the family. And they will wonder why the average American lad by the age of 18 has spent two full years passively watching television.

Add to that a model of extraction of resources and economic activity that by any scientific definition compromises the integrity of the biosphere in an unsustainable way.

They would suddenly see that we’re many wonderful things, but we’re not the paragon of humanity’s potential. And the biggest nightmare is that as we drift towards this kind of bland, amorphous, generic world the entire range of human imagination will be reduced to a more narrow modality of thought. We will one day wake up from a dream having forgotten that there are other possibilities for life itself.

And that’s really what the contribution of these cultures is.

Pique:

How do you protect those cultures with all of these pressures?

WD:

The goal, of course, is not to sequester indigenous people or other cultures like some kind of biological specimen in a living zoo. You can’t make the rain forest a park of the mind, even if you wanted to.

Nobody is talking about that, change is no threat to culture. All cultures have always been dancing with new possibilities for life.

And technology is no threat to culture. The Haida didn’t stop being Haida when they gave up cedar bark cloth for machine-made clothing any more than Canadians stopped being Canadians when they gave up the horse and buggy for the automobile. It’s neither change nor technology that threatens the ethnosphere, it’s really power, the crude face of domination.

And in every case what you see are not fragile people destined to fade away, but dynamic people that are being pushed out of existence by identifiable forces.

This is actually an optimistic observation because it suggests that human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, and so we can be the facilitators of cultural survival.

That’s what’s happening. It’s a paradigm shift going on all around the world. Look in Canada at Nunavut (Territory) for example. Thirty years ago the Inuit people were pretty much marginalized in Canada and in many ways were on the brink of extinction due to epidemics, neglect, residential schools, you name it. And now, 30 years later we’ve created this extraordinary new territory of Nunavut, under the control of 26,000 Inuit people, which is rather astonishing.

This is not atypical. In fact, around the world, from Columbia to Nepal, from Africa through to Southeast Asia, people are recognizing this and the indigenous people themselves are stepping up and using tools like the Internet to connect to each other and take their proper place in the world.

Pique:

By any standards, these were already successful cultures that have been around for thousands of years, so they must be doing something right and have some good ideas and ways of doing things that we should maybe spend some time examining. Is that the idea?

WD:

The goal is not to freeze people in the past, but rather ensure that all peoples in all gardens have ways to engage in technology and modernity without that engagement having to imply the eradication of who they are as an ethnicity.

The greatest lesson of all this is that culture is not decorative, it’s not feathers and bells. A culture is a blanket of civilization that we envelope ourselves in to give us ethics and morals, and make sense out of sensations, and find a place in an ultimately unknowable universe – to find a place, as Lincoln said, "by the better angels of our nature."

You want to know what happens when people lose their culture but remain alive, shadows of their former selves, you only need look as far as Liberia, or any of these other failed states.

Pique:

I know you’ve spent a lot of time in rainforests, and one of the things that always comes up, even in Canada, is the fact that we haven’t really studied these areas… is that we’re destroying plants and animals that could ultimately be beneficial to us. Is that still the idea?

WD:

We know by definition that historically modern medicine has derived many of its drugs from natural products. These natural products have not been discovered by white-frocked laboratory technicians, rather they are the gift of the shaman, the witch, the voodoo priest…

And we know that the flora of these places, not just the Amazon but also places like the coast of northwest British Columbia, has not been studied in any comprehensive way. In terms of the Amazon, less than 10 per cent of all plants have ever been studied by a phytochemist, and undoubtedly those plants contain biodynamic compounds that could be useful in modern society.

That said, I think you have to be realistic on three fronts.

The whole idea of rationalizing the conservation of rainforests because we can get more money from them may be a flawed idea. I feel I was sent to find new drugs in the rainforest and came back instead not with new drugs, but with the desire to celebrate a new vision of life itself.

The second point is that probably the best drugs of the Amazon… have probably already been identified by human beings and are known. The key assumption should not be that we’re going to find new drugs for cancer in the repertoire of the shaman as much as finding ways to assay the entire flora for bio-dynamic compounds – because those are the compounds that would probably yield new drugs.

The third element is to be realistic about the nature of drug treatments these days and where it’s going and the whole advances in understanding genes. Now we’ve deciphered the human genome, the whole emphasis on medical rescue is shifting away from its reliance on natural drugs. We still use a lot of drugs, but it’s not the future.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be cognizant of the potential of the forest, but I think if you used that as a rationale for conservation and don’t find any new drugs, you find yourself without a reason to save the rainforests. I personally feel the rainforests should be valued like all resources, for their own inherent value to the overall biosphere.

Pique:

As a writer and a scientist, when did you start to think about the issue of sustainability, and how do you think we can achieve this? I know it’s a big questions, but is there any point in your career where you started to give it serious thought, or any cultures you encountered that put the thought in your head?

WD:

I don’t really see how modern industrial society, given the political constraints, can ever be sustainable in the true economic sense. I think it’s going to require a huge commitment to new technology, but we have to be honest in a way.

Sustainability doesn’t happen, in my opinion, with a recycling campaign in a little town in Canada, it starts with Canadians understanding that they belong to a very small cohort of the world’s population which controls a huge percentage of the world’s bounty. I think the fundamental discrepancy between those who have and those who have not will continue to be the central challenge of our age.

For the longest time we’ve been able to be blind to that discrepancy as we are anesthetized by our own wealth. The American people, who have long made a virtue of cultural myopia for any number of historical reasons, are also numbed by their own wealth. I mean, there hasn’t been such a wealthy place probably in the history of the earth. The United States spends more money maintaining lawns in a year than India collects in federal tax revenue. The American defence budget is a trivial percentage of their GDP, yet it’s still larger than the entire economy of Australia.

It’s so anomalous and it’s hard for us therefore to understand a world, the world where I’ve spent so much of my time, where two billion people get by on less than two dollars a day.

Those two worlds, long kept apart by geography, are now spun together every night so that CNN is broadcasting conditions of life in Beverly Hills into poor villages in India every day.

The real challenge is that one can tinker around the edges of a community – in a place like Whistler for example you can attempt to institute recycling programs, you can attempt to cut hydro consumption… you can pay attention to your carbon imprint – but all of that, at some level, is tinkering around the edges of a much bigger problem.

A place like Whistler exists because it draws people from the affluent world to go skiing, a recreational pursuit. It’s all well and good to try and create sustainable mechanisms or less consumptive mechanisms within the community, and it’s certainly admirable, but it behooves everybody to pay attention to the fact that the ecological footprint of Whistler spans the entire range of its economy, and by definition implies the carbon output, for example, of all those jets that bring people into what is essentially a recreational resort.

That’s not to criticize Whistler but to suggest that the bigger issue of sustainability is the whole structure of the distribution of wealth around the world. Even within Canada, a country which is by no means homogenous economically… there still are disparities of wealth that are considerable. And even if we do everything within Canada to achieve a sustainable society or less consumptive society – again, a noble goal – we still have to place Canada in its international scenario.

This incredible disparity between the world of haves and a world of have-nots is something so broad and so deep it feels almost impossible to bridge. And yet increasingly the pressure will be to do so because if these two worlds were once kept apart, if only by geography and the lack of communications, today those worlds are woven together by global media.

And even as we export an economic paradigm, a model of development – whether you call it modernization or free trade – it’s done on the assumption that what we’re exporting is not the economy of one particular culture, but as an inexorable economic way of the future. We encourage people throughout the world, through their own volition or effective forms of coercion, to turn their back on their culture with the promise that they’ll achieve the same level of affluence that we enjoy, if only they follow the dictates of our economic paradigm.

In fact what happens is what E.O. Wilson’s recent book suggests, that the for the world to enjoy the same affluence that we have in the west we would require the resources of four planet Earths, just in terms of energy production alone, and that’s not going to happen.

What is happening is that people who turn from cultures and traditions and emulate this model for the most part find themselves standing on the lowest rung of an economic ladder that goes nowhere.

Torn of the past, they can’t go back and going forward means going to the urban centres of the Third World which have swollen to become great seas of misery.

This is significant because the one thing anthropology teaches us is that when people are shorn of their tradition and culture, and the mitigating forces of morality and ethics inherent in culture… all kinds of strange things happen, including hateful, cancerous cults like al Qaeda, or the Shining Path, or the Maoist uprisings in Nepal.

So when you talk about sustainability for a community like Whistler, or anyone else, you don’t get far unless you try and put it on the greater stage of the world. Making Whistler sustainable is all well and good, but it behooves us to understand that Whistler itself… can’t be seen as sustainable in a truly global sense just because of what it represents.

Pique:

Is our standard of living non-negotiable? How do we bridge the gap between rich and poor? Is it a matter of having a more realistic standard of living?

WD:

From my perspective, to achieve sustainability will mean recognizing that we have a world view that is not the inexorable wave of history, just the product of a particular intellectual lineage, and that world view needs to change for us ever to begin to enter into a less destructive relationship with the natural world.

I was raised to believe that the rainforests in B.C. exist to be cut, that was the dominant scientific conviction and political ideology of my culture…. That’s how forestry was practised when I was young, and it made me a different human being with a very different relationship to the forest than a young (First Nations) lad from Malcolm Island who was raised to believe that the forests were the abode of… the crooked beak of heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled in the north end of the world.

The key point is that the different belief systems about that forest make for different human beings and make for a different relationship to that forest when then have direct and solid consequences for the impact of humans in general. When these different voices are silenced through assimilation, acculturation – then you lose that alternative vision of what that forest is, and the world will be reduced to being interpreted through the lens of one particular reality, ours, and I think that would be very unfortunate.