Wade Davis

Anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. Davis's work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best-seller, which appeared in 10 languages and was later released by Universal Studios as a motion picture. He is author of five other books, including Shadows in the Sun (1998) and One River (1996). Born December 14, 1953, in British Columbia, Davis is a citizen of both Canada and Ireland. He has worked as a guide, park ranger and forestry engineer. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada. He has published scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian voodoo and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. His photographs have been published widely. Recently Davis's work has taken him to Peru, Borneo, Tibet, the high Arctic, the Orinoco Delta of Venezuela and northern Kenya. A research associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he also is a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecotrust, Future Generations, and Cultural Survival-all NGOs dedicated to conservation-based development and the protection of cultural and biological diversity. Davis's television credits include Earthguide, a 13-part television series on the environment, which he hosted and co-wrote. He also wrote for the documentaries Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever.