A FASCINATING EVENING WITH WADE DAVIS

It's the head-shaking reality of society today.

Once can turn on the TV or click on a website and invariably come
across the countenance of Charlie Sheen, pontificating at length about
all things narcissistic.

That he has made tens of millions of dollars starring in a putrid
television show alleged to be funny makes it all the more depressing.

Meanwhile, a fascinating person like Wade Davis offers a smorgasbord
of mesmerizing information that dwarfs Sheen's morsels of empty
caloric claptrap and Davis cannot hope to get as much attention.

But, for the overflow crowd that took in Davis's lecture at Thompson
Rivers University's Grand Hall this week, the two-hour talk was more
nourishing than any amount of Two-And-A-Half Meninanity.

I cannot recall being more awestruck than I was as Davis led the crowd
on a spellbinding cultural journey across the globe.

I could barely take notes as I simply let my notebook rest in my lap
and took it all in.

Davis was born in West Vancouver in 1953, went to Harvard and now
lives in Northern B.C. (the Stikine Valley) in the summer and in
Washington, DC in the winter, where he is a National Geographic's
explorer in residence, meaning he travels everywhere in the world,
studying people, languages, plants, culture -- all of it.

At TRU, Davis spoke and showed slides of where he has been, what he
has learned and what we can all learn.

In Polynesia, he joined a native boating crew that can point out with
accuracy 250 stars in the sky and can tell you, by the way the ocean
ripples in the pitch dark, which island is approaching, the ripples
studied as are fingerprints in forensic science.

While traveling through the Ecuadorian Amazon as an ethnobotanist,
Davis spent some time with the Waorani, known earlier as the Auca Indians.

The Waorani tribe had never met outsiders until January 1956. That
year, five well-meaning missionaries were going to visit and dropped
from planes five 8X10 photos of themselves, as a way of breaking the
ice and letting the natives know they were coming to visit so the
natives would not be surprised when they came waking through the jungle.

Well, Davis said, the natives picked up these photos that floated down
from the sky and looked at the pictures of the people. The natives
then looked behind the photos to find the rest of the person as this
was the first time they had ever encountered a two-dimensional image.

When they could see nothing behind the photos, the natives deemed
these floating things to be from the devil.

So, when the missionaries came to visit, smiling and confident their
peace-offering pictures had paved the way for a smooth visit, the
Waorani speared them to death.

They had a penchant for spearing to death many things, Davis said,
including each other.

Davis is also a plant expert and has sampled many, many hallucinogenic
and medicinal varieties. He became the first non-native to take part
in a traditional journey in Colombia in which the natives run for a
day, going from heights of 16,000 feet to 1,000 feet above sea level
and back, again and again, traversing mountain ranges.

The natives there treat life as a loom, Davis said, and consider they
are weaving through life and, as such, they are leaving threads up and
down the mountains on their life journey.

Davis was 48 when he did it and said he chewed on many coca leaves to
help get him through.

But, he said, coca leaves have a bad rap as their link to cocaine has
obscured the real nutrient benefits of the plant -- did you know there
is no known plant in the world with a higher concentration of calcium?

Likening the coca leaf to cocaine, he said, is akin to avoiding the
peach due to its poisonous pit.

Davis told a fascinating story about the U.S. attempt to eliminate
coca leaves in Colombia and other Central American countries, but it
had nothing to do with cocaine.

This was back in the 1920s or 1930s, when some well-meaning but
ignorant American anthropologists decided to blame the coca leaf for
the Colombian natives' poor lifestyle when, in fact, they were
suffering from the effects of European colonialism that had deprived
them of their natural lifestyle.

Davis told of the Anaconda tribe, who require that everyone marry
outside their language. The Anaconda also create through their
botanical expertise, ayahuasca, a drug so strong, Davis said, that one
ethnobotantist described it thusly: "Like being shot out of a rifle
barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing in a sea of
electricity."

Davis also went to West Africa and Haiti to study the voodoo religion
and zombies.

(Nothing like the movies, he noted wryly. In fact, he wrote the book,
The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was made into a thriller movie.
"The worst movie in the history of Hollywood," Davis said).

Oh, there is so much more.

He spent time with the Inuit in Canada, with the Northern Eskimo of
Greenland (the northernmost people in the world), with the aborigines
of Australia (the first people to walk out of Africa 65,000 years ago
and our closest link to our common ancestors).

He spent lots of time in Tibet with monks and, of course, fights for
natives rights here in B.C.

Davis went to Borneo, where the native Penan lost everything to the
Malaysia government's brutal decision to log everything in their
ancestral lands.

The Penan's entire way of life was extinguished in one
generation.

That tribe, and so many more, view our consumer lifestyle of material
wealth as strange, Davis said.

For them, material wealth is a disadvantage as they live a life where
all you own must be carried on your back. Therefore, less is more.

Davis said their wealth is relationships between people as it is
crucial to survival.

As Tibetan monk told him: Your billboards in New York City show naked
13-year-olds in underwear; our billboards are our search for
enlightenment."

Hmmm . . .

He noted that, a few decades ago, there were 7,000 languages being
spoken in the world. Today, he said, there might be 3,500 left.

And, they are disappearing faster than species.

He called language loss the canary in the coal mine in the
ethnosphere.

"Every language is the old-growth forest of the mind," he
said.

"Every two weeks, an elder dies and carries into the grave the last
syllables of an ancient language."

If Davis' wide-ranging, rollicking lecture could possibly be boiled
down to a sentence or two, it is this: Our way is not the only way;
nor is their way the only way. We can and must learn from each other --
the West from the East and the South from the North.

"I never try to denigrate my culture," he said. "What I criticize is
the conceit of every culture that they are the centre of the world."

Davis' breadth of knowledge, his commitment to better the world and
his insatiable curiosity and passion for explaining make him damn amazing.

As one gentleman in the audience said afterwards, during the Q&A
segment: "Your presentation was depressing as hell as it magnified how
boring my life is!"

Do yourself a favour and read one of Davis' books (try the
Wayfinders). You will be glad you did.