About Wade Davis

Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.” 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 Nunuvut and Greenland.

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 Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture.

His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Shadows in the Sun (1993), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction, The Clouded Leopard (1998), Rainforest (1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2001), The Lost Amazon (2004), Grand Canyon (2008), Book of Peoples of the World (ed. 2008), The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, the 2009 Massey lectures, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (2011), The Sacred Headwaters: The Fight to Save the Stikine, Skeena and Nass (2011) and River Notes: A Natural and Human History of the Colorado (2012). His books have been translated into sixteen languages, including French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Basque, Macedonian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Korean, Bulgarian, Japanese and Malay, and have sold approximately 900,000 copies worldwide. 

Davis is the recipient of numerous awards including: The Explorers Medal, the highest award of the Explorers Club (2011), the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society (2009), the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer’s Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary non-fiction. He has been granted Honorary Degrees (Doctorate of Sciences) from University of Victoria (2003), University of Guelph (2008), and Colorado College (2010), and (Doctorate of Laws) from the University of Northern British Columbia (2010) and the National College of Natural Medicine (2011). In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorer’s Club, one of twenty. In 2012 he received the David Fairchild Medal for botanical exploration. His book, Into the Silence, was awarded the $30,000 2012 Samuel Johnson Prize, the most prestigious award for literary nonfiction in the English language.

A native of British Columbia, Davis, a licensed river guide, has worked as park ranger, forestry engineer, and conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada. He has published over 200 scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun and Amazonian myth and religion to the global biodiversity crisis, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. Davis has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men’s Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Scientific American, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and numerous other international publications.

His photographs have appeared in some 30 books and more than 100 magazines, journals and newspapers, including National Geographic, Time, Geo, People, Men’s Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure. They have been exhibited at the International Center of Photography (I.C.P.), the Annenberg Space for Photography, the Marsha Ralls Gallery, Washington, D.C., the United Nations (Cultures on the Edge exhibition 2004), the Carpenter Center of Harvard University, and the Utama Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Select images are part of the permanent collection of the U.S. State Department, Africa and Latin America Bureaus. Davis is 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, and currently touring Latin America. In 2012 he will serve as curator of No Strangers: Ancient Wisdom in the Modern World, an exhibit scheduled for November 2012 at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles. A first collection of Davis’ photographs, Light at the Edge of the World, appeared in 2001 published by National Geographic Books, Bloomsbury and Douglas & McIntyre.

Davis’ research has been the subject of more than 900 media reports and interviews in Europe, North and South America and the Far East, and has inspired numerous documentary films as well as three episodes of the television series, The X-Files.

A professional speaker for over 25 years, Davis has lectured at the American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, California Academy of Sciences, Missouri Botanical Garden, Field Museum of Natural History, New York Botanical Garden, National Geographic Society, Royal Ontario Museum, the Explorer’s Club, the Royal Geographical Society, the Oriental Institute, Musée du Quai Branly, Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, the Chattaugua Institute, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank as well as some 150 universities, including Harvard, M.I.T., Oxford, Yale, Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, Duke, Vanderbilt, University of Pennsylvania, Tulane and Georgetown.

He has spoken at the Aspen Institute, Bohemian Grove and on numerous occasions for the Young President’s Organization. He has spoken four times at the TED Conference, and appeared as well at numerous offsite TEDx conferences. His clients have included amongst others Microsoft, Shell, Hallmark, Fidelity Investments, International Baccalaureate, Bank of Nova Scotia, MacKenzie Financials, Healthcare Association of Southern California, National Science Teachers Association, Promega, NDMA (Non-prescriptive Drug Manufacturers Association), International Baccalaureate, European Council of International Schools, Canadian Association of Petroleum Geologists, Canadian Association of Exploration Geophysicists, American Trial Lawyer’s Association, American Judges Association, American Bankers Association, Centaur Technology, Canadian Association of Actuaries, Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, as well as several leading pharmaceutical companies including Warner-Lambert, Bayer, Miles, Bristol-Myers, and Abbott Laboratories.

An Honorary Research Associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Fellow of the Explorer’s Club, and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. Davis was a founding board member of the David Suzuki Foundation and he recently completed a six-year term on the board of the Banff Centre, Canada’s leading institution for the arts. He currently serves on the board of the Amazon Conservation Association, and as a member of the TED Braintrust. In 2009 he delivered the CBC Massey lectures, Canada’s most prestigious public intellectual forum. In late 2013, it was announced that Davis would join the University of British Columbia as a professor of anthropology in the summer of 2014.

Davis was the series creator, host and co-writer of Light at the Edge of the World, a four-hour ethnographic documentary series, shot in Rapa Nui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunavut, Greenland, Nepal and Peru, which aired in 165 countries on the National Geographic Channel and in the USA on Smithsonian Networks.

When not in the field, Davis and his wife Gail Percy divides their time between Washington, D.C., Vancouver and the Stikine Valley of northern British Columbia. They have two daughters, Tara and Raina. On April 13, 2018, Davis was granted Colombian nationality by President Juan Manuel Santos.