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Wade Davis has been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity."
An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, he 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 15 indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6,000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies and to Borneo where he lived among the nomadic Penan in the forests of Sarawak.
In recent years Davis's research efforts have taken him to East Africa, Tibet, Polynesia, Mali, equatorial West Africa, New Guinea, Vanuatu, and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland. Author of ten books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, and Light at the Edge of the World, he is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Lowell Thomas Medal (Explorers Club) and the Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary nonfiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorers Club, one of 20 so named in the 100-year history of the club.
His film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, a four-hour series shot in Rapanui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunuvut, Greenland, and Peru, that aired internationally on the National Geographic Channel in the spring of 2007. Phantastica, a two-hour special inspired by his books One River and The Lost Amazon, will air in spring 2008 on The History Channel. Davis recently completed a third film project, a 3-D IMAX film, Water Planet: A Grand Canyon Adventure, which will appear in the spring of 2008.
