Biography

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.” 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 which appeared in ten languages and was later released by Universal as a motion picture. His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded Leopard (1998), Shadows in the Sun (1998), Rainforest (1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2002), The Lost Amazon (2004) and One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. He currently is fulfilling a two-book contract with Knopf (USA) and Bloomsbury (UK). Fire on the Mountain, a history of the early British efforts on Everest, will be published in 2008. Sheets of Distant Rain will follow in 2009. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer's Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation $125,000 prize for literary non-fiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorer's Club, one of twenty so named in the hundred-year history of the club. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Vanuatu and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.

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 140 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. He has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men's Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Utne Reader, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, and several other international publications. His photographs have been widely published. His research has been the subject of more than 600 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 nearly twenty 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, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank as well as some 140 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. His corporate clients have included Microsoft, Shell, Hallmark, Bank of Nova Scotia, MacKenzie Financials, Healthcare Association of Southern California, National Science Teachers Association, NDMA (Non-prescriptive Drug Manufacturers Association), 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. Davis is a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation. He recently completed a six-year term on the board of the Banff Centre, Canada's leading institution for the arts. In 2003 he received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Victoria.

Davis was the host and co-writer of Earthguide, a 13 part television series on the environment, which aired on the Discovery Channel. Other television credits include the award winning documentaries, Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, and Forests Forever. In collaboration with 90th Parallel Productions, Alliance Atlantis and the National Geographic International he produced, wrote and hosted Light at the Edge of the World, a four hour ethnographic documentary series, shot in Rapanui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunuvut, Greenland, Nepal and Peru, which is currently airing in 165 countries on the National Geographic Channel. He is host, co-writer and co-producer of a two hour special inspired by the books One River and The Lost Amazon, currently in production for the History Channel. Filmed in New Mexico, Oaxaca, and lowland Ecuador, it will air in the summer of 2007. Davis is a principal character in an upcoming MacGillivray Freeman IMAX film, Grand Canyon Adventure, which will appear in the spring of 2008.

Davis is married to Gail Percy and when not in the field they divide their time between Washington and a fishing lodge in the Stikine Valley of northern British Columbia. They have two children, Tara aged 18 and Raina who is 15.