Ideas - PT 2: What Lies Beneath the Surface: Anthropologist Wade Davis

Episode Date: January 28, 2025

Is it too late to save the planet? Anthropologist Wade Davis doesn't think so — he's inspired by the ability of nature to adapt, and he thinks people can change, too. He says that means looking for all the information we can get. Part two of IDEAS producer Philip Coulter’s conversation with Wade Davis. 

When a body is discovered 10 miles out to sea, it sparks a mind-blowing police investigation. There's a man living in this address in the name of a deceased. He's one of the most wanted men in the world. This isn't really happening. Officers are finding large sums of money. It's a tale of murder, skullduggery and international intrigue. So who really is he? I'm Sam Mullins and this is Sea of Lies from CBC's Uncovered, available now.

This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. There's a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame and reinventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most important challenge of our times. That's anthropologist Wade Davis from his 2009 CBC Massey lectures, The Wayfinders, pointing to something we all know to be true,

the environmental crisis facing our planet. The sacred is all about life and it's what happens all around us, the luminosity around us, and it's accessible to anyone with the heart to see. We can't divorce the sacred from human agency. You know, we will the divine into being. Wade Davis is a great communicator. He's been explorer in residence with the National Geographic Society.

He's made film documentaries, lectured and spoken all over the earth, and published 24 books. It's his role as a spokesperson for the planet and its peoples that make Wade special. His first book, published in 1985, was about the search for the combination of drugs that creates zombies in Haitian culture. After that came books on everything from the conquest of Everest to the cultural history of the Magdalena River in Colombia. Now 40 years on from his first book,

Wade has published a set of essays called Beneath the Surface of Things. It is so beautiful to be able to go into a place and suddenly pick up the rhythms of the dance, you know, the gestures, the manners, the moments that allow you in effect to express your common humanity. God, if that's not the antidote to hate and the atom bomb, I don't know what is. Wade Davis lives on Bowen Island, off the coast of British Columbia.

Accompanied by his longtime ideas producer, Philip Coulter, the two went for a long walk through the forest to talk about the new book and to discuss the ideas that have driven his life's work. This is the second part of the conversation they had on that long walk. We're calling this program, Beneath the Surface of Things. Here's Philip Coulter. That long walk around Killarney Lake on Bowen Island would ordinarily take about 90 minutes

or so, but there were a lot of digressions and stops along the way, either to argue some point or other or to talk about the beauties of nature surrounding us. So the walk ended up taking close to three hours. We were talking about everything, the deer fern at our feet and their ancient history as a plant. From there we jumped to ideas about the proper role of anthropology in understanding our lives and the interconnectivity of all things. That sort of talk is all so seamless for Wade. The more we understand about the natural world, he suggests, the more we're able to articulate the arguments for its defense. And in an age of fracking, of open pit mining, of ocean pollution, of global warming, we

do seem to need new arguments. A hundred years ago, all of Bowen Island was clear cut. But here we are in the forest, as Wade points out, in a thriving ecology. A comment on nature's ability to regenerate, to bounce back. Wade is one of life's optimists, but myself, I'm more of a pessimist. Looking out on Kalarni Lake, I wondered, to what degree should we be intervening

in the matters of the earth? And should we not just be standing back, letting nature do its job? Well, at this point, our footprint is so ubiquitous and all-powerful that, as E.O. Wilson said, in an era of the Anthropocene, we have no choice but being proactive and doing what we can. And we are part of the evolution of life. And so the transformation in the way that human beings have come to think about the

natural world is surely part of our ongoing evolutionary relationship and presence within that natural world. I mean, when people are pessimistic, I always sort of say, well, look, in my lifetime, women have gone from the kitchen to the boardroom, people of color from the woodshed to the White House, gay people from the closet to the altar. I mean, we are capable of social transformations and change at a really astonishing rate. So in that sense, it's not necessarily that I'm optimistic about the world. It's that I know the world isn't going to stop changing. And that gets back to something that I found a lot of comfort in, which I write about in an essay in the book on the sacred, is some advice I got from my father, you know, who

was not a religious man. He had since been broken by the war, I think. And my mother, who had been raised a Baptist in Alberta, she didn't go to church, but she still had that idea, very fundamental Christian idea, that if we just try hard enough, good will triumph over evil. The fallen archangel, the devil, will be beaten by the luminosity of Christ.

And people have hoped for that outcome since the birth of Christianity. And it hasn't happened, and it probably won't happen. My father had no such illusions. He used to say every church should have a billboard outside of it with a notice saying, important if true. And I never saw the inside of a church in the presence, I think once, in the presence of my parents.

But my father did believe powerfully in good and evil. And he used to say, son, there's good and evil in the world. Take your side and get on with it. And what was great about that was what he was really saying is light and darkness walk hand in hand. Good and evil walk hand in hand. Always have, always will. You'll never vanquish

evil you can only take your pick and do what you can to keep evil at bay. And what he was really saying don't expect to win and that was really incredible advice because if you the minute you don't expect to win you don't fear losing and if you do lose you don't stop fighting and And if you do lose, you don't stop fighting. And it allows you to stay in the game. And it's a little bit like the metaphor of the Buddhist pilgrim. You know, the goal is not a place, it's, or destination is a state of mind where the wind can't shake the mountain. And so I find that that's something I've come to embrace reflexively as I get older.

And I think it's really allowed me to not become embittered or angry. I'm as joyful and vibrant and positive and engaged at 70 as I was at 20 and hopefully far more effectively. But bitterness comes to those with expectations that they expect to have been fulfilled, which is in a way a gesture of hubris, right? The world just rolls on and you're only in it for a lifetime and all you can do is do your bit. And your bit doesn't have to even have any outcomes.

It's just, it's the way you live. It's a choice. You know, are you gonna, how are you gonna manifest the incredible gift of life that you've been given? So the unbelievable gift of life, to me, it's just a radiant blessing that is just astonishing. It's like we should be pinching ourselves every single moment of the day. John Rawls from the Saul talks about, in one of his books, talks about the importance of doubt as a human quality,

that we should be questioning everything, all of our own assumptions. Is it a little bit like that, that, you know, at a point in a career when you've written so many books looking, you know, at our life and our experience on this planet from so many different points of view, that now you're at a point where you can kind of stand back from your own? It's not like I think that you know in my past I've been unfairly polemical or judgmental I mean I can't think of anything I've ever written that I wouldn't stand by today but it's more a reflection of how the world seems to be moving around me.

And particularly in this collection that almost all of them were written during the COVID lockdown, looking out at the world, if you will. And when everything was being reduced to two dimensions and to two dimensions and idiotic polemics and hate. You talk in the book about growing up as a child and how for many years you were actually a very devout, church-going kid, until, as often happens, you reach a point where the faith isn't there anymore. Implied by that is the question of to what extent is that spiritual search

that many people go through when they're young now continuing in a different format for you. I think it's always been there for me. I mean, I opened that essay in the book, the essay on the sacred, with a memory of literally being at my windowsill in point clair in the middle of the winter with the window wide open, elbows on the windowsill, looking at the stars as they came through the branches of the old elm trees that still grew in Quebec at that time, and absolutely having a direct conversation with God and accepting his existence with certainty. And I guess I always had some kind of yearning and I ended up just walking off the church every Sunday on my own from the age of about five or six. My parents

were fine with it. Kids got to go anywhere they wanted then. And again, like any seeker, I didn't go to church to worship the building. I went there to be in presence of the Divine. As I wrote, for a long time God was always there, and then one day he just wasn't. And it took me a long time to understand that what I had been really seeking wasn't God, but some kind of radiant force that in the essay I kind of defined as the sacred as opposed to religion. As I said earlier, religion is all about death and coming to terms with that and the structures of preparation for death, the control of the process of death.

And the sacred is the opposite. The sacred is all about life. And it's what happens all around us, the luminosity around us, and it's accessible to anyone with the heart to see. So we can't divorce the sacred from human agency. We will the divine into being. Chalices and religious objects become so through years of human touch like an old tool, warm from decades of use. And that quest is absolutely universal. It's ubiquitous in the ethnographic record. It's a fundamental human appetite and desire. And it's not even clear what it means to embrace the sacred, but to know that it exists all around us is very comforting.

And there's a wonderful quote from D.H. Lawrence who wrote that, Before Jesus and the Buddha spoke, the nightingale sang. And long after the words of the Buddha and Jesus are forgotten, the 19th Gale will still sing. And so the goal in life is to be kind of like that bird soaring in space in pursuit of the sacred. And when I first read that quote from Lawrence that was shared with me, it kind of made sense to all that I've been doing all of my life. The final essay in Beneath the Surface of Things is called On the Sacred. In it, Wade Davis draws a line from the spirituality of his childhood to the deeper understanding of spirituality

he's gained from a lifetime of looking at and listening to the actual functioning of the world. That essence of the sacred, as he called it, is, quote, a dimension that transcends religion, a space of intuition and revelation impossible to describe, yet accessible to those in every culture who perceive the world through what French philosopher Henry Corbin called the eyes of the heart. My longings as a child, I realized, had not been of a religious nature, at least not in a formal sense. I'd been looking for a path that embraced the mystic among the multitudes. The promise of all people in all places through all time,

who had found peace and comfort in their pursuit of the Divine. I came to see God as but the product of our desires. Our spirit and imagination transform an edifice of stone into a sacred space. A shrine is sanctified by the legacy of all those who have come before, with their hopes, fears, promises, and prayers. We've just been climbing a bit of a hill, so we're a tiny bit out of breath. But I like that line, we will the divine into being.

Is there a commonality in the way that your mind has explored so many different cultures in our world and in our time? Are there common elements about the divine? The thing that's incredible about culture, Philip, is that we keep talking about the differences between cultures, but the commonalities are remarkable. And every human culture has to deal with birth, raise their kids, find ways to mate that are

consistent, deal with the agony of old age, the mystery of death, etc. And how people come to terms with all those things or adapt to all those things is culturally specific and creates a lot of diversity. But the fundamental imperatives are universal. And this is what makes the poetry of culture so fantastic is that you can walk into a place that looks so different to you. And then if you just pay attention you'll see all the entry points to make yourself part of that culture and welcome in that culture and create that kind of basic human bond. I mean I guess it may sound really silly or even sentimental but the reason I keep doing this work, not necessarily of anthropology,

but the travel, the storytelling, is because it is so beautiful to be able to go into a place and suddenly pick up the rhythms of the dance, you know, the gestures, the manners, the moments that allow you, in effect, to express your common humanity. I mean, God, if that's not the antidote to hate and the atom bomb, I don't know what is. And that is something that I do have a gift for, is doing just that. And I think it began, you know, people used to ask me, and when we did the Massey lectures together, it was the first time that anyone asked me why or how I became an anthropologist. Sometimes I think anthropologist is a fancy term for being a traveler. It's kind of a label we put on ourselves. You know, we're all just travelers. But it dawned on me, and maybe this was asked when we were doing the lecture in Montreal,

that when I was a little boy, I grew up in a time of the two solitudes in Canada, right? And I grew up in an Anglo suburb, Pointe-Claire, that was kind of plunked on the back of a very old French-Canadian town, village of the same name. And there was literally a boulevard, Cartier Boulevard, that divided pretty much the English from the French. And my mom used to send me, this is a time when my father could be a businessman in Montreal for 12, 15 years and never have to learn a word of French,

and would send me to a little corner store owned by a marvelous old francophone couple. And I'd sit on that side of Cartier Boulevard and I'd look across and I'd think, this is when I'm five and six. Wow, right across this road there's another language, another religion, another way of life. Why can't I cross this road?

And the prohibition didn't come from my parents, it came from my society. But of course I I cross this road? And the prohibition didn't come from my parents, it came from my society. But of course I did cross that road. And I've been crossing that road all my life. Now look over here. Look at that hemlock coming out of that old cedar stump. See there? So there we have, yeah, maybe 10 or 12 feet up.

And maybe about 8 or 10 feet across. You see all the cedar stumps are that height because they had to get above the bowl to cut into the narrower. Okay. See? That's the whole point of those boards. Otherwise you're cutting twice as much width for no gain. These big cathedral trees have to have incredibly wide bases to support themselves. So the base is going like this to the actual tree. So you're

not going to cut through all that, you've got to get above that. I took a note of a few lines of yours from your essay Peoples of the Anaconda, where you write, The entire natural world is saturated with meaning and cosmological significance. Every rock and waterfall embodies a story. Plants and animals are all but distinct physical manifestations of the same essential spiritual essence. But behind every tangible form, every plant and animal, is a shadowy dimension visible only to the shaman. There's a deeply, I guess I'm circling around again on this idea that there's a deeply spiritual context to all of your thinking.

Well, you know, part of that is to, you know, when I say that the most profound insight of the Barasana or the Makuna is the notion that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality, that's again thinking of the metaphors of their lives and the ecological consequence of those metaphors. One of the fascinating things about that complex of peoples in Northwest Amazon is when we carefully deconstruct their myths and their ritual prohibitions, and there's a plethora of prohibitions. You can't fish here at this time. You can't do this here.

You actually see that it comes together as a land management plan, which is quite remarkable. And the shaman is the mediator. It's the shaman who maintains the dialogue between humans and the rest of creation. And in that sense, the shaman, particularly for the Barasan and Makuna, is not a priest, he's not a physician. His role is more like that of a nuclear engineer or a diplomat. A diplomat or a nuclear engineer who periodically has to go to the heart of the reactor to reprogram the world.

And the importance of that is, again, to suggest that these beliefs are not just quaint or curious or mysterious. They have real consequences in terms of the relationship. So, for example, the fundamental creation myth of the Barasana speaks of a great goddess figure, Romikumu, who encountered a world of chaos. And she gave birth to the Iowa, the four thunders, who came up the Milk River from the east and found a world of chaos and turned it over and re-created harmony, order out of the chaos. And then they made love to Romi Kumu and she sent them into the sky.

But the beautiful thing is that human beings accepted that responsibility. So that's what I meant when I said that humans are never seen as a problem. They are the ones who maintain order. And so when the Barasana, for example, take Yahé, which in Peru a variant is known as Ayahuasca. They're not doing it in a journey of self-healing or self-absorption or psychological release. They're doing it as a community that becomes transformed not into symbols of the ancestors, they actually become the ancestors and they fly through space to all the sacred places, where once again they affirm both

their responsibility and their ownership of those places, right? So all these things are connected into a vision of the deepest level of stewardship and responsibility. It's the same thing with the Kogi or the Adhawas, the Weeba, the Sierra Nevada. They really do believe that their rituals maintain the balance of the world in their prayers. So when they say that the water in the Rio Magdalena is no different than the blood in your veins, it's both metaphor, but in that case it's actually literal, because when we die, most of our body is water. It goes into the soil, it seeps to the sea, it gets into the clouds,

it returns as rain, just like the waters of the Magalene River. And again, these metaphors are so beautiful that they inform a vision of life. Now, it doesn't mean that these societies are ecological natives. You know, every society is a measure of its aspirations and its reality. But the aspirations become guideposts. I mean, if I asked you, I came from Mars and I asked Philip Poulter,

what are your religious beliefs? Well, you'd invoke the Judaic Christian tradition. It doesn't mean you go to temple or it doesn't mean you go to church every Sunday, but that's the moral structure of our universe, or at least the one that we grew up in. By the same token, the moral structure doesn't mean that every Arauaco is a perfect ecologist or something.

The measure of a society is not just what they do, but the quality of the metaphors that propelled them forward. On Ideas, you're listening to Beneath the Surface of Things, the second part of anthropologist Wade Davis in conversation with Ideas producer Philip Coulter on a long ramble through the forest on Bowen Island in British Columbia. You can hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on U.S. Public Radio, across North America on SiriusXM, on World Radio Paris, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world

at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Sarah Trelevin and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody. Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this?

What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now. It's a long story. Settle in. Available now. The sacred is eternal, reaching far into the past, shining as a beacon to the future. It is everywhere and nowhere. What is sacred can never be diluted or compromised, co-opted or copied, commodified or made sorted through commerce and greed. Sensed, if never seen, elusive and mysterious by its very nature, the sacred may lie beyond our reach, yet there is comfort just in knowing that such a radiant presence may one day be encountered. The clock is not ticking. No force exists

that can rob us of its promise. The traveler today walks the same spiritual ground as the pilgrim of old. David Ignatius in the Washington Post says, Wade Davis has a gift for saying the unsayable. He's a fearless explorer in the intellectual world, as in the physical. We usually live on the surface of ideas when we talk about issues such as war and racism. Wade takes us far deeper.

In 50 years of traveling the planet, poking into the corners where tourists never go, Wade has brought back stories and insights that deepen our understanding of the human experience. In the diversity of human and natural life, there are simple lessons. That in complexity, there is also simplicity. That we have much to learn from each other and from the natural world that we are more alike than we are different. Wade's most recent book, Beneath the Surface of Things, is a collection of essays on everything from the Ascent of Everest to the Art of Exploring, the Significance of the First World War, the

Idea of the sacred. Here's the conclusion of our conversation in the forest on Bowen Island in British Columbia. So where are we now on the mountain? Well, the lake's just over here. And this is climbing up to a mountain on this side of the lake, and we're maybe halfway around now. But it gets very pretty in here. We had a lot of blow down. This is a kind of interesting case.

So what are we looking at here? Well, you can see that we get wicked winds coming through Bowen Island, right? The power goes off frequently. Trees fall down frequently. And here you can see where a swath of trees got blown over from a wind coming down this draw. See, all these trees came over.

Like you can see how these broadleaf maples, they've taken advantage of the blowdown in past, you know, 100 years ago. And that blowdown, this probably has always been prone to wind. So those, that broadleaf maple and this one here, and that one down there, And that one down there, that one right there, got established when the bigger canopy trees got blown over. You know, I spent a year onulcate young foresters with the kind of cult of scientific ideology of scientific forestry. And now, one of the stars of that department is Suzanne Simard, right? And when I worked in the logging camp, if I had said to my boss that a mature cedar tree is capable of taking its photosynthetic

production and deliberately shunt it first to its own offspring, secondarily to an offspring of its same species from under the tree, and only thirdly to the other denizens of the forest. I would have been run out of that camp like an idiot, right? But that's what she proved to be true. So we now know that all of these creatures, all these denizens of the forest are connected to each other, communicating with each other.

You step on the ground of any of this forest and you're stepping on several hundred miles of mycelia filaments, all the web of connectivity that is the symbiotic relationship between the trees and the fungi. It's just a miracle. A lot has changed. The bench is just up here. Okay. So where are we? Well this is a nice little lookout on the east side of the lake looking over the

remnant cedar from the flooding way back when. It's a great spot, you're looking on with due west and you can often spot beavers and eagles and ravens here, owls, a lot of wild fowl in the shallow lake. Two beaver lodges right down here. Where are they? Well, there's one, see where the light line is between the dark and there's one right there. There's another one over here beyond that green patch. Oh, I see this. That's like

debris in the water. Yeah. Yeah. So they've made a little dam there, is that it? Well, they probably, it's very shallow here, you know, so they wouldn't really need to dam it. The lake is pretty... Right now the lake's high. But when a beaver dams something, it's because they need more water to make their... But if the lake's deep enough, they can make their lodge without building a dam. The title of your new book is Beneath the Surface of Things, and I guess anyone who looks at the cover will immediately understand the image and what it is that you're implying.

But can you talk about that image and elaborate a little bit on what you meant by it? Yeah, I didn't select the cover image, but they came up with a good one. It's basically a profile of an iceberg where you see both what's below and what's above. But it did brought me back to something an old mentor of mine said. I had a wonderful anthropology professor at UCLA. I was an attending, he was just a mentor. He had a way of distilling things in a phrase and he said,

anthropology allows us to see what lies beneath the surface of things. And that image really caught me because at its best, the anthropological lens suspends judgment. It doesn't eliminate judgment, but it suspends judgment so that the judgments we make can be informed once. And all of the essays had, in a sense, that as a theme, looking beneath the surface, you know, rethinking the challenge of climate. Not as a denier, of course, but rather asking or daring to ask the obvious question, if the situation is as dire as people say, why have we been so ineffective? Well, why have we been so ineffective in dealing with the crises facing us?

It's a rhetorical question with a complicated answer that has something to do with the clash between our drive for personal benefit and a commitment to the common good. Wade sidesteps the question by pointing to the role of anthropology. The rise of anthropology is a discipline at a time of profound social change, when human rights in general and race in particular were battlefields. He quotes historian Charles King, anthropology came into its own on the front lines of the great moral battle of our time, as it anticipated and in good measure built the intellectual foundations for the seismic social changes of the last hundred years. Anthropology matters because it allows us

to look beneath the surface of things. The very existence of other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other visions of life itself, puts the lie to those in our own culture who say that we cannot change, as we know we must, the fundamental way in which we inhabit this planet. Anthropology is the antidote to nativism, the enemy of hate, a vaccine of understanding, tolerance and compassion that silences the rhetoric of demagogues, inoculating the world against the likes of the Proud Boys and Donald Trump. Never has the voice of anthropology been more important. I guess part of what's implied by this is the question about the nature of what it is the anthropology project, in fact, might be.

Because, you know, so many of the essays in this book, as you say, are along the lines of short-form histories. You know, there's an essay about the First World War, there's an essay about the history of India as a colony, there's a preface to something that you wrote about the conquest of Everest. There's also an essay in here about the decline of America. But I guess the question that it raises to me is, what are the boundary lines or the guardrails around anthropology?

I mean, I guess I'm asking, what do you think anthropology as a discipline gives you as a tool for this kind of historical and social commentary? Well, in many ways, I don't think of myself as an anthropologist as much as someone who uses tools of various disciplines, history, biology, anthropology, to look at the world. But the anthropological lens encourages one to, A, look beneath the surface of things, as the book is titled. In other words, not judging appearances, but seeking something deeper to understand the real occurrence of a culture. And that perspective you can apply to really, that line of kind of critical thinking,

you can apply, and perspective, you can apply to almost any phenomena. And even one's vocation should just be a lens through which you see and interpret the world, but just for a time. The goal is to make living itself your vocation, you know, the act of being alive. And, you know, I've picked up things that have become core to my, not just way

of thinking, but my way of living from people I've admired. I mean, Gary Snyder, the poet, I never went anywhere when I was a young man without a collection of his poems in my backpack or pocket. I once asked him what was the best thing we could ever do for the wild and he said, stay put. And the irony is that in COVID we had to stay put and look what happened to the natural world. It rebounded overnight. But another powerful influence to me has always been the writer Lawrence Durrell and his beautiful book Spirit of Place. He said, if you want to understand the people, just find a quiet point in their landscape and listen to the whispered messages of the wild.

He thought that landscape held the key to character. He said you could depopulate France and settle it with Mongolians and find in a generation the same national traits, the affection for beauty, fine food, the reflex of disdain for Americans. This has just all come out of the soil of France. And that's what Margaret Atwood, fine food, the reflex of disdain for Americans. This has just all come out of the soil of France. And that's what Margaret Atwood, you know, famously,

was getting at in her book Survival, when she said the three words to understand England, U.S. and Canada were island for England and frontier for Americans, survival for Canada. This idea that the weight of the North, the weight of the winter. And I know that may seem really retro in a Canada that mercifully has had its complexion transformed over the last generation, but I still feel

that there is something about the power of our landscape to inform who we are. You know, I can't help but think that the weight of the winter, the fact that for much of our history there are more lakes than people, creates something of a kind of deep humility that has sometimes even been the subject of ridicule. But for me it's something I'm very, very proud of. And I know myself to be a total product of the landscape of British Columbia. Shall we walk on?

Sure. There's an essay in the book called The Art of Exploring. And in it you write, Territorial exploration has rarely been divorced from power and conquest. Is that part of the problem that humans as explorers are liable to destroy the very things we want to explore? Well, I think it's more just an issue of politics and power. I mean, you know, I wrote an essay that the real explorers,

the ones who went where no humans had been, of course, were those who walked out of Africa 65,000 years ago. And since then, what we call exploration has never been divorced from political power. I mean, it's just sort of amusing. And it's all part of this sort of cult of the first, which in all the years I was at National Geographic, there was this pressure to be or to do the first of something. You know, I just realized that that had a long, long history. So when Jacques Cartier goes in and discovers the St. Lawrence, it's in fact home to thousands

of indigenous people. And it just goes through history like that. Here in Bingham, discovering Machu Picchu, which was well known to local people, who told them where it was and how to get there. You know, Malory walking across the map to get to Everest, a mountain no one had approached at close quarters, except for the hundreds of Tibetan nomads they met as they trudged across the Tibetan plateau. And that whole cult of exploration reached its sort of peak with the quest for the poles, right? The North and South Poles, which were absolutely meaningless destinations.

It wasn't like seeking the nautical achievement of finding the way through the Northwest Passage. This was an arbitrary point of both national and personal prestige, and it was really the beginning of the cult of self of the 21st century and 20th century. And I reference in that same essay the journeys of Herodotus, who five centuries before Christ went out to explore the known world, and when he came back to Athens and had the audacity to say something interesting was going on over in Persia, he was ostracized. And had he only reported the name of his horse, what he had eaten for breakfast, and the name of a river that he had been the first Greek to swim, therefore it was new to the Greeks,

no one would have gotten on his case. But he wasn't like that. He traveled eyes wide open to wonder. He reported the poetry of the people, the strange creatures of the marshes, and he actually essentially said, those people have something to say that the world needs to hear. And again, this is where anthropology matters because not just cultural myopia but cultural clash has been behind every single human conflict in history. So in a way anthropology is the antidote to nativism, it's the antidote to hate, it's the antidote to racism. You know it's a vision of how we could really

live as a multicultural pluralistic world. Is there a target that we can aim at? I mean, it's an imperfect process, as you're describing it. And you'd also describe it, I hear you describing it very much as a very much personal process. This is a responsibility that each of us has to take on. Well, you know, I don't expect to be able to transform the world. In fact, Peter Matheson, another one of my favorite writers, a wonderful man, he said that anyone who thinks they can change the world is both wrong and dangerous. And he had in mind, of course, people like Hitler and Stalin and Mao.

But there's a kernel of truth in mind, of course, people like Hitler and Stalin and Mao, but there's a kernel of truth in that. It's the curse of history that's been those individuals who have taken upon themselves, whether it's Lenin, whether it's Mao, whether it's Napoleon or Hitler. But change happens incrementally, but it happens collectively, right? So all you can do is add your bit to the process and that's what in fact happens. We're standing here on a bit of a border walk. This looks like a fairly marshy area or it could be when it's wet. There's a big stream that comes in through here and it's been dry for about five days

here and it's hard to imagine what happens when we have huge rains that we normally get on a daily basis through these dark months of winter. And this creek comes right into the head of the lake here. We're just about to come to the head of the lake where the reservoir reached its highest point. But this low flat here is highly productive and you can see here lots of remnant stumps from the time it was first logged. I mean look over here one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. These are massive cathedral trees. So what do you see on the ground here? What's growing in these? Well, the problem is that what you see on the ground is the whole degradation of the ecosystem,

because all you see on the ground beyond moss are sword ferns, and sword ferns are the one thing that the deer do not consume. And you also have horsetail here, equicetum. Now this is an interesting story, because the coal swamp forests that gave us coal, all of our coal and gas, oil, this order of plants was the size of redwoods. It's called calamites. It's just like a princess pine or lycopodium,

with a plant called lycopredendron, again the size of redwoods. And now, these represent remnants of massive orders of plants that were driven to extinction by the rise of the flowering plants. So you're looking here at a very ancient plant. This is completely bizarre. And this is why we call it scouring rush, because it's full of silicon, right? It's the only plant that actually fixes gold as well. You know that silicon? So that's where the scouring, we use it to wash our pots.

In the preface to the book, you write about how not being able to travel, not being able to do very much outside of your home, you turn to writing and you wrote a lot. You also note that nature was quote unquote, reborn briefly during the pandemic, then it was undone after the pandemic ended. And you referred to what I think you called our capacity as a species to forget. What do we need to do to not forget? Well, it's a very good question because the ability to forget is obviously hugely adaptive, right? Because it allows us to move on. to move on. You know, I was really surprised that people noticed and commented on the sudden resilience, you know, suddenly, you know, people in Kathmandu and Karachi being able

to see the white peaks of the Himalaya for the first time in memory or, you know, Kaiman and Baja that hadn't been seen or great flocks of flamingos in the marshlands outside of Mumbai. Rivers like the river that reflows through Medellin, Colombia, became like a trout stream. The resilience of nature was incredible. But as soon as the crisis was over, we just didn't absorb that lesson and we went back to our old ways with a kind of a certainty that was itself haunting, right? And I think maybe because we were all so overwhelmed and so caught up in our own personal sagas

during the lockdown that that lesson that nature was telling us, we saw it but we didn't seem to take it to heart. We certainly didn't change our ways in terms of our relationship to the natural world. The lesson that Wade is pointing towards, I think, is that there is always cause for hope if only we pay attention to what the world and its peoples are telling us. On page 2 of his CBC Massey lectures, referring to the myriad cultures of our planet, he writes, All these peoples teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope. other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope.

On the very last page of those lectures, he writes, It is said in the Sahara that if a stranger turns up at your tent, you will slaughter the last goat that provides the only milk for your children to feast your guest. One never knows when you will be that stranger turning up in the night, hungry and thirsty and in need of shelter. As I watched Muhammad pour me a cup of tea, I thought to myself, these are the moments that allow us all to hope. To act in a manner that is meaningful, effective, and truly transformative, we need a language not of desperation and doom, but of confidence and determination.

On a mission to save the planet, pessimism is an indulgence. Orthodoxy, the enemy of invention. Despair, an insult to the imagination. The global energy grid will be transformed, if not in our lifetime, then certainly in that of our grandchildren. The impetus and motivation will be hope, not fear. The agent of change are human ingenuity, the adaptive capacity to innovate and invent that has always allowed our species to thrive.

So much of your writing and so much of your talk and your public presence over the years has been inspired by things you've learned, things you've seen, things you've experienced presence over the years has been inspired by things you've learned, things you've seen, things you've experienced among other cultures outside of white western culture, North American culture. What's your takeaway from that? What are the most important things that you think stick with you? Well, I think the grand idea, of course, is that you recognize that we're all connected. Humanity is one single whole.

And the idea that every culture has something to say each deserves to be heard, I keep saying that, but that is something very fundamental to me, because it's the opposite of the cultural myopia, the idea that my world is a real world and everybody else has a failed attempt to be me, that I think has been the curse of humanity. The other thing that I've found both deeply moving and inspiring is how you discover that every culture faces the same adaptive imperatives, has the same complexities, have the same chasms between or gaps between aspiration and how people actually live.

In other words, the ideal versus the real that people everywhere are struggling with. In other words, we have these metaphors that drive us forward, these beliefs, these values, and we don't always adhere to them, but they remind there constantly as guideposts as to how we know we should be living. And I think that's true in every culture. And the ability to communicate across what seem to be deep chasms between beliefs and ways of thinking, ways of being, when you discover that you can actually cross that quite readily, that too is, I think, deeply promising. And just the sheer joy of being human and alive. You know, I often say this to young people that the one lesson of this idea that every culture has something to say

is that they have teachers out there all over the world that they didn't even know they had. You can sail with the Polynesians who cross the Pacific guided by the stars. You can sit at the feet of a kurendera in Oaxaca. You can be in a monastery in the Himalaya in the presence of someone who has achieved Buddhahood, enlightened You can be in a ceremony in Dahomey or Benin, where people literally respond to the rhythm of the drums and the power of the chants to transform themselves into spirit beings through spirit possession. You can be in the Arctic and hunt with the Inuit in the light of the midnight sun.

You can…all these incredible things that I've been so fortunate to be able to do, to cross the Sahara, to sail down the length of the Amazon, to cross the Andes, to hang out with the Mamos. There's a kind of a, just a poetry in the, I mean, I just find it so inherently fascinating, inspiring, and hopeful that human beings have figured out so many ways to live, to survive, to thrive, to find access to the spirit realm. I mean, what's not to like about that? That's a pretty good ending.

I like that. On Ideas, you've been listening to part two of Anthropologist Wade Davis in conversation with Ideas producer Philip Coulter. Wade Davis' most recent book, Beneath the Surface of Things, is published by Greystone Books. This program was produced by Philip Coulter. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso.

The senior producer is Nikola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.