Ideas - What Lies Beneath the Surface of Modernity: Anthropologist Wade Davis

Episode Date: January 6, 2025

Anthropologist Wade Davis has smoked toad, tried ayahuasca, and figured out the zombie cocktail in Haiti. He takes a walk through the forest with IDEAS producer Philip to talk about the wonders of our planet and ideas in his latest book of essays, Beneath the Surface of Things.

On Mother's Day 1985, Philadelphia did something unthinkable. The city had been engaged in a standoff with a radical organization called MOVE. The helicopter takes off, then... The city dropped a bomb on MOVE's headquarters, killing 11 people, five of them children. My daughters were taken away by this corrupt government! Why is it so many have never heard of the MOVE bombing? Black people will never get justice in America. The Africa's versus America,

available now everywhere you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. There is 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. Change is driven by political forces, but change can only happen when there's some catalyst, some spark that shifts the entire dynamic. The vision of the Earth from space, for example. You know, until Apollo 8, there was no place in the world that had a Ministry of the Environment. Now there's no nation that doesn't.

Wade Davis is a great communicator. It's his role as a spokesperson for the planet and its peoples that makes Wade special. His first book, published in 1985, was about the search for the combination of drugs that creates zombies in Haitian culture, a search that morphed into an exploration of Haitian voodoo spirituality.

Now, 40 years later, Wade has published a book of essays beneath the surface of things. Most people around the world interact with the natural world not through a kind of a metaphor of extraction, but through some notion of reciprocity, a basic iteration of the idea that the Earth owes its bounty to people. People in turn owe their fidelity to the world. Wade 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 talk about the ideas that have driven his life's work. We're calling this program Beneath the Surface of Things. Can you just describe what we're looking at? Where are we? program beneath the surface of things. Can you just describe what we're looking at? Where are we? Well, we're standing on an access road to Clarnie Lake, which is a regional park. We're surrounded by what most people would think is an extraordinary robust forest of

Douglas fir and Western hemlock, red cedar. But if you peel back the veil a little bit, you'll see the complete dominance in the lower story on the ground of sword ferns. This is because they are not eaten by the deer. The herbaceous flora that would have been on the ground is decimated by the overpopulation of feral deer. By the same token, you'll notice even a beautiful holly, daisies plant, so you can see the females come in

into the red fruits of winter, of Christmas, but again, that's an invasive species. So what the baseline flora would have been like is something that botanists are trying to reconstitute, and there's a series of plots on the island botanists are trying to reconstitute. And there's a series of plots on the island where we're really trying to see if we can bring back the abundance of herbaceous growth that would have been here. The trees are really impressive. I mean, some of them are two and three feet wide, diameter best height.

Even this douglas fir right here is a substantial tree. And it shows you how rich this part of the world is. I mean, because everything on this island was clear cut, probably in the lifetime of my father, the early years of his life, 1920s, turn of the century. And we'll see as we take this walk, some of the leftover remnant cedar stumps will give you a sense of the scale of the forest at the

before industrial forestry came in. But again it's kind of I've always found it optimistic because it shows you how quickly how dynamic this ecology is and that is something that's quite true for the entire Pacific Coast you know we often forget that 20,000 years ago, all of this was under ice. We forget that something as iconic as a red cedar tree didn't even reach this coast until about 6,000 years ago. And that actually sort of sparked the fluorescence

of civilization up and down this coast, because cedar was a tree of life. And so the ability of this ecosystem to regenerate is also a metaphor for the Fucundity of nature. I mean, nature is so robust, as we saw, for example, in the early days of the COVID lockdown. I mean, suddenly it was amazing. I mean, the beaches of Baja were covered with caiman. You had wild boar in the streets of Barcelona. You had, you know, flocks of flamingos in the wetlands of Mumbai. Grizzly bears in the valley floor of the Yosemite.

There was, in a moment of kind of global peril, we had this kernel of hope, which was the realization of just how capable the earth is to regenerate. And I've always found great hope in that. I first met Wade Davis in 1997 when I interviewed him for this program. I was about to leave for Peru for a documentary series about the Inca, and Wade had just published One River, a book with a broad canvas. At once the story of two friends and mentors, his guides to the anthropological wonders of Latin America, then the record of a personal odyssey through the region, the book is also

a meditation on the nature of anthropology itself. What is this profession, Wade asks, that looks under rocks and up into the trees, that explores the mysteries of the many cultures of humanity. Cultures that all ask the same questions. Why are we here? How shall we arrange ourselves? What can we know about the world without and within? How might we respond to the mystery? I'm just looking around here and you can see the remains of some old stumps. That would be an old cedar that came down. I mean, the trees were truly monumental.

I mean, this would have been a forest this size, you know, cathedral. So I guess the other part of the story that you're telling is that if this was all clear-cut 100-odd years ago, nature has an astonishing ability to reconstitute itself. Total. I mean, if you think of the wealth of rivers, for example, I mean, you know, in 1967, the British Museum of Natural History declared the Thames to be a biologically dead river.

I mean, not even an iota of oxygen in it. Certainly no forms of life. Well, today, there are 125 species of fish in the Thames, and dolphins swim beneath the bridges of London. At the mouth of the Hudson, a tourist looking over from Manhattan saw a humpback whale. So these rivers have an amazing ability to regenerate, as does nature itself. And that's what we're seeing in this forest. I mean, this by anybody's standards in the, would be a towering west coast rainforest.

Look around and tell me what else you see growing here. What are the other plants? You've talked about the fern, some holly and... Well, you know what I see when I look at a forest? This was, to me, the great revelation of botany. Most people, when they look at a forest, they just see a wall of green, pretty when taken as a whole. But it's only when you pull out the elements that you begin to see the true story of a

forest. And when you know phylogeny, which is the origin of plants, and you know the relationship, taxonomy of plants, suddenly every denizen of the forest has a story. And the great story of botany that, I don't know why it's not celebrated more, it's kind of like photosynthesis. I mean, no politician should be able to run for office if they can't recite the formula of photosynthesis. I mean, that's the formula of life. You know, the very fact that, you know, water comes together, you know, with carbon dioxide sparked by photons of light to create oxygen that we breathe

and carbohydrates that we eat. I mean, that's it. I remember a friend of mine used to hate that book, A Secret Life of Plants, that made a big deal about plants responding to Mozart. And Tim used to say, why would a plant give a shit about Mozart? I mean, they can eat light, isn't that enough? So that's what makes these rainforests so rare. It's not just their beautiful, magnificent towering, it's as an ecosystem their remnant once was at a time of the dinosaurs.

You're talking about a process that's taken place over millions of years. Can we engage in a kind of thought experiment and go back in time, talk about what our sense of the world might have been before the arrival of humans. Is it possible to imagine a snapshot of a past world? Well, you know, I think the abundance, first of all, the world's always changing, you know, I mean, not just in terms of plate tectonics and deep geology, but in terms of biology and evolution, I mean, whole epics have come and gone. I mean, sometimes, you know, catalyzed by events like massive meteor collisions and so on,

extinction of the dinosaurs. I mean, this is ultimately the most humbling realization we should have is that everything comes and goes. It's like empires. Every empire is born to die. Every great era of human history is born to change. I mean, these coasts here in British Columbia, and again, I find this kind of optimistic.

If you're humble, you begin to think in geological time or even evolutionary time. I mean, 20,000 years ago is a prick of time in the scheme of things. Yet 20,000 years ago, we are under ice. You know, 6,000 years ago, the red cedar arrived here. I mean, the red cedar, places like Haida Gwaii, for example,

when the first humans entered the world, according to Haida mythology, they encountered not towering rainforests, but a tundra of open barren grassland. And we now know from the pollen record that's exactly what it was 14,000 years ago. There was, in fact, a land bridge across Hecate Strait to the mainland. And so the unbelievable pace of ecological change is astonishing. And so the whole civilization of this coast was catalyzed by the arrival of the Red Cedar

Tree, but the Red Cedar Tree was relatively late in the botanical record, and it coincided with what we see from the archaeological record as the beginning of the fluorescence of the great civilizations of this coast, the only civilization to achieve such a level of sophistication without benefit of agriculture. Can we talk a little bit about that transition? You're talking about how nature itself has transformed the world through time and there are natural forces that we have had no control over, probably for a very good reason, that have brought about magnificent changes in the world as we see

it around us. But there's another kind of change, of course, which is the change that came about once humans arrive and the impact that we start to have on the Earth. Can you talk a little bit about that? Like, what do you see as the main markers of the effect of humanity on our planet? Well, first of all, when we speak of climate change or the biodiversity crisis, these are very serious situations that threaten all of humanity. But it's important to remember they weren't caused by humanity. They were caused by a particular worldview with a certain idea of nature. And most people around the world interact with the natural world not through a kind of a metaphor

of extraction, but through some notion of reciprocity, a basic iteration of the idea that the earth owes its bounty to people. People in turn owe their fidelity to the world. I mean, earth owes its bounty to people, people in turn owe their fidelity to the world. I mean, again, the human footprint on the earth is so ephemeral. I mean, we only really came into our own around 65,000 years ago, and at that time, some of us stayed home in Africa and some of us left and embarked on this extraordinary journey that in 40,000 years brought the human spirit to every corner of a habitable world. But the key revelation of our era, and one that I think in time will be as consequential

as the vision of the Earth from space brought home by Apollo, which has absolutely transformed the way we think about everything. The other revelation also from science, also from a great journey, was the gift of genetics. And in our lifetime, geneticists have proven it to be true what philosophers have always hoped, that we're all interconnected, that we are one big human family. And that means, if we accept the scientific truth truth that we share the same genetic endowment, it means that we share the same genius. And how that genius is expressed is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation and adaptation. And every culture shares that genius. And

that's why every culture is something to say and deserves to be heard. And every culture at the same time, and this is a great lesson of anthropology, is a product of its own choices, its own history, its own circumstances. And we in the West, we can literally trace our ascendancy to a set of ideas in the Enlightenment, when we keenly and properly try to liberate ourselves

from the tyranny of absolute faith. And when Descartes said that all that exists is mind and material, he in a phrase liberated us, but he also deanimated the world. And that's why Saul Bellows said, science has made a housecleaning of belief. And the idea that a flight of a bird could have meaning or that a mountain could be a deity was ridiculed. And once you de-animate the world, it's a lot easier to treat it as a material object to be exploited.

And that's precisely what we've done, and that's what's driven our way of thinking. And the key thing is that we're quite unusual in our way of thinking, however ubiquitous and powerful that way of thinking has become. And most societies around the world, the vast majority, unusual in that way of thinking, however ubiquitous and powerful that way of thinking has become. And most societies around the world, the vast majority, as I said, interact with some kind of metaphor of reciprocity. And the reason that's important is that it changes the way

that people think about their place on the planet. And if I'm raised as I was to believe that these forests existed to be cut, I mean, I went to the logging camps and worked as a logger at a time when the absolute ideological commitment of scientific forestry was to eliminate all the oil growth in British Columbia. That was just the way of things. That's how it was to be. And that made me very different as a child from, say, Haida or Kwakwakawak, raised to believe that the forests were to be engaged, you know, Hukuk and the crooked beak of heaven. My godchildren in Peru are raised to believe that a mountain is an Apu deity that will direct their destiny.

Whether it is or is not, it's not the point. The belief has a profound impact on the culture. And that's one of the great lessons of anthropology. Just seeing a lot of ducks out there, a lot of geese. Look at that, isn't that beautiful? Yeah, it's very beautiful. I often paddle out there in my kayak and just sort of disappear in that forest of dead

cedar snags, It's incredibly beautiful. If you recognize that marriage need not exclusively imply a man and a woman, that single mothers can be good mothers, and that two men or two women can raise good families as long as there is love in the home, it's because you've embraced values and intuitions inconceivable to your great-grandparents. And if you believe that wisdom may be found in all spiritual traditions, that people in all places are always dancing with new possibilities for life, that one preserves jam, but not culture, then you share a vision of compassion and inclusion that is perhaps the most sublime revelation of our species,

the scientific realization that all of humanity is one interconnected and undivided whole. Wade ends the book, One River, with a thought from his friend, the anthropologist Tim Plowman, who once said, quote, that science and myth were one, that the natural world was but the manifestation of thoughts and impulses occurring on endless metaphysical planes, all enveloped by the mind of the healer. It's an idea that runs through all of Wade's writing, speaking, and teaching. That the planes of our existence are separated by the thinnest of membranes,

barriers that are sometimes permeable, fungible, so that we are not quite sure which world we are in. We're only sure it is all one world. Looking through the trees here, we can see, is this the lake? This is Kalarney Lake, and I don't know when this was, it's an artificial lake. There's an old cement dam, but salmon still come up this creek. There's a hatchery, and you can still see at the end of the lake

the cedar forest that was inundated. And you have these kind of ghost-like snags and remnant cedars from the time of the flooding, which again speaks to the durability of that wood. But again, this is one of the most beautiful places in the Lower Mainland, and yet we have to remember it all fell to the woodsman's axe. So again, that gives us some hope. In your most recent book, which is titled Beneath the Surface of Things, and we'll

get into talking a bit about more that's in the book later on, but in the book you invite us to think about the world pretty much as it existed at the time of our grandparents. And you talk about how there was a time 150 years ago when race, for example, was accepted as a biological fact and that there was a hierarchy of cultures and some were superior to others and different peoples were different rungs of the biological ladder as it were. So I guess the question is what changed in our own time to make that kind of thinking turn around? We don't believe these things now that we believed

150 years ago. You know it's one thing I always say to young people who are impatient with the pace of change is just to consider the values of their great-grandparents or even their grandparents in some cases. And as you say, on issues of race, the position of women, attitudes towards the environment, the legitimacy of diverse interpretations of the spiritual realm, almost any single value, not only would you disagree with your great-grandparents, you'd probably find what they believe morally reprehensible, much as you might honor their memory. And the question is, how did that change so quickly?

Change is driven by political forces, but change can only happen, that kind of profound change, when there's some catalyst, some spark that shifts the entire dynamic. The vision of the Earth from space, for example. You know, until Apollo 8, there was no place in the world that had a ministry of the environment. Now there's no nation that doesn't have that, however effective they may or may not be. Everything changed with that image from space. And what really sparked our ability to transform the way we think was a strange group of anthropologists, contrarians all,

who came together around the legendary Franz Boas at Columbia University and the Museum of Natural History in New York. And he was the first to really ask how the nature of human perceptions are formed. What is, he coined the notion of culture as we understand it to be. And his big breakthrough came in Canada. This is why it's so important. He was a physicist who began to see during his PhD in Germany that the way he thought about things depended on his point of view or his point of view and

formed how he thought about things and When he was in Baffin Island he was caught out in a terrible blizzard and his life was completely in the hands of his Inuit companion and he realized who the hell are we to call these people primitive? What the hell does that mean? They're geniuses. You know, they forged a life from the cold. And by the same token, he then came out of the Pacific Northwest and encountered what could only be described as high civilization in an entire world without agriculture that

had never succumbed to the cult of the seeds. So he began to think anew, and his thoughts were the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. And if you, for example, today think it's normal for a Jewish boy to pursue the Buddhist Dharma, if you think it's normal for two women to have a good family as long as there's love in the home, if you think that every religion is legitimate, provided it satisfies the spiritual needs of the people with doing no harm, well, you're a child of anthropology.

These ideas came about from these unbelievable thinkers, and they weren't comfortable. They were persecuted. They lost their jobs. They were hounded by the FBI, attacked for the subversive that they were. Most of them, many of them were women. Margaret Mead, the incomparable Zora Neale Hurston, of course Ruth Benedict, Margaret's lover. And Benedict famously said, the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. These were

of anthropologists to make the world safe for human differences. These were unbelievable pioneers, and that's why I think that Boas ranks with Freud and Darwin and Einstein as one of the four pillars of modernity. These ideas have now become mainstream, as you're saying, in what, in our own lifetime, in the last hundred years or so. So this is the work and these are the ideas of a relatively eclectic group of anthropologists, but they're now mainstream ideas. What happened to take these ideas and make them mainstream? Everything you're describing about what Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas had to say and what they were teaching us

is now fairly mainstream, but in its time it was radical, but how did it become popular? Yeah, I mean, they never lived to see it become not just recognized, but in a sense, informed the zeitgeist of the modern era. You know, I think it's the nature of change, and change can be sparked by events, trends, whatever. I mean, I just don't think we can begin to underestimate

the impact that the vision of the Earth from space had on us. You know, suddenly we went from imagining the world to be an infinite place to seeing it as a small jewel floating in, as the astronauts famously said, the velvet void of space. And in a sense, everything changed then. I mean, think about it. When we were kids just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was an environmental victory. Nobody spoke of the biosphere or biodiversity. Now these are terms used by school children.

So for me, anthropology is all about promoting the idea that every culture has something to say. Each deserves to be heard, that the other peoples of the world aren't failed attempts at being you, whoever you are. Every culture is a unique manifestation of the human spirit. And to me, it's the poetics of that that draw me. I mean, that's why language loss is such a potent idea, because it really is something people can understand.

What would it be like to lose your language? Well, that happens almost every fortnight. A language, of course, is not merely a set of grammatical rules or a vocabulary. It is a flash of the human spirit, the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes in a material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem

of spiritual possibilities. Of the 7,000 languages spoken today, fully half are not being taught to children. Effectively, unless something changes, they will disappear within our lifetimes. Half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction. Just think about it. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence? To be the last of your people to speak your native tongue? To have no way to pass on the wisdom of your ancestors or anticipate the promise of your descendants. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of

someone somewhere on earth roughly every two weeks. On average, every fortnight an elder dies and carries with him or her into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. What this really means is that within a generation or two we will be witnessing the loss of fully half of humanity's social, cultural, and intellectual legacy. This is a hidden backdrop of our age. In an essay from his new book, Beneath the Surface of Things, Wade Davis notes that an anthropologist like Franz Boas would never sit back in silence as fully half the languages of the world hover on the brink of extinction. Franz

Boas and Wade Davis would also agree, change and technology are not a threat to culture and indigenous cultures are not destined to fade away. The real threat to culture, says Wade, is the misuse of power. If human beings are the agents of cultural loss, we can surely also be facilitators of cultural survival. It's an activist approach to the question about the role of anthropology in society. To what extent does the observer, the describer, the scientist have a responsibility to be an agent of change? I want to pick you up with some of this,

referring to a lot of your own thinking and your own writing as being really activist quote-unquote In your own career There seems to be some kind of tension between what? Anthropology was supposed to be doing as a discipline and what you thought it could be doing I'm just curious as to what led to that rethinking for you I think when I was recruited as a professor at UBC and I and I experienced what anthropology had become in the kind of postmodern world and And it seems to me, and I hope this isn't unfair, and it's certainly not universally true, but it certainly seems that academic anthropologists spend a lot of time studying themselves and studying anthropology.

And maybe that's a useful intellectual endeavor, but at a time when the forests of the Panan are being destroyed, when the world of the Inuit is melting from beneath them, at a time when the Chinese have literally millions of Uyghurs in concentration camps, it seems to me not very helpful. And I know that some of my colleagues would view me as completely out of touch, as one put it, engaged in the anthropology of the 1970s, as if human rights had a kind of a season, you know. And this is something that's really propelled me from the very start, because I was acutely aware because of my training, my experience in the Amazon, that the same forces that were eroding biological diversity were of course afflicting culture.

And now that is sort of taken as a given, and people are recognizing that Indigenous people, for example, are the titular stewards of about 80% of the remaining terrestrial biodiversity in the planet. But that was a long time coming. terrestrial biodiversity in the planet, but that was a long time coming. On Ideas, you're listening to Beneath the Surface of Things, anthropologist Wade Davis in conversation with Ideas producer Philip Coulter on A Long Rumble Through the Forest on Bowen Island in British Columbia. You can hear ideas wherever you get your podcasts and on CBC Radio One in Canada,

across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell.

I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who sober Jeff is. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Anthropologist Wade Davis has been described as quote, a rare combination of scientists, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity.

At the beginning of his career, he specialized in ethnobotany, the study of the ways in which indigenous peoples use plants and herbs for both sacred and medicinal purposes, and the ways in which the border between the two frequently blurs. That idea that categories of knowledge are less distinct than we think, that there is complexity to all things and few easy answers, that the more we know, the less we truly understand, has led him to a deep commitment to the importance of preserving both the cultures of the world and the natural environment itself. We don't know what we don't know.

His most recent book, Beneath the Surface of Things, is a collection of essays on everything from the significance of the ascent of Everest to the art of exploring to the idea of the sacred. I met up with Wade near his home on Bowen Island off the coast of British Columbia, and we went for a walk through the woods to talk about his ideas, his new book, and the natural world around us. Here's more from that conversation. I'm going to pause here a moment to just look around. We've come over a couple of small

streams. I'm looking around and there's moss on the trees here. Yeah, what you've got, we're coming, see this is sort of, these creeks come in and form an alluvial fan on this side of the lake. So do you see much of a change in the topography of what we're looking at? We've got, you're seeing the consequence of the inundation over here. The lake was dammed when the creek was, Clarnie Creek is what it's called now, was dammed whenever it was in the early part of the 20th century. The reservoir that

was established came all the way up here and flooded the forest. But the remarkable thing is you get these snags of red cedar that have stood in the water dead like poles since that time. It just shows you the durability of the species, the wood of the red cedar tree. But there's an awful lot of life out there. There's beaver dams and ponds. There's a lot of wildlife. Barn owls, incredible concentrations of ravens and bald eagles. There is in fact a cougar on the island right now that swam over and is creating some excitement. There are no bears on the island, there are no predators on the island, and a huge population of course of feral deer, which has devastated the flora.

You're talking about the inundation over here, which is the remains of a dam and the damage that's happened. So there's always, if you like, the footprint of a dam and the damage that's happened. So there's always, if you like, the footprint of the past and particularly what people have done to change the natural environment. In one of your books, you make a reference to talking about anthropology. You say, I had no interest in preserving anything. So we have a sense, I think, most people have a sense that we want know, we want to get back to some kind of perfect past where the footprint of humans was less destructive

than it has been since. That's a very Western idea. Indigenous people would never think of human beings as a problem, but the only the solution, because it's only through the human imagination that the wonder of the divine can come into being. The idea of preservation, you preserve jam, not culture. Every culture is always dancing with new possibilities for life. The problem in terms of the impact

on cultural diversity and integrity is never change any more than its technology. It's always power. You know, it's always identifiable forces that are crushing generally in order to get access to resources. And that's actually an optimistic observation as I know often written, because if human beings

are in fact the agents of cultural destruction, we can be the facilitators of cultural survival. These aren't societies that are fading away as if incapable of keeping up with modern times. In every case, dynamic living people is being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. And that's part of what my writing is all about, is trying to ask, why are we doing that? And for what purpose are we doing that?

And for whose benefit are we doing that? I guess part of the question has to do with to what degree we observe the state of the planet and what needs to be done with it. And to what extent do we try and impose our own handprint, if you like, on how that change is supposed to take place. And the question I have goes back to, I think, maybe your first book, which was The Serpent and the Rainbow,

which was about your search for the so-called zombie cocktail in Haiti. And I remember at the very end of the book, you talk about a kind of moral dilemma that you end up in, which is that you are offered in exchange for a large amount of money the opportunity to see somebody resurrected from the supposed dead, a zombie. And the question in your mind is, as I remember it, on the one hand if I can see this, if I can observe this, it would prove my theory, but on the other hand, if I can see this, if I can observe this, it would prove my theory. But on the other hand, the moral dilemma is that if I pay all this money, is that money then going to instigate the fact that somebody is going to be made to suffer? And the answer to that dilemma was pretty easy for me, I recall, because I didn't go to Haiti to find zombies. I wanted to make sense out of sensation and to take this phenomena that had been used

in an explicitly racist way to denigrate not just Haitian culture but all of African civilization and try to make sense out of it. And fundamentally that book was the zombie investigation, was an opportunity to draw attention to the way that we've dismissed African faith. I mean, you ask yourself to name the great religions of the world, there's always one continent left out, sub-Saharan Africa, as if the people had no spiritual beliefs. Well, of course, by ethnographic definition, they did.

I guess the question is an unanswerable one, which is to what degree do we have to just stand back and let nature do what it has to do? And to what extent is it legitimate for us to get involved and making choices? That's a very good question, Philip, and it touches on something that people misunderstand about anthropology.

They think that anthropologists embrace an extreme relativism, as if every human practice must be defended simply because it exists. And one of my great mentors, David Mabry-Lewis, always said, anthropology never calls for the elimination of judgment, just the suspension of judgment, so that the judgments were ethically and morally obliged to make as human beings can be informed once. And that perfect example of that is the Voodoo investigation. You know, this amazing religious visionary realm, which is Voodoo, which like any other religion is just attempting to anticipate the mystery of death and understand the alignment

between human beings and the spirit realm. And so that's where, to me, the anthropological lens can be so helpful, revealing phenomena that are completely legitimate but have been unjustly and often, in the case of Africa, for racist reasons, denigrated. This question of what it is that anthropology can do lies behind much of Wade Davis's thinking and writing. The anthropological lens, as he calls it, reveals to us the myriad ways in which human societies have attempted to make sense of the world, showing us both the infinite ways the world may be interpreted and also the possibilities of the human mind.

There is no one correct way of reading what we observe. This is a theme of his 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, The Wayfinders, subtitled Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. Here's the opening of that book. One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that in the Amazon, Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the Buddhists in Tibet still

pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to remember the central revelation of anthropology, the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago. In the background too, a lot of your writing, a lot of your thinking, is the fact that there are almost untellable riches to be discovered when we look at other cultures and civilizations that we've largely ignored. And in one of your books, I think I'm paraphrasing, but you have a line along the lines of you say something like, why does it matter if exotic cultures and their belief systems disappear? Well, the question, I guess, would be, why does it matter?

Because every human culture is an expression of the imagination and a legacy of thousands of years. You know, everyone really does have something to say. You know, one of the frightening traits of modernity, and I think perhaps this may or may not go back in time as well, I don't know, but the fluidity of our memory and our capacity to forget. And this touches on an earlier question of yours.

You know, the scientists call this shifting baseline syndrome. Another kind of dry term for what is in fact a haunting trait of our species. We're able to adapt to almost any degree of environmental degradation. In 1871, Buffalo outnumbered people in North America. And from the height of the population to the reduction to a curiosity, it was just eight years. Explicit policy of the U.S. military to deny the cultures of the plains their main food. And when the last of the Buffalo was gone and the last of the chiefs was in the reservations, the commander who orchestrated the campaign suggested to Congress that a

commemorative medal be minted with a dead buffalo on one side and a dead Indian on the other. And now, the thing that was so haunting is that the people of Iowa live in a landscape claustrophobic in its monotony. Cornfields and silos, and the time of the buffalo is as distant from their lives, is irrelevant to their lives as a fall of Rome. And yet it happened in the lifetime of their grandparents, right? The same thing here on the coast of British Columbia. In the lifetime of my father,

when the sockeye returned, the ocean turned color. You know, the abundance, the fecundity. the color, the abundance, the fecundity. And we see this time and time again. I mean, most Canadians have no idea what an old growth rainforest really looks like. Most Canadians, particularly those who are not from the coast here, would come on this walk with us today around Clarnie Lake and really have no idea that this lake is manmade,

that this forest has been reborn from a clear cut. How would they know? And so that capacity to forget is really haunting. I remember once in Haiti, Haiti in the 1920s was 80% forested with one of the richest Rhineland forests of the Antilles. Today the forest cover is like 2% and I was with a voodoo priest looking at this just scabrous, leprous patch of half-hearted

trees and he began to wax eloquent as if words could squeeze beauty out of what he was looking at. I could only think of locusts, he thought of angels, right? But that's how we adapt, that's how we keep going. So the scary thing about that is it's absolutely without doubt that human beings can adapt to almost any degree, not just an ecological degradation, but as we've seen through the sordid years of the 20th century, any degree of social and basic degradation. Before we go any further, I want to look around and just point out what looks like something quite remarkable. Right in front of us there's what looks like a tree that must have fallen maybe a hundred years ago. It's

called a nursery tree. A nursery tree. Can you describe what we're looking at? You've got a long rotting old red cedar probably about four feet across, stretching 120 feet. And out of it, you have one, two, three, four, five hemlock trees of various ages and configurations ranging from, I don't know, two and a half feet, three feet across, down to maybe a foot across. And these have all just grown out of the humus and organic material. They're straddling the tree. They're straddling the tree. Well

here, over here, look at this red cedar coming out of an old red cedar stump. Okay. This is a big cedar that we're looking at right here. I mean that is, that's substantially bigger to what's at about seven feet across. I suppose I should be using metric. But that probably was, I would say that that was here at the time that this was clear cut, but not big enough to bother to cut and for some reason it was spare. Back then, they didn't have this policy of taking down every stick. Like when I was working as a logger in the 70s,

you had to take down everything. That's why it was clear cut. So they wouldn't bother to cut down a tree that they weren't going to take. But that one's older than you can see, substantially older than most of what you're seeing around here. In Wade Davis's new book, Beneath the Surface of Things, there's an essay that asks us to consider a new word for the concept of indigenous. There are words, he begins, that through overuse lose their power and authority, causing the eyes to glaze over.

Sustainability is surely one. Indigenous may be another. The essay goes on to make the argument that creating special categories for identity, that some people are indigenous and others are not, can be problematic. It's a sensitive issue, and one that I wanted to discuss with Wade. But first, here's an excerpt from that essay. Every culture is a product of its own history. The Nenets reindeer herders of Siberia, the Barasana living in the forests of the Colombian Amazon,

the Dogon dwelling in the cliffs of the Bandyagara escarpment in Amali, have no more in common culturally than the French, Russians, and Chinese do. Associating the former as indigenous peoples is as arbitrary and ultimately meaningless as subsuming the latter into a contrived category of industrial peoples. The cultures of the world are not anonymous, as if lost in a fog of indigeneity. Every culture is a unique and ever-changing constellation of ideas and intuitions, myths, memories, insights, and innovations, all coming together to inspire an original

vision of life itself. Each is its own response to a fundamental question—what does it mean to be human and alive? To compress this vast cultural repertoire into a single rubric ultimately diminishes all, denying to each culture its distinction, what it alone has distilled from the human imagination and our shared genius as a species. We were talking earlier about a lot of your thinking and your writing around the wisdom and the knowledge of other cultures, and I guess specifically we're talking about cultures

that we might describe as quote-unquote indigenous. There is an essay in your most recent book on this whole question of what we mean by the word indigenous. In this essay you take some issue with the concept of quote-unquote indigenous. Can you talk a bit about that? Well, the term indigenous originally was coined by white anthropologists who were not comfortable with the language of their discipline at a time when words like savage and

primitive were accepted and used. And the term, of course, referred to ethnicities who had essentially been trapped within the boundaries of nation-states forged from the detritus of colonial empires. And so the term was both picked up and celebrated by those ethnicities as a sign of identity and an expression of political power, all of which is good.

But I see two problems with the term. One is it implies that some of us are not indigenous. And as Gary Snyder, the poet said, we all have to become as natives to the earth. You know, stewardship should be part of the commitment of every human being, every human society on the earth. We all need to be indigenous to the planet, which again is one of the lessons of Apollo. But the other problem I have with the term is that, again, it suggests the obvious, that some of us are indigenous and some of us are not.

And the vast majority of those who would be classified, if you will, as indigenous, perhaps 6,500 of the 7,000 languages of humanities, kind of puts them into a miasma of anonymity and indigeneity, as if they're all one thing. And creating that kind of dichotomy is not really that much different from the old conceit of the civilized and the primitive that is so odious. And my whole thrust as a storyteller is to celebrate the uniqueness of every culture

as being an individual expression of the human heart. Everyone's got something to say. Each deserves to be heard. And they don't need to be buried in a sea of indigeneity, which, in fact, however good the intentions, only serves as another means of disenfranchisement and obliterating the unique as to who they are and the contributions they make to humanity. That being said, can we put this in a political context? I mean, you have an expression In a political context, I mean, you have an expression such as Black Lives Matter, and then that morphs into a kind of counter-expression, which is all lives matter.

Do you run into the same kind of issue with this question about indigeneity? If the concept of the indigenous was originally developed as a way of protecting something that was vulnerable, do you in a way run the risk of removing that protective... Not if you replace it with a more empowering and respectful reference. And to me, I keep coming back to the notion of nation. A nation is what we declare it to be. The United Nations has over 78 countries or so that didn't exist in 1963. At the age of 70, I'm older than 100 countries in the world.

The Haida, by contrast, have occupied those islands of Haida Gwaii as their political and spiritual home for at least 10,000 years. The Toltan territory is larger than about 20 countries in the UA including Austria, Switzerland, Israel, etc. Driving from Vancouver to Prince George in middle British Columbia, 500 kilometers, you actually go through more ancestral languages than you'd encounter if you were to drive from Moscow to Madrid. So I don't think we need to bury these ethnicities in this kind of miasma of indigeneity, I think we should be celebrating them as being nations. And that doesn't mean that I'm calling

for the immediate Balkanization of Canada into areas reflecting the original understanding of who lived there. I'm just saying the way we think of these things. And again, indigenous has served its role, but as I said in that essay, it's a little bit like the term sustainability. It's kind of been overused and lost its meaning. And maybe the meaning that was essential at one point, which I acknowledge in that essay, maybe we can take a step up, which I see to be a more respectful step up,

and recognizing the people to be something more than just part of a miasma of indigeneity. I mean, I think I do more honor to the Haida by recognizing them as being members of a nation than by members of an indigenous half of humanity or three-quarters of humanity. And again, that essay was like everything else in that book, Philip, that essay was not written to be provocative, but the whole point of that book is looking beneath the surface of things. The one

thing that I've come to really be skeptical of and not appreciative is ideology, be it of the right or the left. Ideology is about ideas that you cling to. And the minute that you become an ideologue, you must defend those ideas. And anyone who disagrees with you becomes a threat to those ideas, therefore a threat to you.

And so the first thing you do is castigate them. The second thing you do is burn the books and the sources of information that support their ideas. And as we discovered in the 1930s, once you burn books, you burn people. On Ideas, you've been listening to part one of anthropologist Wade Davis in conversation with ideas producer Philip Coulter Wade Davis's most recent book beneath the surface of things is published by Greystone Books This program was produced by Philip Coulter The technical producer for ideas 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.