Wade Davis

Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. He holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. He spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), which appeared in ten languages and was later released as a motion picture. His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), The Clouded Leopard (1998), Shadows in the Sun (1998), Rainforest (1998) and One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction, Canada's most prestigious literary prize. His most recent book, Light at the Edge of the World (2001), a Canadian bestseller, published in the USA in 2002.

A Research Associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Fellow of the Explorer's Club, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and Executive Director of the Endangered People's Project. Davis is a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, Future Generations, Cultural Survival and Rivers Canada, all NGOs dedicated to conservation based development and the protection of cultural and biological diversity. He also serves on the board of the Banff Centre, Canada’s leading institution for the arts.

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