Wade Davis Quotes

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.

Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.

The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence.

The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.

I am so far removed, from everything, that I can’t even cry. There’s a chasm between me, where I am, and the world I am in. The world I move my feet through. The atmosphere I breathe is like golden syrup, twenty-seven atmospheres thick. I’m wading through the world, consumed with … consumed. And I’m wading through the swamp that my body has become.

These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit—other options, other visions of life itself.

The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

How tranquil it was, wading ankle-deep in flowers, pink snow, cascading, tumbling down, tingeing the earthen pathways

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.

We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation.

She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.

Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.

In my humble opinion," (Ghandi) told the court, "non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good.

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole.

The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.

I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything-to be able to cultivate gentleness. George Malory to his wife Ruth at the end of the Great War

Death's power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown.

What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.

After several trips across the Andes, the pattern of the flora was gradually coming into focus. This to me was the great revelation of botany. When I knew nothing of plants, I experienced a forest only as a tangle of forms, shapes, and colors without meaning or depth, beautiful when taken as a whole but ultimately incomprehensible and exotic. Now the components of the mosaic had names, the names implied relationships, and the relationships resonated with significance.

I tend to be a real optimist because I just find that pessimism is an indulgence and despair is kind of an insult to the imagination. And you know my father always said just do what you need to do and then ask whether it was possible or permissible.

It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release.

There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible.

Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.

A simple intuition, a single observation, can open vistas of unimagined potential. Once caught in the web of an idea, the researcher is happily doomed, for the outcome is always uncertain, and the resolution of the mystery may take years to unfold. Such was the case in my encounter with the magic toads of the Americas.

during his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe.

Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.

Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?

They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion; to come to terms with themselves and with one another; to know where they were going and why.

It was amusing to look at that colorful case so symbolic of an entire nation. Haiti, it is said, is the place to discover how much can be done with little.

For the people of the village every activity was an affirmation of continuity. At dawn the first of the family to go outside formally greeted the sun.

the drum is joy and the river is joy, which is why so many songs name the Magdalena.

He had nothing modern and yet he lived to a hundred and ten. Why? Because he lived in a world that made sense.

In Africa, there is no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane, between the material and the spiritual.

Marsh had travelled on foot to the source of the Nile and once stood down a charging rhinoceros by intrepidly opening a pink umbrella in its face.

Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful.

Every effort should be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. This

Such experiences are all too rare,” he continued, “and they but too soon become blurred in the actualities of daily intercourse and practical existence. Yet it is these few fleeting moments, which are reality. In these only we see real life. The rest is ephemeral, the unsubstantial. And that single hour on leaving Lhasa was worth all the rest of my lifetime.

They have no illusions of permanence,” she explains. “There is no time for regret. Despair is a sin against the imagination. Their grocery store is out there on the land and this creates an emotional life that’s so much bigger than that of those who live in cities. They deal with death every day. To live they must kill the things they most love. Blood on ice is not a sign of death but an affirmation of life. Eating meat becomes a sacramental experience.

BRITAIN HAD NOT FOUGHT a major continental war in a century, and the high command exhibited a stubborn disconnection from reality so complete as to merge at times with the criminal. A survey conducted in the three years before the war found that 95 percent of officers had never read a military book of any kind. This cult of the amateur, militantly anti-intellectual, resulted in a leadership that, with noted exceptions, was obtuse, willfully intolerant of change, and incapable for the most part of innovative thought or action

Evolutionary theory, distilled from the study of bird beaks, beetles, and barnacles, slipped into social theory in a manner that proved useful to the age. It was anthropologist Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” At a time when the United States was being built by the labour of African slaves, and the British class system was so stratified that children of the wealthy were on average 6 inches taller than those of the poor, a theory that provided a scientific rationale for differences in race and class was a welcome convenience. Evolution

Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological sophistication, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem better than back-breaking labour in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise of the new, people throughout the world have in many instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old. The consequences, as we have seen in Kenya, can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West, but to join the legions of urban poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive. As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire. This creates a dangerous and explosive situation, which is precisely why the plight of diverse cultures is not a simple matter of nostalgia or even of human rights alone, but a serious issue of geopolitical stability and survival. [..] Outside of the major industrial nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient skills and visionary wisdom.

In sum, until April 12, Governor Barber, apparently assumed that his friends were faring well, and took no action whatsoever. Governor Barber’s friends, however, were not faring well at all. From the beginning of the siege, the weather had been bad. A cold rain began to fall shortly after men from Buffalo first arrived at the T. A., about midnight the evening of April 10, and during that night the rain turned to snow, meaning that the invaders in the cramped quarters of their fort “suffered intensely.”34 The peril of the invaders was obvious, and knowing that the telegraph lines were probably still down, they wanted to get a message to the governor in Cheyenne “stating their predicament and asking for immediate help.”35 A young man named Dowling stepped forward and offered to try to get through the lines around the ranch to Buffalo. His offer was immediately accepted, and H. E. Teschemacher wrote a telegram to Governor Barber, which was signed by Major Wolcott. It was an especially dark evening, and Dowling had a harrowing adventure, wading through the icy creek and then briefly falling in with some of the besieging men. In the darkness nobody identified him, however, and he managed to split off from them. He was then able to “commandeer a horse” and ride to Buffalo.

Sometimes it just is what it is, Wade. There are things we can change and things we can’t. The key is knowing the difference.

Only once did I see a Tibetan having a bath. It was at Shegar Dzong … Disporting himself in the waters of a pool, quite close to the village, was a Tibetan boy, stark naked. On closer examination it transpired that the boy was the village idiot.

Bruce would not have been able to secure leave, as he indeed did in 1922, had the position been offered him. Clearly the Everest Committee believed that Howard-Bury was the better man for the job, as Hinks explained in a letter of

Seyahat etmenin en güzel yanlarından biri, kadim yol yordamları unutmamış, geçmişlerini esen rüzgarda hala duyabilen, yağmurlarla yıkanan taşlarda hissedebilen, bitkilerin kekre yapraklarında tadabilen insan toplulukları arasında yaşama fırsatı yakalamaktır.

Bütün kültürler esasen aynı zihinsel kıvraklığa, aynı zeka kapasitesine sahiptir.

I need to forget to continue living.’ 

My hope and intent is to provide a wide range of resources and ideas that provoke real questions and considerations under the surface of common dialogue. With a definite thrust toward clues for moving beyond limiting patterns that restrict our personal and communal evolution and experience of, as well as effectiveness in, life. Part of that is about giving different angles of insight into the why and how of developing skills, whatever they may be. I think the larger discussion, or maybe the more relevant one surrounding skills development, involves what quality of fuel is being used to run the skill. Inevitably, and very quickly, this enters into considerations of how much of oneself one brings to the show. For example, anyone can learn a sophisticated skill in an extremely short period of time, once they’re completely convinced of the need, benefit and value of doing so and find enough full-bodied conviction to engage it accordingly (“You never hear anyone practicing a language; they simply listen and then begin to speak.” — Wade Davis).

The book was in the form of a long letter from The Creator of the Universe to the experimental creature. The Creator congratulated the creature and apologized for all the discomfort he had endured. The Creator invited him to a banquet in his honor in the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City, where a black robot named Sammy Davis, Jr., would sing and dance. And the experimental creature wasn't killed after the banquet. He was transferred to a virgin planet instead. Living cells were sliced from the palms of his hands, while he was unconscious. The operation didn’t hurt at all. And then the cells were stirred into a soupy sea on the virgin planet. They would evolve into ever more complicated life forms as the eons went by. Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will. Trout didn't give the experimental creature a proper name. He simply called him The Man. On the virgin planet, The Man was Adam and the sea was Eve. The Man often sauntered by the sea. Sometimes he waded in his Eve. Sometimes he swam in her, but she was too soupy for an invigorating swim. She made her Adam feel sleepy and sticky afterwards, so he would dive into an icy stream that had just jumped off a mountain. He screamed when he dived into the icy water, screamed again when he came up for air. He bloodied his shins and laughed about it when he scrambled up rocks to get out of the water. He panted and laughed some more, and he thought of something amazing to yell. The Creator never knew what he was going to yell, since The Creator had no control over him. The Man himself got to decide what he was going to do next—and why. After a dip one day, for instance, The Man yelled this: “Cheese!” Another time he yelled, “Wouldn't you really rather drive a Buick?

I’m wading in, but I’m not ready to fully immerse myself yet.

a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses

We settled long ago,” he later reflected, “that there’s no reckoning with death.

Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit. —Wade Davis

Instead, his dream of twelve years was wiped out by the stroke of a pen.

As warriors, they had destroyed so much, but as men they created little.

The crisis has in fact been provoked by a relatively small subset of the human population, a particular cultural tradition that over time has reduced the world to a mechanism, the planet to a commodity, with nature itself being seen as but an obstacle to overcome.

As romantics,” he told me, “we idealize a past we never experienced and deny those who knew that past from changing. We forget perhaps the most disturbing lesson of anthropology. As Lévi-Strauss said, ‘The people for whom the term cultural relativism was invented, have rejected it.

They fish with kites, crafted of plastic and small bits of wood, that rise in the wind and carry their long lines, rigged with perhaps a dozen hooks,

fought alongside men, enjoying complete political and military authority.

Breastplates worn by both men and women as symbols of virility and fertility.

They, too, had little to say about the achievements of their mysterious forefathers. Memories were faint after five centuries.

The Zenú as a people survive

allowed them to achieve something that has defied us to this day.

Throughout the Americas, smallpox and measles killed nine out of ten,

the arrival of Columbus, more than a thousand would be lost, many within decades of European contact.

broken and ravaged by the Spaniards in the last years of the sixteenth century, a once great civilization formally declared dead by a Catholic priest, Antonio Julián, in 1679.

the study of what they left behind: ghostlike memories brought forward in the guise of myths,

systems of local and long-distance commerce made possible by the Río Magdalena

the unleashing upon an entire hemisphere of the concentrated essence of death itself: biological pathogens, virulent, invisible, unknown. As

the black robes who, in their evangelical zeal, exhaled pestilence even as they declared smallpox to be the will of God.

of los naturales, as chroniclers described the natives, from 70,000 to a mere 800. In the islands of the Caribbean, some 3 million Arawakans died between 1494 and 1508. Within

the Spanish colony turned to Africa. Of the more than ten million men and women dragged in bondage to the Americas over three centuries, some four hundred thousand came to Colombia, nearly twice the number of immigrants that arrived from Spain over those same years.

love, nature, and desire had fused the worlds of Africa and the Americas into one.

Cuando se ha vivido en completo aislamiento, ¿cómo se puede entender lo que significa perder una cultura? No es sino hasta que ha desaparecido casi por completo y la gente se educa y se dan cuenta de lo que están perdiendo. Para entonces, los atractivos de las nuevas formas de vida son tan irresistibles, que los únicos que quieren volver a las antiguas costumbres son los que nunca vivieron bajo ellas".

conscientes de que la creatividad no es la motivación de la acción, es su resultado.

the final death of innocence.

barely left of our river of nostalgia

little more than a warren of tired shacks that paint alone keeps from tumbling into the water.

In 1928, when field hands went on strike and bananas rotted on the stem, agents of the United Fruit Company in the guise of soldiers slaughtered their families with machine guns, leaving the plaza of Ciénaga blanketed with the dead, corpses that were cast into the sea. The survivors fled south only to be murdered in the Aracataca graveyard before the eyes of a desperate priest. As an infant, García Márquez rested in his cradle within earshot of the massacre. Years later, he was living as a student in a Bogotá boardinghouse just blocks from the Black Cat Café, where Jorge Gaitán was murdered. García Márquez watched as workers poured into the

the army turned its tanks on the people and a terrible violence was born that would leave generations of Colombians looking over their shoulders in fear, waiting for the moment

when death would find them.

death as a swindle,

The Magdalena had become a cemetery,

his Magdalena, as he wrote, but an illusion of memory.

What in fact had died was just one man’s story,

the Río Magdalena, according to García Márquez,

transformed from paradise to wasteland,

The robber of memories is surely the one trapped in nostalgia

the Río Magdalena remains an open book, one with countless pages and chapters yet to be written.

Open to the Caribbean, recharged by the annual surge of the Magdalena, the wetland was a perfect balance of river and sea. Often described as the most beautiful body of water in Colombia, it was

Shortly after inhalation, I experienced warm flushing sensations, a sense of wonder and well-being, strong auditory hallucinations, which included an insect-cicada sound that ran across my mind and seemed to link my body to the earth. Though I was indoors, there was a sense of the feel of the earth, the dry desert soil passing through my fingers, the stars at midday, the scent of cactus and sage, the feel of dry leaves through hands. Strong visual hallucinations in orblike brilliance, diamond patterns that undulated across my visual field (Davis, Wade & Weil, Andrew T. “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad” in: Ancient Mesoamerica, 3 (1992), p. 56).

In three generations, a moment in time, we have contaminated the water, air, and soil, driven countless species to extinction, dammed the rivers, poisoned the rain, torn down the ancient forests, and ripped holes in the heavens. As Harvard biologist E. 0. Wilson reminds us, this century will be remembered not for its wars or technological advances but rather as the era in which men and women stood by and either passively endorsed or actively supported the massive destruction of biological diversity on the planet.

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 the most important challenge of our times.

When you get to Tatogga, or the cliffs of Cape Breton, or the Alberta badlands, pause long enough to find an open ridge where the sky seems to shelter the Earth, or a valley where horses shake manes that quiver like sheets of distant rain. Watch for pollen in the wind, an eagle circling, ice forming on a summer lake. When you find a place where the clouds and mist envelop the peaks, creating that special illusion of depth that grants meaning to all travel, tip your hat to those who have come before you, breaking trail.