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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The stark simplicity of his diary entries suggests the values of a generation of men not yet prepared to yield their emotions to analysis or reflection.

I need to forget to continue living.’ 

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

for the government to clean and bring life back to the Río Magdalena. All of it. That’s what we want. And that’s what the country needs.

Peel back the moments of any place, day, or time in Colombia, dig through the memories of any family, and you will always find the Río Magdalena.

dig through the memories of any family, and you will always find the Río Magdalena.

Rodrigo de Bastidas, sailing across the mouth in 1501, had named the river El Río Grande de la Magdalena.

María Magdalena always stood tall, the spiritual watchtower of the world.

in the same way the church slandered María Magdalena, we soiled the river,

turning an artery of life into a conduit of death.

We declared it beyond hope, its condition irredeemable, absolving ourselves of any responsibility for its fate

to deny the Río Magdalena is to betray all that we are as Colombians.

Colombia’s collective amnesia to discover, for the first time, the river that actually made possible the nation.

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.

Americas over three centuries, some four hundred thousand came to Colombia,

The Spaniards could no more silence the drums than quell the passions of those who danced.

The drummer is both musician and servant of the divine. Music is entertainment, but also the catalyst of transformation.

This was, in part, the genesis of cumbia, the heartbeat of Colombia and its singular gift to the world.

Cumbia is a rhythm, a beat, a dance—a choreography of seduction that ignites the spirit and shakes the soul, infusing one’s entire physical being with a sensual promise as innocent and perfect as a prayer. The dance movements of the male recall the desires of the lone cimarrón: passionate, powerful, yearning. Those of the woman, the coy resistance of the native maiden, bright candles in hand, spinning in a whirlwind of indifference. The music builds through the night, an alchemy of spirit and sensation that with every performance enhances its authority and power, laying

infusing one’s entire physical being with a sensual promise as innocent and perfect as a prayer.

a powerful resonance that can have the very forest trees overhead swaying in sympathy.

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

Music was the backdrop of his youth, a cacophony of sound that greeted every dawn and heralded each night

the delicate movements of deer in the evening as the sun softens on the horizon.

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

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

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.

the final death of innocence.

barely left of our river of nostalgia

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

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

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".

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

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.