Wade Davis

He has published 1800 articles on subjects from Haitian Vodo, Amazonian myth and religion, the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, the ethnobotany of South American Indians, as well as, how COVID-19 has signaled the end of the American era.

Davis has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men's Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Scientific American, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, Rolling Stone, and numerous other international publications.

Davis is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP).

The exhibition "Ascent to Glory," included photographs, films and artifacts from five expeditions from the period 1921 to 1953.

The Bowers Museum presented the exhibition in partnership with London's Royal Geographical Society.

An honorary research associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, a Fellow of the Explorer's Club, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

Davis was a founding board member of the David Suzuki Foundation and completed a six-year term on the board of the Banff Centre, a Canadian institution for the arts.

His account weaves together the three Everest expeditions in 1922, 1923 and 1924, set in the shadow of the Great War, by finding "a unifying thread in the person of George Mallory, the scatter-brained Adonis and Bloomsbury favourite whose fate would enthral the nation," wrote John Keay in Literary Review.

His photographs have appeared in some 20 books and more than 80 magazines, journals, and newspapers, including National Geographic, Time, GEO, People, Men's Journal, Outside, and National Geographic Adventure.

Edmund Wade Davis (born December 14, 1953) is a Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer.

In 1974, at age 20, he crossed the Darién Gap on foot in the company of the English author and amateur explorer, Sebastian Snow.

Davis is an ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker.

He is a licensed river guide and has worked as park ranger and forestry engineer.

Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations, while making some 6,000 botanical collections.

He conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada.

In 1983, Davis first advanced his hypothesis that tetrodotoxin (TTX) poisoning could explain the existence of Haitian zombies.

Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti.

He is professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.

Davis was born in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

He holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University.

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), a bestseller.

The book was used loosely as the basis of a Wes Craven horror film, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988).

Other books by Davis include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction, Shadows in the Sun (1998),The Clouded Leopard (1998), Rainforest (1998), Light at the Edge of the World (2001), The Lost Amazon (2004), Grand Canyon (2008), Book of Peoples of the World (ed. 2008).

His books have been translated into 14 languages

Other television credits include the award-winning documentaries Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People, Forests Forever, and Earthguide, a 13-part television series on the environment that aired on the Discovery Channel in 1990.

His four-hour series with National Geographic, Ancient Voices / Modern World, was shot in Australia, Mongolia, and Colombia.

It has been broadcast worldwide on the National Geographic Channel as part of the second season of Light at the Edge of the World.

In 2022 Davis curated an exhibition at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California that highlighted the history of expeditions to the peak of Mount Everest.

Davis served as Explorer-in-Residence with the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013.

A first collection of Davis's photographs, Light at the Edge of the World, appeared in 2001 published by National Geographic Books, Bloomsbury, and Douglas & McIntyre.

They have been exhibited at the International Center of Photography (ICP), the Marsha Ralls Gallery (Washington, D.C.), the United Nations (Cultures on the Edge exhibition 2004), the Carpenter Center of Harvard University, and the Utama Center (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia).

Some of his images are part of the permanent collection of the U.S. State Department, Africa and Latin America Bureaus.

Davis is the co-curator of The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes, first exhibited at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and currently touring Latin America.

He is featured in the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX film Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, released in the spring of 2008.

He has served on the board of directors since 2009 for the Amazon Conservation Association, whose mission is to conserve the biological diversity of the Amazon.

In 2009, he delivered the CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's most prestigious public intellectual forum.

He is a member of the International Advisory Board, Hunt Consolidated, PLNG, and has also been engaged in Journey to Zero, a three-year campaign sponsored by Nissan and TBWA to support zero emission vehicles.

Davis' 2012 book Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest won the Baillie Gifford Prize (formerly the Samuel Johnson prize) for non-fiction.

A second collection was under contract for 2013 publication with Douglas & McIntyre as well.

Davis was the series creator, host, and co-writer of Light at the Edge of the World, a four-hour ethnographic documentary series, shot in Rapa Nui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunavut, Greenland, Nepal, and Peru, which aired in 165 countries on the National Geographic Channel and in the USA on Smithsonian Networks.