The Music Momma interviews Wade Davis tomorrow! NEW IMAX FILM GRAND CANYON ADVENTURE: RIVER AT RISK 3D

NEW IMAX FILM GRAND CANYON ADVENTURE: RIVER AT RISK 3D

The Music Momma interviews Wade Davis tomorrow. Stay tuned for that interview!!!!!




Wade Davis is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”

Davis 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 in eight Latin American nations 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), an international best seller which was later adapted into a motion picture.

His other books include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest, Nomads of the Dawn, The Clouded Leopard, Shadows in the Sun, Rainforest, Light at the Edge of the World, The Lost Amazon and One River, which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Fire on the Mountain, a history of the early British efforts on Everest, will be published in 2008. Sheets of Distant Rain will follow in 2009. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the 2002 Lowell Thomas Medal (The Explorer’s Club) and the 2002 Lannan Foundation prize for literary non-fiction. In 2004 he was made an Honorary Member of the Explorer’s Club, one of twenty so named in the hundred-year history of the club. In recent years his work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Vanuatu and the high Arctic.

A native of British Columbia, Davis, a licensed river guide, has worked as park ranger, forestry engineer, and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in northern Canada. He has published 140 scientific and popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun to the global biodiversity crisis. He has written for National Geographic, Newsweek, Premiere, Outside, Omni, Harpers, Fortune, Men's Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Natural History, Utne Reader, National Geographic Traveler, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Globe and Mail and others. His photographs have been widely published. His research has inspired numerous documentary films as well as three episodes of the television series, The X-Files. A professional speaker for nearly twenty years, Davis has also lectured extensively for institutes, museums, universities and corporate clients.

Davis was the host and co-writer of Earthguide, a 13 part television series on the Discovery Channel. Other television credits include the award winning documentaries, Spirit of the Mask, Cry of the Forgotten People and Forests Forever. He produced, wrote and hosted Light at the Edge of the World, a four hour ethnographic documentary series, shot in Rapanui, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Nunuvut, Greenland, Nepal and Peru, which is currently airing in 165 countries on the National Geographic Channel. He is host, co-writer and co-producer of a two hour special inspired by the books One River and The Lost Amazon, currently in production for the History Channel. Filmed in New Mexico, Oaxaca, and lowland Ecuador, it will air in the spring of 2008.

Davis’ book Grand Canyon: River at Risk—a photographic accompaniment to MacGillivray Freeman’s IMAX Theatre Film Grand Canyon Adventure: River At Risk—will be published in March 2008 by Earth Aware Editions. The book features stunning photography by National Geographic photographer Chris Rainier and a Foreword by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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 19 and Raina who is 16.