Wade Davis

He was granted Colombian nationality and citizenship in April 2018.

Davis is married. He and his wife Gail Percy have lived in several places, sometimes with concurrent residences in Washington, D.C., Vancouver, the Stikine Valley of northern British Columbia and Bowen Island near Vancouver. They have two adult daughters, Tara and Raina. On April 13, 2018, Davis was granted Colombian nationality by President Juan Manuel Santos.

In late 2013, it was announced that Davis would join the University of British Columbia as a professor of anthropology in the summer of 2014.

An Honorary 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, and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and 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. 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 featured in the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX film Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk, released in the spring of 2008. 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 which 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.

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

Other books by Davis include Penan: Voice for the Borneo Rain Forest (1990), Shadows in the Sun (1998), Nomads of the Dawn (1995), 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), and One River (1996), which was nominated for the 1997 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. His books have been translated into fourteen languages, including Basque, Serbian, Japanese and Malay.

Davis's research has inspired numerous documentary films as well as three episodes of the television series The X-Files. He has been lecturing since the 1990s at various institutions.

Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, 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 6,000 botanical collections. He also conducted ethnographic fieldwork among several indigenous societies of northern Canada. 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 bestseller. The book was loosely used as the basis of a Wes Craven horror film, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988).

The strictly scientific criticism of Davis's zombie project has focused on the claims about the chemical composition of the "zombie powder". Several samples of the powder were analyzed for TTX levels by experts in 1986. They reported that only "insignificant traces of tetrodotoxin [were found] in the samples of 'zombie powder' which were supplied for analysis by Davis" and that "it can be concluded that the widely circulated claim in the lay press to the effect that tetrodotoxin is the causal agent in the initial zombification process is without factual foundation". Davis's claims were subsequently defended by other scientists doing further analyses and these findings were criticized in turn for poor methodology and technique by the original skeptics. Aside from the question of whether or not "zombie powder" contains significant amounts of TTX, the underlying concept of "tetrodotoxin zombification" has also been questioned more directly on a physiological basis. TTX, which blocks sodium channels on the neural membrane, produces numbness, slurred speech, and possibly paralysis or even respiratory failure and death in severe cases. As an isolated pharmacological agent, it is not known to produce the trance-like or "mental slave" state typical of the zombies of Haitian mythology, or of Davis's descriptions. This criticism can be countered by pointing to the datura mentioned in Davis's research. In and of itself, datura can produce these trance-like symptoms, and if a part of regular meals, could cause (or contribute to) the maintained stupor. Datura ingestions may present with prolonged toxic effects lasting hours to days. Biochemist Jessika Jake has noted that Bromism may also be at play here. In his account of his release, Clairvius Narcisse reported that the master's wife fed salt to the enslaved and set them free. Administering NaCl helps the body excrete bromide, and thus is a known treatment for Bromism. Symptoms of bromism include stupor, slurred speech, abnormal gait, and other symptoms described in zombie folklore (such as "behavior can become violent, especially at night," skin rashes, and wide pupils). Further investigation into the bromide source should be addressed, and may be as simple as the use of bromide salts when preparing food for the enslaved.

In 1983, Davis first advanced his hypothesis that tetrodotoxin (TTX) poisoning could explain the existence of Haitian zombies. This idea has been controversial and his 1985 follow up book (The Serpent and the Rainbow) elaborating upon this claim has been criticized for a number of scientific inaccuracies. One of these is the suggestion that Haitian witchdoctors can keep "zombies" in a state of pharmacologically induced trance for many years. As part of his Haitian investigations, Davis commissioned the exhumation of a recently buried child. (Dead human tissue is supposed to be a part of the "zombie powder" used by witchdoctors to produce zombies.) This has been criticized in the professional literature as a breach of ethics.

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

Edmund Wade Davis CM (born December 14, 1953) is a Colombian-Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer whose work has focused on worldwide indigenous cultures, especially in North and South America and particularly involving the traditional uses and beliefs associated with psychoactive plants. Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.

He has published 1800 popular articles on subjects ranging from Haitian vodoun and Amazonian myth and religion to the traditional use of psychotropic drugs, and the ethnobotany of South American Indians. 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, and numerous other international publications. Davis is a Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers (iLCP).