Wade Davis, professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia, will give the 2025 Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture as part of UGA’s third annual Humanities Festival. Davis’s talk, based on his 2009 book The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, is presented by the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.

An ethnographer, writer, photographer and filmmaker, Davis served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000-2013. 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 is the author of hundreds of articles and 23 books including The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (1996), Magdalena: River of Dreams (2020), and The Wayfinders.

Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human and alive? In this talk, Wade Davis leads us on a thrilling journey to celebrate the wisdom of the world’s indigenous cultures. In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries B.C. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true Lost Civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the Earth really is alive, while in the far reaches of Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from 45 years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally, we settle in Borneo, where the last rainforest nomads struggle to survive.

Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. Of the world’s 7000 languages, fully half may disappear within our lifetimes. At risk is a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalogue of the imagination that is the human legacy. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.