Wade / David

Wade in 1971.

Wade present day.

David in 2018.

Wade Davis, the acclaimed ethnobotanist and National Geographic explorer-in-residence, can pinpoint the precise moment from his boyhood that created his obsession with the anthropology of cultural differences. “I remember coming alive at your bar mitzvah,” he tells his old school chum from Montreal and Harvard classmate, David Goldbloom, for this episode of PasstheMic75.

For Wade Davis, Colombia is where heaven and Earth converge, offering the greatest repository of biological diversity on the planet. He calls it his “lodestone,” a source of strength, beauty and understanding, the place that gives him license to be free. In return, Colombia has made him an honorary citizen, treasuring his two books about the country. One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest (1997) was written in homage to Wade’s Harvard professor Richard Evans Schulte; Magdelena: River of Dreams is a love letter to the Rio Magdalena and the country that first captured Wade’s imagination as a 14-year-old living with a family in the mountains near Cali. It was there he came to believe that magical realism is journalism.

But it was serendipity that sent him  back to Colombia after graduating Harvard with a degree in anthropology in1975. He remembers sitting in a Harvard Square cafe besides a map of the world, not knowing where he was headed. His friend David Hoffman pointed to the high Arctic and said he’d go there; Wade felt like he had to go somewhere and pointed to the northwest Amazon in Colombia—a life-defining moment.

“At an early age,” he says, “I came to understand that the forces that are causing the erosion of biological diversity are the same as those affecting cultural diversity. We take that for granted now. But in the early 70s, it wasn’t really directly appreciated.”

From the use of MDMA (the drug known as “Ecstasy” or “Molly”) for the treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome to the fad of ayahuasca retreats (using a South American psychedelic as the basis for mind-altering experiences), he worries that the resurgence of psychedelics these days is a kind of “frenzy.” But he also says he’s lucky he was taking them in the 70s with shamans in the Amazon or the Andes, and they had a profound impact on his life. His mother warned him that taking psychedelics meant he’d “never come back the same.” But that’s precisely what he wanted. “That was the very point of taking these substances,” he says now, “not to come back the same.”

“I’ve always had a sense of mission in life,” he says, and writing about Colombia was “like a mission that became a prayer."