♪ >> Hello and welcome to this edition of Canada Files .

I'm Jim Deeks and I'm looking forward to chatting with our guest on this episode.

If you read books on travel and exploration or enjoy TV programs on far-off places and civilizations, then you'll undoubtedly know of Wade Davis.

Wade is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

A Harvard-educated PhD who has written over 20 books, hundreds of magazine articles and produced nearly 40 films and documentaries.

He has several honorary degrees and is a member of the Order of Canada .

If there was a living, breathing version of Indiana Jones, he would surely be Wade Davis.

>> Wade, thank you so much for joining us.

>> My pleasure, Jim.

>> I've just touched briefly in my introduction on your fascinating credentials.

I wanted to add one more.

This is a quote from somewhere on the internet.

I think it was a comment on one of your books.

You've been described as "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's diversity".

That's very nice.

We'll discuss some of your projects in a few moments.

For all that you've done, I suspect that the widest exposure of your lengthy career happened this past summer in 2020 when you published an article in Rolling Stone magazine called "The Unravelling of America".

Let's discuss that piece first.

Were you saying America is doomed?

>> Not at all.

In fact I was in no way looking forward to the decline of America.

If the hinge of history opens to the Asian Century, we're going to be nostalgic for the best years of the America century.

What happened there was that I'd been asked by many people to write about COVID.

I declined because I didn't have anything new to say.

I was paddling our kayak around our little island here in British Columbia when I had the idea that COVID wasn't really a story of morbidity, mortality and healthcare.

It was fundamentally a story of culture.

If we could understand where our culture was in part by the way it responded to the crisis.

Americans who look into the mirror and see their exceptionalism-- one of the things you have to do when you do a family intervention is you hold the mirror in love to the loved one.

So they can see where they've fallen.

That can be the first step on the path to rehabilitation.

COVID was an opportunity to see the fact that sad as it was, Americans were living in a failed state at that time ruled by a dysfunctional government.

At the head, something of a buffoon of a president.

Who was actually recommending the use of household detergent to treat a disease that one had a sense that he didn't intellectually understand.

People suddenly looked at America, not with admiration or anger, which has the emotion since World War Two, but with pity.

That's not an emotion the Americans are used to having.

The article was an attempt to ask what is that all about.

As you said, it hit this extraordinary unexpected nerve.

I sent it on spec to an old friend of mine, Jann Wenner, who created Rolling Stone.

Jann put it up and it resulted in over 5 million visits to the site.

362 million social media impressions.

Visitations to my Wikipaedia site soared from a modest 150 a day to over 4,000.

It hit a nerve and it was really asking, "What indeed, has become of the American dream?"

>> What was the range of reaction to that piece?

I'm sure it wasn't overwhelmingly positive.

Particularly among Americans.

>> What was interesting was that the response obviously and predictably reflected the two halves of the American reality these days.

Those on one side were quietly saddened by the piece but determined to get it right.

From the other side, and not universally, came a deluge of vitriol, that was bizarrely vicious in its intensity.

>> Wade, what about Canada in all of this?

As America declines, is there an opportunity for us on this side of the border to assume some of the moral, if not economic leadership that America seems to be losing around the world?

>> America will be a shining light for a long time.

And let's hope so.

I think there are lessons in Canada.

One of the things in Canada that has helped us in this crisis-- July 30 when the Americans announced close to 60 thousand cases of COVID.

That was a modest number compared to today.

At the time, it was extraordinary.

That day, there were only 5 COVID cases in all of British Columbia where I live.

We're a metropolitan population.

An Asian city, Vancouver.

Flights coming in all day long from China and throughout Asia.

Three hours up the road from Seattle where the pandemic landed in the Americas.

Something was going right here.

Part of what was going right is, we don't define wealth by the currency accumulated by the lucky few.

As much as the strength of social relations and the bonds of reciprocity that bind us all into a greater purpose, if you will.

We have a healthcare system that's designed to cater to the collective, not the individual.

Certainly not the private investor who views every hospital bed as a rental property.

If you look at France, "liberté, égalité, fraternité".

Liberty, equality, brotherhood.

America, "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

It's not clear that France or the States has had any of the above.

Our motto in Canada is pretty boring, "Peace, order and good government".

But the amazing thing is, that's exactly what we've had since Confederation.

It doesn't make us a perfect place in terms of race, etc.

But we do pretty well.

>> Agreed and you've done pretty well being a Canadian.

I want to go back and examine how you got to where you are today.

How did you find a love of nature and interest in civilization?

>> I grew up in Montreal during of the t wo solitudes .

I lived in an English community that was clumped like a carbuncle in the back of an old Francophone village.

My mom would send me to the corner store to get cigarettes or milk.

I would sit there at the age of five and six.

Across that boulevard was another language, another religion and way of life.

I couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to cross that road.

Not from my parents but from my society.

Eventually I crossed that road and I've been crossing that road as an anthropologist all of my life.

I'd say to young people, "Life is not linear, it is serendipitous."

I was in a fire camp at 15.

The fire camps then were filled with these American draft dodgers from Vietnam.

We were these obedient Canadian lads and they were irreverent in an irresistable way.

One had the Harvard student strike on the cover of Life magazine in his backpack.

In a raw atavistic way, I said, "That's got to be the college to go-- to be cool like these Americans."

So I applied, having no idea where it was and got in.

My parents didn't have the money to send me down to Boston.

I arrived at Logan Airport with a big trunk, full of everything I owned, and no idea where Harvard was!

I saw an African American with a Harvard t-shirt but he didn't know either.

So I dragged my trunk through the subway station because my family didn't take taxis.

I got to crazy Harvard Square in 1970.

Then I realized my mom had made a mistake.

I was 10 days early!

The dorms weren't open.

I did not have a penny in my pocket.

I dragged my trunk through the streets of Cambridge until I found a church and knocked on the door.

A pastor opened it, who would become a great friend of mine and he put me up for a week.

That is the moment I fell in love with the American people.

>> You did well at Harvard and you met some big success early on with the publication of a book about zombies in Haiti called, "The Serpent and the Rainbow".

It sounds like a novel but it was anything but a novel.

Tell us about the premise of that book and how it was received at that time.

>> I'd never written anything but scientific papers.

Simon and Schuster rejected the first couple of chapters.

Then I disappeared to a friend's farm in Virginia.

I'd come back from Haiti with both malaria and hepatitis without even knowing I was sick.

She nursed me back to well-being.

In seven months, I wrote my first book, "The Serpent and the Rainbow".

Which you'd have to say, is the only PhD thesis I know that was made into a Hollywood film.

>> It was a major success and you've written over 20 books since that time.

Your latest book which has received very positive reviews is called, "Magdalena, River of Dreams A Story of Columbia".

It's about a river, a people and a country that you hold very close to your heart.

For someone who has travelled to all four corners of the earth why Columbia?

>> Magdalena is an attempt to tell the truth about Columbia.

A country that has suffered a 50 year civil war.

It's important to remember that the number of combattants on all three sides-- leftist guerillas, paramilitary forces, the army never surpassed 200,000 in a nation of 50 million.

Most Columbians have been victims of a war that would not have endured one week if it hadn't been for the illicit profits of cocaine.

Put it into perspective, Escobar was shipping 80 tons of cocaine a month into the US, generating $17 million a day.

His accountants budgetted $1,000 US a week, just to buy elastic bands to wrap the money in.

In the last year of peace, before President Santos signed the peace agreement in Cartagena in 2016, the FARC, down to 6,000 cadre, mostly kids in search of a good meal, nevertheless generated $600 million US through extortion and drug trafficking.

If you give me the Beverly Hills boy scouts and $600 million, I can wreak havoc in Southern California.

That's the reality.

Despite this, a war that has caused suffering in every single Columbian family-- the country maintained democracy and civil society.

It greened its cities.

Created millions of acres of national parks.

Sought restitution with Indigenous people.

And paved the way for a cultural and economic renaissance.

Thousands of people forced to flee the country are returning.

Young people with skill sets acquired in every endeavour.

Think about 220,000 dead, 100,000 missing.

7 million internally displaced.

5 million forced to flee the country.

How would we feel in America if Canada has patterns of drug consumption in bar rooms and boardrooms across the country and laws prohibiting the drug creating the black market.

But sanctions so lax that the market flourished.

Such that 85 million Americans were thrown out of their homes.

That's what happened to Columbians.

In that sense, we all owe a moment of grace for Columbia.

Whereas the US has been tormented by a handful of desperate women and children arriving at its southern border.

While facing the cost of the peace agreement of $45 billion, Columbia's main revenue, oil, prices plummeted.

Without any fanfare, they have absorbed the biggest humanitarian crisis in the history of the Western hemisphere.

Close to 2 million Venezuelans fled into Columbia.

They haven't been turned away at the border.

They've been welcomed, housed and fed.

Their children put in school.

Healthcare given to the elders.

It's the most extraordinary thing that Columbia has done.

In some sense, the book was an attempt to tell the truth about Columbia through the metaphor of its great river, the Mississippi of Columbia.

A quarter of commerce but also a fountain of culture.

The repository of literature, poetry, music and prayer.

>> For telling us the truth about Columbia and giving us a much broader perspective other than "it's a drug haven", the President of Columbia made you an honorary citizen.

Which is a huge honour that you are very proud of.

>> Extremely proud of it.

I was weeping in the palace when he gave it.

President Manuel Santos is an extraordinary man.

He was the defence minister who orchestrated the campaign supported by Plan Columbia.

The US gets a lot of flak for foreign adventures: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam.

Plan Columbia really worked!

It allowed Columbia to professionalize its army.

It let both the FARC and the paramilitaries know that the entire field of play had changed.

President Santos, having orchestrated the military campaign under the leadership of Alvaro Uribe, then turned all of his energy, once he became president, towards peace.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize as a result.

And deservedly so.

He wrote of my new book, Magdalena , a beautiful unsolicited tweet that said, "Every Columbian must read this book".

>> As I mentionned earlier, you've been to, literally, all four corners of the earth.

Maybe the answer to this question is Columbia-- but in all your travels, have you been to one place that you would describe as paradise?

>> Almost everywhere I've been, I think of paradise-- a little " paradise lost" .

All of my books are trying to not celebrate the exoticism of "the other" but to show the way that various cultures take our common genius.

This is a great revelation of genetics.

We are cut from the same "genetic cloth".

Genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum.

Race is an utter fiction.

We all are descendants of a common ancestor.

Including those who walked out of Africa 65,000 years ago.

In 2500 generations, carried the human spirit to every corner of the inhabitable world.

If we accept that we're all of the same genetic dexterity, it means we all share the same mental acuity.

How that genius is expressed is a matter of choice and cultural orientation.

There's no such thing as a primitive people .

>> Is there a civilization or a people, understanding we all came from the original DNA, that you've come across personally or historically that you would say, more than any other, these people figured out the meaning of life?

>> I would lean on the elder brothers-- The Kogi, Wiwa, and the Arhuarcos.

Three different societies, all descendants of the ancient Tayrona civilization in Columbia.

In the wake of the conquest, they retreated to an isolated volcanic massif, where in a bloodstained continent they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood.

A sun priest, who maintained that their rituals and prayers literally maintain the cosmic or ecological balance of the world.

They speak in full paragraphs of our need to change the way we inhabit the planet.

One of the things we should recognize is that the success of our technological civilization, wondrous as it is, its ubiquity, authority and dominance shouldn't suggest to us that it's the norm.

It's actually quite anomalous in the human experience.

Descartes said "all that exists is mind and matter", when he de-animated the world.

Saul Bellow said "science made a house-cleaning of belief".

The world became a stage upon which only the human drama unfolded.

That created a mechanistic view of the earth which is not common in the ethnographic record.

Most societies have a relationship based, not on extraction, but reciprocity.

Some variant of the basic idea that the earth owes its bounty to people.

But people in turn owe their fidelity to the earth.

This plays out in metaphor.

What I mean is I was raised as you were, Jim.

To believe that a mountain is a pile of rock, ready to be mined.

A forest consists of board feet and cellulose, ready to be logged.

That makes us very different than Indigenous people who believe the forest is an abode of Huxwhukw and Crooked Beak of Heaven.

Or that a mountain is an Apu deity, as they believe in Peru, that directs their destiny.

This is important because it changes the ecological footprint of the culture.

To believe that the natural world is alive.

Society is like the Barasana, the Makuna and the Tanimukas in the northwest Amazon in Columbia.

Their most profound cultural intuition is a notion that plants and animals are people, in another dimension of reality.

That's a poetic idea but it plays itself out in mythology such that their myths become a land management plan.

Dictating how people can live sustainably in the forest.

I'm always asked as an anthropologist why do these other cultures matter?

They matter for lots of reasons.

At the very existence of other ways of being, thinking, orienting ourselves in social, ecological and spiritual space, puts a lie to those of us in our own tradition-- rich as it is.

Who say we cannot change as we know we must the fundamental way in which we inhabit this planet.

>> Let me ask you about climate change.

We've had your friend, Dr. David Suzuki on Canada Files .

He talked about his concern for the planet because of climate change.

And his real concern about the world his grandchildren are going to grow up in.

We'll also be interviewing this season, Patrick Moore, whom I think you know as well.

Who takes a view, not an opposite view.

He certainly is very skeptical about the alarmism around climate change.

What's your view?

Are we on the brink of disaster?

Or is the alarmism and concern about climate change overblown?

>> I think the absolute consensus amongst scientists is that there is a serious, demonstrable transformation.

It's happening before our eyes.

I would say, as an anthropologist, the most poignant thing in my experience, is whether you have Pat debating with David, the bottom line is that Indigenous people who played no role in the creation of this problem are the ones dealing with the consequences.

Whether it's the Inuit in the High Arctic, Polynesians in the Marshall Islands with sea levels rising.

The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, as the Kogi see the ice on the flank of the Goddess Mother melting.

The other important thing is for us, climate change, whatever one's political position is either a political debate, a technical challenge, an economic opportunity, or biological ecological catastrophe.

But we forget that for those around the world who literally believe that they are responsible for the well-being of the earth.

That represents the vast majority of Indigenous people.

Their prayers, rituals, and ceremonies maintain the balance of the world.

For them, climate change is a profound psychological and existential crisis.

Because if the earth is in trouble, it is their fault.

Ethnographically we see around the world Indigenous societies who played no role in the creation of this phenomenon.

In a certain sense, doing more to deal with it than we are, who are culpable.

Climate change is a consequence of 300 years of consuming the ancient sunlight of the world.

There is no doubt that human activities are engaged in this warming of the environment.

We should look at the consensus of scientific opinion.

None of these scientists want there to be a problem.

No-one is looking for evidence of apocalyptic visions.

They don't get up in the morning hoping that the world is going to fall apart.

I promise you that.

And clearly the consensus among scientists.

We turn to science to celebrate the essence of who we are in western civilization.

Allopathic medicine-- the greatest achievement of human history, arguably.

The fact that we can put a man on the moon.

Yet when science informs us of something that's not convenient for our economic models, we turn our back on the science.

In some cases, try to reduce to ridicule, those advocates who are warning us of the impending challenges that are brought about by the climate crisis.

>> Wade, you'll be approaching your 70th birthday in a couple of years.

I didn't want to make you feel badly about that.

Do anthropologists generally retire gracefully?

Or would you like to breathe your last floating on a river in a kayak somewhere 1000's of miles away from where you are now?

>> That's a wonderful question.

I've never described myself by a label-- anthropologist, botanist.

I've always thought of myself as a storyteller.

Storytelling never ends.

I've been really blessed to have opportunities of education and experience.

For 13 years, I was Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic .

I've been able to see so much.

One of the reasons I returned to the university system as a professor, was to fill the eyes of young people with wonder.

To infect them with the virus of tolerance To try to do for them, what my great professors did for me, in this wonderful lineage of knowledge.

You understand that the student is more important than the teacher.

in that lineage.

I try to say to young people, with all the pressures that are upon them, including my own daughters-- always remember that pessimism is an indulgence.

Despair is an insult to the imagination.

Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention.

Do what is necessary.

Do what you need to do.

Only then ask whether it's permissible or possible.

Always remember what Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Everest said, "If you're not living on the edge when you're young, you're taking up too much space."

>> Wade, you are one of the most interesting guests we've had on Canada Files .

Thank you so much for taking this time with us.

>> Thank you so much.

It's been a honour to be with you, seriously.

>> Thank you as well for joining us on this edition of Canada Files .

We'll see you next time.

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