The Wayfinders (The CBC Massey Lectures)

by Wade Davis

ONE OF THE INTENSE pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live amongst peoples who have not forgotten the old ways,

all these peoples teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope.

Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,

From humble origins in Africa, after a journey that lasted 2,500 generations, a hegira 40,000 years in the making, our species had settled the entire habitable world.

Ninety percent of the Amerindian population died within a generation or two of contact.

We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We highly educated people are much worse, relatively speaking.”

A third of the Amazon is savannah.

within a forest that he revered but of which he ultimately knew nothing.

Everything is related, everything connected, a single integrated whole.

Meat is not the right of a hunter but a gift from the spirit world.

White people, Ricardo told me, see with their eyes, but the Barasana see with their minds.

The cost of destroying a natural asset, or its inherent worth if left intact, has no metric in the economic calculations that support the industrialization of the wild. No company has to compensate the public for what it does to the commons, the forests, mountains, and rivers, which by definition belong to everyone. As long as there is a promise of revenue flows and employment, it merely requires permission to proceed. We take this as a given for it is the foundation of our system, the way commerce extracts value and profit in a resource-driven economy.

For several centuries the rational mind has been ascendant, even though science, its finest expression, can still in all its brilliance only answer the question how, but never come close to addressing the ultimate question: why.

The “annual allowable cut” was not a limit never to be exceeded but a quota to be met.

child raised to believe that a mountain is the abode of a protective spirit will be a profoundly different human being from a youth brought up to believe that a mountain is an inert mass of rock ready to be mined.