One River Quotes

“during his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe.”
― Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

“For the people of the village every activity was an affirmation of continuity. At dawn the first of the family to go outside formally greeted the sun.”
― Wade Davis, One River

“Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful.”
― Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

“Shamanism is arguably the oldest of spiritual endeavors, born as it was at the dawn of human awareness. For our Paleolithic ancestors, death was the first teacher, the first pain, the edge beyond which life as they knew it ended and wonder began. Religion was nursed by mystery, but it was born of the hunt, from the need on the part of humans to rationalize the fact to live they had to kill what they most revered, the animals that gave them life. Rich and complex rituals and myths evolved as an expression of the covenant between the animals and humans, a means of containing within manageable bounds the fear and violence of the hunt and maintaining a certain essential balance between the consciousness of man and the unreasoning impulses of the natural world.”
― Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

“As romantics,” he told me, “we idealize a past we never experienced and deny those who knew that past from changing. We forget perhaps the most disturbing lesson of anthropology. As Lévi-Strauss said, ‘The people for whom the term cultural relativism was invented, have rejected it.”
― Wade Davis, One River

“Cuando se ha vivido en completo aislamiento, ¿cómo se puede entender lo que significa perder una cultura? No es sino hasta que ha desaparecido casi por completo y la gente se educa y se dan cuenta de lo que están perdiendo. Para entonces, los atractivos de las nuevas formas de vida son tan irresistibles, que los únicos que quieren volver a las antiguas costumbres son los que nunca vivieron bajo ellas".”
― Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

“Instead, his dream of twelve years was wiped out by the stroke of a pen.”
― Wade Davis, One River

“a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses”
― Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest