What would you get if you crossed an anthropologist and a botanist? That question may sound like the latest joke making the rounds. But the career of explorer Wade Davis has provided a fascinating punch line. What can these two fields of study accomplish together?

Dr. Wade Davis bears many titles. He's one of seven National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence. He's the author of several highly acclaimed books about different cultures around the world. And he's an ethnobotanist, an unusual career that combines the study of plants and the people who live among them.

Davis' work has taken him from the Amazon rainforest and the Andes mountains in South America to the high Arctic region in northern Canada to the mountains of Tibet in China. It's been a journey which began in the field of anthropology, the study of different societies and cultures. The journey took an unexpected turn after he spent almost two years among the tribes in the Amazon rainforest.

"As a young anthropologist," he explains, "I never really understood how I was expected to turn up at some village and announce that I was going to be there for a month or two months or more and that they were going to house, feed, and protect me. And guess what, 'I'm here to study your private lives.' If someone did that to us, we'd call the police!"

Botany became a means for Davis to better connect with the people he was trying to study. "In the Amazon, the obvious way to come close to the people in the forest was through the plants themselves, the plants upon which the people depended for every aspect of their material well-being and spiritual well-being," he says.

"So I think that I became a botanist because it was the only way I could figure out a means of understanding the life and ways of other peoples."

Davis explains how the knowledge of plants provides a link with the tribes of the Amazon. (Requires QuickTime. Download now.)

What do nomadic tribes such as the Inuit in the high Arctic and the Penan of Borneo have to teach us? Davis offers an answer that may surprise you.

After getting a Ph.D. from Harvard University, Davis spent another three years living among 15 different tribes in both the Amazon and the Andes. During that time, he collected thousands of plant specimens as well as an intimate knowledge of tribal life. Other expeditions took him to Haiti, where he researched the connection between folk medicines and voodoo, and to the islands of the south Pacific, where he focused on the Penan people in the Borneo rainforest.

Davis says that his work with different peoples constantly means finding common ground with them, even when there are no plants in sight. When he studied the Inuit—a society of nomadic hunters in the frozen reaches of the high Arctic—he forged a connection by becoming a hunter himself.

These exotic experiences may call to mind the famous movie explorer Indiana Jones. Davis notes that he did once wander for 10 days without food and that he has had his share of close calls on airplanes. But he stresses that these adventures are more the exception than the rule.

"I've never, ever gotten anything in my work as an anthropologist by invoking the kind of bravado, macho character that you might imagine an Indiana Jones to have," he says. "That doesn't get you very far. What really gets you places is having the ability to break down that inherent barrier that exists between you and the people with whom you find yourself living as a guest.

"And that's often gesture, nuance, subtle things. A willingness to sleep beside people on the stony ground, to endure the cold, to eat whatever is placed before you—whether its living insects or a slithering snake."

Wade Davis says that although he's no Indiana Jones, he's had a lifelong taste for travel and adventure.

Along with Davis' remarkably broad view of the world, he's developed some large concerns. Those concerns include the rapid erosion of Earth's "ethnosphere," which Davis defines as "the sum total of all thought, beliefs, and ideas since the dawn of human consciousness."

Davis says the loss of the world's linguistic diversity alone has caused significant damage to this ethnosphere.

"When your parents were born, there were probably 6,000 languages spoken on Earth," he points out. "Of those 6,000 languages, fully half are not today being taught to schoolchildren, which means that they are already effectively dead. And linguists tell us that within another century that the linguistic diversity of the world may be down to 300 languages."

The loss of native languages poses a particular concern for Davis.

That decline also means a loss of the culture, philosophy, and way of life contained in languages, Davis warns. Still, he remains hopeful about the future and points to the progress in preserving the biosphere—the world's fragile physical environment.

"Forty years ago, just getting people to stop throwing garbage our of their car window was considered a great environmental victory," he says. "And voices like Rachel Carson, who warned of more dire scenarios, were absolutely isolated voices in the wild.

"If you think about it, 30 years ago, 'biodiversity' or 'biosphere' were exotic terms familiar only to a handful of earth scientists. Now they're part of the vocabulary of schoolchildren. So we've come a tremendously long way in our realization that we have an enormous impact on the planet."

Davis points out that our growing global awareness makes the fragility of Earth more obvious.

Davis adds that explorers like himself have an important role to play in preserving what's left of the ethnosphere. "We've really contributed to the public dialogue, which says that that the very fact the Penan live in the forests of Borneo or the Inuit in the high Arctic—all of these cultures teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of organizing society, other ways of interacting with the Earth itself. In that diversity, I think you find strength.

"What I'm going to try to do in my tenure as Explorer-in-Residence is to hunt around the world for those stories that really tell us something about this diversity. In a sense, my role is to be more of a storyteller than either a botanist or anthropologist. I believe that it's stories that change the world."

While modern anthropologists may not be discovering new peoples, they play a major role in raising awareness about human diversity.

And with that diversity in mind, Davis envisions his future as a storyteller.

Learn More

• Find out more about the loss of languages around the world in the Riverdeep Current article, "Languages on the Brink."

• Read about the dangers facing Brazil's rainforest in the Riverdeep Current article, "Remnants of a Rainforest."

• Younger students can create their own interactive stories in Edmark's Destination Rainforest, available on CD-ROM.

• Do your own botanical investigations with the Biology Explorer activity, Photosynthesis: Sun and Shade Plants. (Requires Logal Express. Get a free trial subscription.)

More Links

• Visit the National Geographic Society's Explorers-in-Residence pages.

Related Resources

• You can get the following books by Wade Davis:

  Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire

  One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

  Rainforest: Ancient Realm of the Pacific Northwest