Author, explorer, filmmaker, and professor Wade Davis will deliver the 14th Annual Sidhartha Maitra Memorial Lecture at UC Santa Cruz on Friday, November 14, at the Music Center Recital Hall.
Davis will speak on the topic: "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in a Modern World"
Presented by the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, the lecture begins at 7:30 p.m. Although the event is sold out, the lecture will be made available to the public online through a live stream.
Davis is Professor of Anthropology and the LEEF Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Between 1999 and 2013, he served as Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and is currently a member of the NGS Council of Explorers.
Named by the NGS as one of the Explorers for the Millennium, he has been described as “a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.”
Davis is the author of 17 books, including The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, The Wayfinders and The Sacred Headwaters. His latest book, Into the Silence, received the 2012 Samuel Johnson prize, the top award for literary nonfiction in the English language
His film credits include Light at the Edge of the World, an eight-hour documentary series written and produced for the National Geographic channel.
In recent years Davis’s work has taken him to East Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Polynesia, Tibet, Mali, Benin, Togo, New Guinea, Australia, Colombia, Vanuatu, Mongolia and the high Arctic of Nunuvut and Greenland.
He holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University.
