Presiding: BARBARA SCOTT, Southern Oregon University, UCEA President
Awards Presentation: MURIEL OAKS, Washington State University
Speaker: WADE DAVIS, Cultural Anthropologist, Explorer

    We are in a race against time to preserve countless species of plants and animals. Wade Davis takes us on a journey across the globe to survey the progress. Wade Davis is an explorer-in-residence at the national geographic society. Named by the geographic as one of the “explorers for the Millennium,” Davis is an anthropologist and plant explorer who received his ph.D. in ethnobotany from Harvard University.
    Davis spent three years in the Amazon and Andes searching for new medicinal drugs, before heading to Haiti to investigate folk poisons used to create zombies. This investigation is chronicled in his book The Serpent and the Rainbow, an international best-seller. From Haiti, Davis moved to Borneo, where he lived among the Penan, the last nomads of Southeast Asia. His recent travels have taken him to East Africa, the high Arctic, Tibet, the Orinoco of Venezuela, and the deserts of Mali and Burkina Faso.
    Just as there is a biological web of life, there is also a cultural and spiritual web of life—what Davis and National Geographic have taken to calling the “ethnosphere”—the sum total of all the thoughts, beliefs, myths, and institutions brought into being by the human imagination.