I’ve been a fan of Wade Davis for decades.

An academic and adventurer. He crossed the Darién Gap at age-20, for example.

This book is a summary of his Massey Lectures:

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World (The CBC Massey Lectures 2009) 

Very good. Smart and succinct.

Davis compares cultures quickly and easily, looking for lessons for us who haven’t lived with Amazon tribes for years.

Of the thousand key point, one really struck me. His discussion of how the British — on arrival — could not understand the Australian aborigines.

These are and were a people with no notion of linear time.

Theirs was one of the great experiments in human thought. The notion that the world existed as a perfect whole, and that the singular duty of humanity was to maintain through ritual activity the land precisely as it existed when the Rainbow Serpent embarked on the journey of creation.

… But in life there is only the Dreaming, in which every thought, every plant and animal, are inextricably linked as a single impulse, the inspiration of the first dawning.

Had humanity followed this track, it is true that we would have never placed a man on the moon.

But we would most certainly not be speaking of our capacity to compromise the life support of the planet. I have never in all of my travels been so moved by a vision of another possibility, born literally 55,000 years ago.

TED Blog

Edmund Wade Davis CM (born December 14, 1953) is a Canadian cultural anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author, and photographer.

Davis came to prominence with his 1985 best-selling book The Serpent and the Rainbow about the zombies of Haiti. He is professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia.