The Somenos Marsh Wildlife Society is honoured to host Wade Davis as our keynote speaker for the 2021 WildWings Nature & Arts Festival. Wade will be speaking to the 2021 WildWings theme, Sharing a sense of Place where he will relate our theme to the current world around us. 

Wade is an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. 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.” In recent years his 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 Nunavut and Greenland.

An ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker, Wade holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his Ph.D. in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among fifteen indigenous groups in eight Latin American nations while making some 6000 botanical collections. His work later took him to Haiti to investigate folk preparations implicated in the creation of zombies, an assignment that led to his writing Passage of Darkness (1988) and The Serpent and the Rainbow (1986), an international best seller later released by Universal as a motion picture. On a local note, he attended Brentwood College in Mill Bay for his high school education. For more info daviswade.com

Ticket Cost: $20 on sale at Cowichan Performing Arts Centre.

Location: Cowichan Performing Arts Centre