Episode Transcript
[Intro]: Welcome to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Dennis McKenna: Wade Davis is an ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has taken him from the Amazon to Tibetan Africa to Australia, Polynesia to the Arctic.
An explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society from 2000 to 2013, he is currently professor of anthropology and the BC Leadership chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. Author of 24 books, including “One River”, “The Wayfinders”, “Into the Silence”, and “Magdalena”, he holds degrees in anthropology and biology and received his PhD in ethnobotany, all from Harvard University. Primarily through the Harvard Botanical Museum, he spent over three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, living among 15 indigenous groups in eight latin american nations while making some 6000 botanical collections.
A professional speaker for 30 years, Wade has spoken for the TED main stage on five occasions, delivered the CBC, Massey lectures, and lectured at 200 universities and some 250 corporations and professional associations.
Wade is an honorary member of the Explorers Club, honorary vice president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, a recipient of twelve honorary degrees, and a member of the Order of Canada, among other distinctions.
In 2018, he was made an honorary citizen of Columbia, named by the National Geographic Society 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.
His latest book, Beneath the Surface of Things, became a national bestseller within days of its release by Greystone in April 2023.
Wade, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the Brainforest Café.
[00:02:42] Wade Davis: Thank you, Dennis. Wonderful to be here.
[00:02:45] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, I am too. My God, what a resume. I mean, this is.
[00:02:50] Wade Davis: Yeah, I was just going to correct one thing. That little book Beneath the Surface of Things just came out in 24. So it's only been out for a couple of weeks.
[00:02:59] Dennis McKenna: Yes, it's been out for a couple of weeks. I read it. I've read some parts more than once. It's just an amazing work. I mean, like, I mean, I'm a great fan of. And I've read almost everything you've written. I can't say I've read all of it, but it is an incredible piece of work and it's a series of essays and so on that you pulled together that you actually started working on when Covid-19 hit and shut everything down.
So what are your thoughts? I mean, this. This book clearly sort of delineates you as an influential thinker, an intellectual, a person who looks at the contemporary situation. And you have an inherently interdisciplinary perspective. You understand biology and ecology, but also politics. And when you look around our current existential situation.
Clearly, we're at some kind of juncture. We're at some kind of tipping point.
[00:04:15] Wade Davis: I mean, the funny thing about those essays, we all kind of saw our lives skid to a fault. And all their precious plans take a detour to the car wash during COVID, and for someone like myself, who had been almost incessantly on the road, and someone who was a storyteller, a writer, was always drawing material from the far reaches of the earth, if you will.
Suddenly, it was both a relief and a shock to have to stay put, to stay still. And I began to look back at my previous life of travel, almost like a violent hallucination.
And I enjoyed that hiatus. I mean, of course, we must always remember how many people suffered. And I was in a unique situation in that, you know, I was of a certain age.
I didn't have word pressure. I had a beautiful place to live. And it was just a moment in time where I began to sort of journey not across deserts or through forests, but through dense concentrations of words, you know, in books. And I found in books kind of new vistas that caused me to think and write in different ways. And it was only as all the essays sort of came together that I realized with the help of my editor that there was a kind of common theme. And it invoked something that a great mentor of mine, the anthropologist Johannes Wilbert, who lived 40 years with the Huenikini warao in the Orinoco delta, great latin american scholar. And he always said, anthropology allows us to see beneath the surface of things. And that's where the title comes from. And what the etsies are trying to do is look at phenomena through that anthropological lens, which, when focused most helpfully, often allows us to see the wisdom in the middle of the way. I mean, one thing, Dennis, that I've come to really not just be concerned for, but almost to have contempt for, is ideology, ideology, be it of the right or the left. And what is ideology? Ideology is when someone becomes so loyal and fixed in their adherence to a set of beliefs that not only is there no flexibility in their intellectual landscape, but those who do not concur with those beliefs become demonized as the other. And the ideas that promote difference of opinion become a target. And therefore, before you know it, books are burned. And before you know it, as famously was said, if you begin to burn books, you burn people. And we're living through an era of just intense ideological conformity, which is sort of so antithetical to the dream of a new earth, if you will, that we all shared coming out of the best of the idealistic sixties, sparked in part by the fact that millions of us lay prostrate before the gates of awe having taken some psychedelic. I mean, we've talked about this, Dennis, and I don't think that I would write the way I write or think the way I think or approach nature the way I do certainly understand women and respect women. Or if I hadn't taken psychedelics, that old thing from our parents, don't take these things, you'll never come back the same. Well, in a way, that was the entire point, right?
[00:08:02] Dennis McKenna: That was the point. No, I think. I mean, clearly people in our sort of demographic or intellectual demographic have been profoundly influenced by psychedelics in a good way. And as you say, I think it gives us an appreciation for each other, for nature, for this planet that we live on, that we're being so profligate, so thoughtless about how we use the resources. I mean, when the so-called psychedelic, the psychedelic revolution, it's hard to put a marker. I mean, it kind of got a start in the sixties and then it kind of got stuffed down and then in some ways it's coming back. And I've said in conversations with our colleagues, well, psychedelics may save the world. I think psychedelics are a catalyst to waking up. And I think the point that you made about ideology, and I would also, you know, include religion in this, often these things are mechanisms to interfere with clear thinking, basically, and, you know, a set of beliefs that is kind of a set of suppositions that may or may not be based in facts. And I think psychedelics can be a wake up call from this.
[00:09:31] Wade Davis: Yeah, they had like a house cleaning. You know, one of the things that I like to think that I try to do both as a speaker, a filmmaker, a writer, storyteller is,
Is to leave people uplifted. You know, there's always. There's always a sense of, you know, doom and gloom. But, you know, what era has ever been free of negativity? I mean, in 1945, the last year of World War two, a million human beings died every month in that conflict.
It's interesting. Religion is fundamentally about what happens to us after death.
Every religious ideology is fundamentally wrestling with eternity and trying to come out on top. My father used to say every church should have a billboard outside of it saying, important, if true. But at the same time, at the same time, my father was really a wise man and a very kind man. And if he didn't necessarily believe in religion. I mean, he had very much been broken by the war. He did believe in good and evil. And unlike my mom, for example, Dennis, who was more of a traditional christian, who had that idea or that dream, that if we just try to harden a goodwood vag, push evil, the Christ child would triumph over the fallen Archangel, the devil, and all would be well. Of course, my dad had no such illusions. And he would say to me, son, there's good and evil in the world. Take your side and get on with it. And what he was really saying was really wise. Because history makes it very clear that good and evil walk side by side. We'll never vanquish the darkness. We can only choose a side of light. And it's almost like a buddhist idea, the pilgrim life being a pilgrimage with the destination not being a place, but a state of mind. And one of the things that's so helpful is if you recognize that you'll never vanquish evil, you don't worry about your failure to do so, and it gives you no cause for bitterness. And therefore you can continue to serve, if you will. Although it sounds a little precious, the side of righteousness.
And I certainly find at my age, I'm 70 now, we're about the same age that I haven't really lost my idealism or my energy or my conviction that there's certain things that are right and certain things that are wrong. And then when there's an obligation to stand up. And I think that's largely because I don't really expect to win. And it gives one a lot of freedom. And I think that there is a disservice that older people do. I mean, what is life but a story we lose the power of comprehending as we get old. So as we get old, we look back, we don't understand the world coming at us from behind, if you will. And we tend to get very despairing. And bitterness especially comes to those who look back on a life of decisions imposed upon them. Whereas contentment comes to those who have truly been the architects of their own lives. And they look back on a life of conscious decision making and the freedom and the knowledge that you've made the right, if not necessarily the right decisions, at least you've owned your decisions. And that, I think, is a key to contentment in old age. But I think if we're going to really deal with problems like climate change, we have to recognize that nothing good comes out of pessimism. Pessimism is despair and an insult to the Imagination.
[00:13:19] Dennis McKenna: Despair that is an answer to nothing.
[00:13:23] Wade Davis: Yeah, it's an insult to the imagination. I mean, orthodoxy is the enemy of invention. We have to do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible or permissible. And I think there's a very provocative essay in the new book on climate, which is in no way denying the severity of the threat. On the contrary. But it is asking whether we're approaching it in the right way. And one of the issues that it raises is what the climate of doom and gloom has done to the psychological well being of young people who in fact will have to deal with the consequences of this age of carbon. And there's a lot of talk of things we can do, but if you really pay attention, and again, look beneath the surface of things, they're not going to be necessarily that effective. So, for example, there's nothing wrong with personal agency as we try to lower our individual carbon footprint. But if you think that stopping flying is a solution, you have to recognize that realism is not apathy. And the realistic scenario is that 80% of the world has never been in an airplane.
India's the greatest airline market today. Just last year at Paris Indigo and Air India bought 1000 jets. By 2040, the Airbus in Boeing anticipates selling 42,000 aircraft.
These sorts of personal things we can do are nice, but they're not going to solve the problem. And similarly, this obsession we have with getting to net zero, it's probably not going to happen, certainly as readily as people say it must.
And secondly, it won't do much good to get to a carbon free energy economy if that economy continues to destroy the natural world. I mean, a classic example would be here in British Columbia, where we've, with great fanfare, pledged to get to net zero in Vancouver by 2030, even while the province of British Columbia colludes with industry to cut 65 million metrics timber every year. Eastern Europe, in Romania and Bulgaria were grinding up ancient forests to make sawdust, to make pellets, to ship to Germany, to allow Germany to satisfy its green quotas of energy production. It's something you hear. This is one last final optimistic thought. You hear a lot about the figure 1.5, in other words, 1.5 celsius being the figure we must somehow keep beneath. But that's not going to happen, clearly, as the UN has admitted. But the real interesting 1.5 figure is actually the reproductive rate of the population. And as soon as the population reproductive rate drops below 1.5 for two generations, the population of that nation cuts in half.
Incredibly, Korea is already 0.8, Ukraine's 1.01. I think the states is about 1.68.
Japan, China, even India is 2.08. So what in fact is happening is that within the lifetime of our probably great grandchildren, the world will see a precipitous collapse of the human population.
[00:17:12] Dennis McKenna: Yes.
[00:17:12] Wade Davis: What's interesting about this is it's not being driven by ideology or by policy, it's just happening. And it's happening largely with the liberation of women. So in fact, the single most important thing we can do for climate, if we're thinking about meaningful long term solutions, is to liberate women and give women control of their reproductive bodies and to give them economic opportunities. So paradoxically, economic development together with the liberation of women is probably the most important thing we can do for climate.
And yet, if you look, for example, the terms of the Paris agreement, if you take the money that we all know will neither be appropriated nor therefore spent, but nevertheless, the paper that was pledged, the money rather that was pledged at Paris to deal with climate through the end of this century to 2100, if you just took one month of that expenditure, that would be enough to lift the entire global population and half of which of course, being women, out of poverty.
And yet all this energy is going into this kind of chasing after net zero.
Realistically, it's not going to happen, at least in our lifetimes.
[00:18:37] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, it seems that in some ways, this chase after net zero, it's like the problem has been taken over by the tech bros and that sort of thing. It's like, well, not only can we fix the climate, but we can make money at it. No, you can't make money. And these things, like the electric vehicles for example, are carbon capture. And all these things, these are red herrings. They're not going to work.
[00:19:07] Wade Davis: I mean, I think actually billions for your podcast audience, I think that the electric car thing is really worth one to kind of deconstruct for a second, because you're so right, it is a red herring. It turns out that first of all, 20% of electric car is plastic. So that's fossil fuels anyway, that the majority of a car, be it electric or conventional, its carbon footprint occurs in the manufacturing. And it turns out its much more carbon intensive to bring an electric car. And of course, the electricity index is much higher too because of the use of the heavy metals. And so it turns out that the difference over the course of both the construction and the operative life of the vehicle, its only about a 25% difference to go to electric. And when you consider that in most of the world, certainly in China and in India, the electricity for the foreseeable future will be generated by coal. It's not clear that the promise of electrification of the fleet with all the incumbent costs. I mean, after all, there are 150,000 gas stations in America, there's over 100,000 in China. This represents a tremendous investment to shift that transportation grid. It can be done, but not without enormous expenditures. And the outcome may not just be as promising as we would like. At the moment, there's about 26 million electric cars on the road, because people have bought into the hope that they represent, they remain about 1.5 billion conventional cars. And just to think about that, Coal for a minute, India last year in its master plan produced 700 million tons of coal. And this year the master plan calls for the production of a billion metric tons of coal. So this doesn't suggest that coal is not going to be in the energy equation, out of the energy equation anytime soon.
[00:21:19] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, you can't, this is not going to happen. The thing, the thing about the point you just made and the point that is made in your essay that really resonated strongly with me. Not only do we have to provide people with the ability to improve their standard of living, right, I mean, make life better for people, especially women, and that will redound to have consequences that are beneficial for the climate less people, the demographic collapse that that will create. But then the other point that I thought was, I hope that people are paying attention to what we need to do is not get enamored of all these new technologies. These are the next shiny objects that the tech industry is offering. What we need to do is restore nature, make that point.
[00:22:25] Wade Davis: That's the other key point.
It's one thing to reduce carbon emissions, it's another to facilitate carbon absorption through the mirror photosynthesis. And one of the ironies is that when you go to these global climate conferences, as I did in Copenhagen in 2020, I think it was, maybe it was another, I can't remember the year.
You have thousands of environmentalists there with not really anything to do and any reason to be there. And one of the things I've certainly noticed, even from my own work on nonprofit boards and environmental groups, is that environmental groups all around the world have been distracted by the climate issue, which on the one hand is so abstract that no one has to be accountable and no one has to risk the discomfort of political confrontation or conflict. It's kind of like this holy grail.
And meanwhile, it seems that around the world, the natural capital of Home the lakes, the forests, the rivers, to some extent have been neglected, as entire global environmental community has been increasingly singularly focused on the climate challenge. And meanwhile, for example, we have, in the boreal forests of Canada, or indeed the boreal forests of the world, from Siberia to Saskatchewan, we have massive industrial clearing, which is the most powerful carbon sink in the world. The boreal forest sequestered carbon at twice the rate of the Amazon, for example. And yet we're tearing down those forests and in Canada, largely to make two ply toilet paper. So, in other words, we have to both protect our natural.
I mean, the best things we can do for carbon, it seems to me, is protect and enhance our natural systems. And that includes regenerative farming, planting in the, and taking advantage of the miracle of photosynthesis, at the same time liberating women and paying attention to some very basic things. I mean, for example, 8% of carbon emissions come from the decay of food in landfills. And that's because around the world, an enormous percentage of food in the United States is something like, you know, 400 billion meals a day end up in the trash, an expenditure of over $100 billion of food waste, all of which ends up in landfills that end up, of course, creating. So while people go hungry, we are squandering food and creating methane emissions from the world.
[00:25:15] Dennis McKenna: How can we influence the cultural, global, global conversation? How can we shift it away from these, you know, technological solutions which are.
[00:25:30] Wade Davis: One of the things that.
[00:25:32] Dennis McKenna: On nature, back on slowing down. I mean.
[00:25:37] Wade Davis: I think one important, one important point we can make is that climate change and indeed the biodiversity crisis have become humanity's problems. But they were not caused by humanity. They were caused by a narrow subset of humanity that for the last 300 years has been consuming the ancient sunlight of the world. In other words, one of the lessons of anthropology that i've been as a storyteller trying to spread with every talk and every book is that we now know that the genetic endowment of humanity is a continuum. Race biologically is a total fiction, all cuffed in the same genetic cloth. And that means that all human cultures, by definition, share the same genius. And therefore, how that genius is expressed is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. So there is no hierarchy of culture. That old victorian idea that we went from the savage to the barbarian to the civilized to the strand of London has been totally mocked by, ridiculed by modern science, and is irrelevant to our lives today as a notion of clergymen in the 19th century who believed the earth was just 6000 years old. And so. But what this means then, is how people use that genius is simply a matter of choice. Every culture is a unique answer to a fundamental question. What does it mean to be human and alive? Every culture has something to say on that subject, and just as each deserves to be heard. And so when we look around the world, we too, of course, are a product of our history and of our beliefs and our choices. And in our tradition, as we tried to liberate ourselves from the tyranny of absolute faith, and we gave birth to this amazing flash of the human spirit that we now know as the enlightenment. In a single phrase, descartes deanimated the world.
We throw away all notions of myth, magic, mysticism and metaphorical. And invariably, as Saul Bellow said, science made a house cleaning of belief, and the triumph of a kind of secular materialism became the very conceit of modernity. Now the consequences of that are grave. And the transformation of the earth into an inner stage set in a way upon which only the human drama unfolded, I think accounts for how we can do what we do to the earth. You know, When I was growing up in British Columbia, Dennis, I used to work in some of the tough logging camps on the coast here. And if you've ever seen a clear cut, you can only imagine what it feels like to be making that clear cut. And the only way we could survive psychologically, as far as I could tell, was just assuming that the force was inert and we were there to make money. And that's what we were. And that way of thinking, although it may be ubiquitous and seemingly all powerful in its triumph around the world, has not just got us into this position of dire circumstances, but more importantly, we should remember that it's, in fact, not the norm. It's highly anomalous in the human experience. And if you look at the ethnographic record, it's very clear that extraction is not the norm. But reciprocity is some basic iteration that the earth owes humans its bounty and people in turn owe the earth their fidelity. And this is something that is consciously played out in culture after culture, in ritual. And people are never seen as a problem. We are the only solution because it is only through human consciousness that the earth, in a sense, can come most perfectly alive. And so the Barasana, for example, the northwest Amazon of Colombia, their most profound cultural insight is the thought that plants and animals are just people in another dimension of reality. Now, again, the important thing in this is not to try to say who's right and who's wrong. That's not the point. It's how the metaphor plays out with the people. So, in other words, you and I were raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Well, that makes us different than our godchildren in the Andes. Are raised since birth. To believe that a mountain is an Apu deity. That will direct their destiny. Now, its not about whos right and who's wrong. What's interesting is how the belief system has different consequences. In terms of the ecological footprint of the culture. So if you go into the northwest Amazon, the shaman and the use, for example, of Yajé or ayahuasca. The shaman is really less a physician and less a priest. Then he's a diplomat who must maintain constant dialogue with the spirit realm. I mean, you can't go hunting unless the shaman speaks to the animal masters, right?
But also from time to time, because of this rule that humans take on to maintain the harmonic balance of the world. Which is literally what they believe. In the case of the peoples of the Anaconda, the Badasanan, Makun and Tanimuklos and so on.
The shaman must be more like a nuclear engineer. Who goes into the heart of the reactor to reprogram the world.
The main image is that human beings actually have the responsibility and the control and the capacity to maintain the balance of the world. And terms like harmony, balance. I'm not invoking the language of hippy ethnography. This is really what they think they're doing. And so if we go to the Arawakos or the Colgi, the Huiwa and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. I mean, there's direct descendants of the ancient Tyrone civilization. Still alive, still ruled and inspired by sun priests 500 years after the conquest. And still believing that their prayers maintain the cosmic balance of the world. They really believe. And they know that the blood that flows through your veins. Is no different than the water that runs down the course of the.
[00:31:47] Dennis McKenna: Who´se to say that that's not true.
[00:31:51] Wade Davis: Well, they said that they are true. Because we know that hydrologically, when we die. Our blood seeps into the groundwater and runs.
[00:32:00] Dennis McKenna: But so in preserving.
[00:32:03] Wade Davis: So I think the key point there. Let me just. Dennis. Let me just jump in there. Sorry to interrupt you, but just to cap that off, the point isn't to suggest that, you know, we go back to a pre industrial past. Or that any indigenous group be somehow frozen in time. Like some kind of zoological specimen and denied the brilliance of modernity and science. No, it's to say that the very existence of these other ways of thinking, other ways of being, other attitudes about the relationship between human beings and the natural world, critically, it puts a lie to those of us in our own dominant society who essentially say that we cannot change when we all know we must change the fundamental way in which we inhabit the planet. And this process of change is happening, and it's underway to this day. I mean, think about it. When you and I were kids, just getting people to stop throwing garbage out of a car window was an environmental victory. No one spoke about the biosphere or biodiversity. Now, term's known to schoolchildren. So the change is happening. But like all true change, it happens slowly, unpredictably, in ways that aren't obvious, necessarily, or evident to those living through the moment in time. I mean, we're all, like, on the back of a river, right? Flowing downstream, but we don't really know what the current's gonna be or what the orientation of the river is. We're just flowing and doing our best. But change does happen, and it is happening, but it happens not.
[00:33:43] Dennis McKenna: But slowly, not fast enough.
[00:33:44] Wade Davis: Well, you know, I mean, it is what it is, you know? I mean, you know, and again, I think it's worth reflecting. You know, it's sort of like the commencement speaker who stands up in front of a bunch of bright eyed, wonderful college graduates and basically says, the world's a mess. It's up to you to fix it. I mean, what kind of crap is that, you know, they didn't cause a problem. And by the same token, you know, the world will win in the end, and all we can do is do what we can do, and above all, we know one thing, that change only comes about through hope, never, never through fear.
[00:34:33] Dennis McKenna: Right? Right. Yes.
I mean, it's important to preserve this knowledge, this indigenous knowledge, most of which is not written down. It's in the very fiber of these people's beings. But this perspective, and I think the indigenous people's relationships with these psychoactive plants are a component of that. So maybe our culture's rediscovery of psychedelics is a hopeful sign.
[00:35:04] Wade Davis: Well, I remember, Dennis, one of my favorite.
[00:35:11] Dennis McKenna: things that psychedelics are going to save us.
[00:35:09] Wade Davis: Well, I don't know. I remember, Dennis, one of my favorite talks that I've ever heard you give was sort of, you know. You know how some people say that we think we domesticated, we think humans domesticated dogs. But if you pay attention to the dynamic, it's pretty clear that dogs, domesticated humans, they're on the gravy train. But you said a wonderful thing about how we don't just everybodys obsessed by how we discovered or developed this curious formulation called ayahuasca. And I love the talk you once gave that essentially said, no, no, it was the other way around, that ayahuasca is actually driving the equation.
[00:35:50] Dennis McKenna: Yes, yes, thats true. That's true. I was struck. I mean, there was a sentence, a phrase in your essay on climate change, which is absolutely hands down one of the best essays I've read on this whole topic. And we're going to post that on our blog site so that people can read it with your permission.
[00:36:19] Wade Davis: Sure.
[00:36:19] Dennis McKenna: Something you said in there, that if, that it would cost $300 billion to plant a trillion trees and a trillion trees would bring climate down by something like 40% or bring carbon.
[00:36:34] Wade Davis: Yeah, you know, it's very funny.
[00:36:36] Dennis McKenna: Doubled that. I mean, this is less than the defense budget for United States for one year.
[00:36:43] Wade Davis: Well, you know, the business of planting trees to sequester carbon has been controversial in the sense that there was a swiss study that suggested that just using worked over land and taking advantage of land that would not in any way impinge upon either urban growth or agriculture around the world. You could plant enough trees to sequester carbon on the scale equal to the emissions of the industrial society on an annual basis. And there have been people who have almost ridiculed that idea and saying it just can't possibly work or happen. I'm not sure what the argument is saying that it can't work. All I know is that photosynthesis, by definition, is the formula of life. The very fact that carbon dioxide come together with photons of light to give us food we eat and air we breathe.
And that means sequestering. That implies sequestering carbon. So maybe planting trees isn't a panacea, but it can't be a bad thing to do.
[00:38:01] Dennis McKenna: Can't hurt. And it's far more effective for carbon sequestration than any of these technologies, which will take billions, trillions to develop and decades which we don't have.
[00:38:17] Wade Davis: Well, you know, I think You and I,
[00:38:20] Dennis McKenna: there is no better urban sequestration technology than photosynthesis.
[00:38:28] Wade Davis: And you know, Dennis, you and I have been in this realm of plants all of our lives, and I think, you know, the whole story of coca versus cocaine so exemplifies this sort of two worldviews coming at the same kind of issue, if you will. I mean, there's a long essay in the book called the divine leaf of immortality that sort of traces the whole history of the condemnation of coca. And the thing that's so disturbing about this is not only coca is not cocaine. I mean, coca is to cocaine what potatoes are to vodka when the US.
[00:39:08] Dennis McKenna: The coffee is the caffeine and that sort of thing.
[00:39:13] Wade Davis: But when the government goes after people using coke leaves like Eliot Ness going after a truckload of potatoes as violation of the Volstead act. But the thing is, the thing about coke is not only is it a benign, stimulant, highly nutritious plant essential to the ritual well being, the very identity indigenous people throughout the Andes and northwest Amazon. I think the bigger point is that this idiotic war on drugs has not just confused coca with cocaine, but has robbed the world of what is, in fact, South America's greatest gift to the world. And that, of course, is the divine leaf of immortality. I mean, one of the things that's so interesting about coca is that efforts to eradicate the traditional fields in the highlands, in Peru and Bolivia, in the deep valleys beneath the highlands, began 50 or 60 years before there was a cocaine problem or a cocaine trade, a black market trade, and it had nothing to do with the alkaloid and had everything to do with the cultural identity of those who revered the plant in the 1920s.
[00:40:25] Dennis McKenna: All drug prohibition programs usually have to do with suppression of whatever cultural group uses them.
[00:40:33] Wade Davis: Exactly.
[00:40:34] Dennis McKenna: Black people and cannabis and latin american people and all these things.
[00:40:39] Wade Davis: If you look at all the.
[00:40:43] Dennis McKenna: Cultural suppression.
[00:40:45] Wade Davis: Well, I mean, if you look at the 1949 UN conventions calling for the eradication of coca, there's no cocaine problem then.
Cocaine was just a topical anesthetic and a very effective one of that, illustrate Andy Weil's add that there's no such thing as a good and bad drug, just good and bad ways of using drugs.
But what happened in the twenties? Physicians looked up into the mountains from Lima and they saw social pathology. They saw illiteracy, they saw hunger. And because issues of economics, land distribution, equity, exploitation, came too close to challenging the bourgeois foundations of their lives, in Lima, they settled on coca as a cause of all problems in the andes, and the call went for the eradication of the plant. And incredibly, over two generations, from the 1920s through the end of the 1940s, as this call went out from physicians and health officials in Lima, none of them bothered to do the obvious, which was to do a nutritional study of the plant. And when finally Jim Duke and Andy Weil and Tim Plowman did that in 1975, what they found horrified the backers at the US government because it turns out that coca had a small amount of the precursor of cocaine hydrochloride, which was absorbed benignly, as you say, like caffeine in a coffee bean, through the mucous membranes of the mouth. But it was chock full of vitamins and proteins, highly nutritious. It had more calcium than any plant ever studied. Perfect for a diet that lacked a dairy product. It even had enzymes that enhanced the body's ability to digest carbohydrates at high elevation, which made it perfect for the potato diet of the Andes. And moreover, the culture of the use of coca was antithetical to that of cocaine.
Coca is less a drug than a meditation.
Fascinating, Dennis. If you look at the reports from travelers and anthropologists, but especially physicians in the late 19th century, before there was any stigma to either coca or cocaine, the reports are fascinating because they're basically saying things like, well, I started using the plant and walked 30 miles across some moors, Klein bin Lachen got home in time for dinner and I didnt have any tiredness, no hunger, no notice of any kind of stimulation. But it was all right, good day. I'm 89 years old. In other words, it was the fact that the plant had these attributes without being a stimulant. So that this is a remarkable thing about coca. I mean, there's a very funny story that Mortimer writes about in his classic history of coca, published in 1901, where there was a world championship lacrosse game played in Toronto in 1877 on a very hot, humid summer day. And one team was mainly rural kind of lumberjacks, and the other were mostly clerks from the inner city of Toronto. And one would have thought the lumberjacks would have triumphed, but they got wiped off the field by the clerks. And the only explanation Mortimer suggests is, is that the clerks were all chewing coca. You know, in other words, it has. So what, you know, I say in that essay, you know, there's two kind of other important points, I suppose, in that essay, amongst others, is that the only two entities in the world that want to continue to maintain this war on drugs that now cost a trillion dollars, and today there are more people using worse drugs in worse ways than ever before. There's no greater example of a public policy failure than the war on drugs. But the ones who are so keen on it are obviously the cartels themselves. The last thing they want is a legal market for either coca or cocaine. Their profits and their higher black enterprise would just collapse. And of course, the other side that has no interest in actually winning the war on drugs is the DEA, because they get a budget of $67 billion every year, and without a war on drugs, they'd be out on the street looking for work.
But the other aspect, we always talk coca versus cocaine, but we don't talk about the quality of coca and what it could mean to us. I mean, if I told you, for example, the hallucinogens have all kinds of clinical utility, but for a narrow subset of syndromes, for relatively few people in the global population, Coca could reduce coffee to a footnote of history simply because it's a much better and more effective stimulant. I mean, who can really work on coffee? You get the jitters. You get anxious. It doesn't help concentration. It's not a very useful stimulant. Whereas Coke, if I. If I told you there was something that could just sort of wipe away your slight existential malaise when you wake up in the morning, help you get to your desk, and you suddenly find at your desk that with no sense of being under the influence of any stimulant whatsoever, you're just capable, mysteriously, of focusing like never before, concentrating as never before, and having a little kind of sense of well being that somehow just lifts you up when you have to write that first sentence of a report or make that first gesture in whatever it is that you're doing, that incredible ability to facilitate focus and concentration and creativity, which is exactly what coca seems to be able to do.
And so that wonderful gift, which could benefit so many people around the world, has been denied to them because idiotic.
[00:46:38] Dennis McKenna: If you could give access to legal coca, people would discover its properties. I mean, it may not beat out coffee, but people have to have the opportunity to discover this gift.
[00:46:50] Wade Davis: When I say beat out coffee, I'm being facetious. But my point is that.
[00:46:55] Dennis McKenna: I mean, people don't even know about it, you know?
[00:46:59] Wade Davis: And, you know, there's another important element, Dennis, is that, you know, the war on drugs was a sheer fabrication of President Nixon.
[00:47:08] Dennis McKenna: Absolutely.
[00:47:11] Wade Davis: When he wanted to create this notion of the silent majority.
And he never cared a bit about drugs, as Ehrlichman makes clear in his memoir. But a real war on drugs did happen, or a war of drugs. And that war led to the death of 400,000 Colombians. It forced 7 million Colombians to flee their homes and become internally displaced. 5 million Colombians felt obliged to leave their country.
And that war wouldn´t have lasted a day without the black profits of the cocaine trade. In the last year before the peace agreement, the Farc were down to 6000 cadre, mostly kids in search of a meal.
And they made $800 million from the illicit trade. So you give me the Boy scouts of Beverly Hills and that kind of money I could wreak havoc in southern California. And so there's another aspect to this which is that there are 150,000 family farmers, farming families rather in Colombia alone who grow coca as a way of surviving. They're living and we need to give those folks a legal nutraceutical market for their product.
And in doing so we can generate for Colombia, through taxation the money to pay for the cost of peace having drained their treasury for 50 years to pay for the costs of a war made possible only by the sordid profits of the illicit cocaine trade.
So there's so many reasons to liberate this sacred plant.
[00:48:48] Dennis McKenna: The whole problem is because then cocaine itself, the alkaloid has been attributed bit aside this artificial value. I mean the drug itself is worth pennies but it's the interaction between the cartels and the attempt to prohibit cocaine.
[00:49:11] Wade Davis: To me this is one of the arguments for legalization. I mean what drives the black trade and leads to all the death. I mean countries like Mexico, Colombia is still, will never find true stability until the end of the illicit cocaine trade. But Ecuador now, I mean Haiti is a drug state.
The only way to end that is to take the money out of the trade. And everybody thinks that the drugs are driving the trade. What drives the trade is the money.
[00:49:45] Dennis McKenna: The trade is driving the production value.
[00:49:49] Wade Davis: You know I've never in my life met anyone whose decision to use or not use an illicit drug has ever had anything to do with the legal status of that substance.
And by the same token as back to Andy's adage about good and bad ways of using drugs, one good way of using a drug is not to use a drug. In other words, abstinence. And I think if cocaine was legal tomorrow, the supposition is that suddenly everybody's going to use it.
My instinct says quite to the contrary. Anybody who wants to use cocaine can use it today.
And most people who have been exposed to the drug realize that its really a crappy substance and have already decided on abstinence. I mean if cocaine was legal tomorrow, neither you or I are going to rush out to use it. And I don't think anyone will use it once particularly if there is an alternative in the sense of a stimulant it all comes.
I think, in fact, one of the other things about coke that could be very helpful is that it might well help wean people from the use of some of these other substances, illicit. And from tobacco to.
To coffee.
[00:51:18] Dennis McKenna: You have to educate. It all comes down to education. Like Andy and other people, he makes that point. There's no such thing as a bad drug. It's all about. There are plenty of bad ways to use drugs and beneficial ways to use drugs. Well, you mentioned people about these choices and then let them make the choices.
If coca were an option, people would choose to use it.
[00:51:45] Wade Davis: Yeah. And I think you brought up coffee. It's such a good example. Because in the early days, coffee, of course, was a purely medicinal plant. And then it became kind of a stimulant that was subversive. And the sultan of Constantinople, famously, would dress himself up in disguise and go out and try to behead any coffee drinkers found in the streets of a city.
The coffeehouses. In many ways, the French Revolution was caused by caffeine. Because until the early part of the 17th century, you really couldn't drink water in any European city if you didn't want to get ill. So everybody was mildly besotted, drinking mead and wine and beer and spirits. And then suddenly, three central nervous system stimulants come in from beyond the borders of Europe. Chocolate from Central America. And coffee from Abyssinia and eventually the countries of the new world. And, of course, tea from China. And all these substances have to be prepared with boiled water, which takes care of the pathogens. And they're sold in specialized houses because they're unique commodities. And those houses became centers of intellectual intrigue. The coffeehouses of England were known as penny universities because you could go in and listen to Christopher Wren or Samuel Pepys or Jonathan Swift discussing the issues of the day. And of course, in France in particular, they became centers of intrigue and sedition. And the mob that stormed the Bastille began at Voltaire's favorite coffee house, the Cafe de Foy. But what's interesting about coffee is that it. I mean, as you well know, caffeine addicted rats will tear their skin apart to get to new caffeine, if that's made available to them. And yet coffee was domesticated because it served the needs of a changing industrial economy. You could be mildly besotted on beer and work a field or carve artisanal implements, but you couldn't work a machine tool. The industrial revolution depended on steam and coal. But it also depended on tea and coffee and the tea and coffee rate became institutionalized as what was essentially a periodic moment to stop working and take another dose of the drug. Over time, we domesticated coffee to the point that we don't even consider it to be anything but a part of our diet, when it in fact remains a powerful central nervous system stimulant.
And because of that, and because we domesticated, you have an international market that brings great benefits to nation states in terms of taxation and trade. And you also haven't prompted a black market trade with exorbitant prices that would drive addicts to crime in order to satisfy their need for the drug. And yet we did exactly that with coca and cocaine.
[00:55:01] Dennis McKenna: If for some reason, all of a sudden governments were to decide that caffeine is a scourge and it should be prohibited, then we have to eradicate the sources of caffeine. We have to prohibit caffeine. I don't know anyone that would go out of their way to make pure caffeine. You talk about a shitty drug. You know, I mean, cocaine is a shitty drug. Caffeine, even worse, its very prohibition would create this black market because those who want caffeine would stop nothing to get it.
[00:55:38] Wade Davis: Stop nothing to get it. And I mean, it is interesting for coffee drinkers to contemplate that scenario. Dennis, you just.
But on the face of it, it immediately appears completely absurd. The idea that a nation state would demonize and prohibit the drinking of coffee and at the same time go out and try to spray with herbicides that poison the rivers and hurt the children, all the coffee plantations of the world, I mean, it just seems ludicrous on the face of it and would never happen. But then you just have to substitute one plant for the other and realize that that is precisely what's been going on.
[00:56:21] Dennis McKenna: That is precisely what's going on. And if people can't see that analogy and come to some reasonable accommodation, well, coca leaf the divide is the answer.
[00:56:38] Wade Davis: But in the essay, there's a funny kind of anecdote, Dennis, I probably have told you about, but when I came back in 1975, having been Tim Plowman's field assistant on the big Harvard Coca study that we did for two years, Tim said there's a job at the USDA. He wanted me to apply for the US Department of Agriculture. But then he said if I took the job, he'd kill me. And so, intrigued, I went out to Beltsford, Maryland, and I found my way to the office of this corpulent bureaucrat, who clearly was not USDA. He was DEA, drug enforcement agency, head to toe. And the first thing I noticed about him is he was a drug addict. I could hardly get into the office for the cigarette smoke. The second thing I noticed was that the entire office was, was decorated with seized drug paraphernalia. It was like going into the office of an anti pornographer and having the wallpapers papered with pornography. Then I'm looking at this guy, and he describes the job and what he wants. The only thing he distilled from all of our work on the ethnobotany, the nutritional value, the ritual importance of coca. All he distilled is that Tim and I were good at finding coca fields, cocales. And he wanted me to go back to those fields and harvest any insect or fungus or any organism that predated on coca leaves, that they could bring it back to the states, manipulate it genetically, and reintroduce it to wipe out the coca fields. And I'm looking at this sort of monstrous individual with his big hairy chest and gold chains and gold on his watch and butterfly collar and everything. It's the 1970s, after all. And I'm thinking, where have I met this guy before? And as I left the office, I suddenly realized that I had never met him, but I had met him a thousand times because I, we had a little farm in Medellin just in the early seventies, when the cartel was emerging, and we met a lot of these characters. And if the sordid, murderous nature of the trade was not yet apparent, the dark character of these men and women certainly was. And this guy was the cartel. I mean, I never had a stronger, visceral sense that the cartel and the DEA were two sides of the same coin, both of them completely committed to maintaining this policy disaster, war on drugs in perpetuity. And of course, I didn't take that job, but someone did. And eventually they did introduce butterflies and various organisms that predated on coca. And the campaign only stopped when Bill Clinton put an end to it, because he was afraid that the Latin american countries would see it as a policy of biological terrorism, which in fact, it was.
[00:59:30] Dennis McKenna: It was, yeah. So then they just went to the, then they went to herbicides.
[00:59:49] Wade Davis: And of course, that was a dismal failure because they could just harvest the leaves after they had been sprayed, replant the fields, and if necessary, continue into the forest, cutting down more primary forests to make more coca fields. So the use of, and by the way, something most Americans are unaware of, is that the Americans had pledged $800 million to facilitate the peace agreement.
And when President Santos ordered the cessation of the aerial sprain. The Americans threatened the subsequent administration. President Duquesne with a refusal to send that aid unless they restarted the fumigation probe. The aerial herbal fumigation campaign. And this was at a time when Colombia was dealing with 3 million Venezuelan refugees who they didn't turn away. They housed, they gave food to, they put their kids in school, gave them medical care, and in fact, gave them all the right to work. An astonishingly generous gesture by a nation state. But at a time when Colombia needed every penny it had to pay the cost of the peace agreement, which was $45 billion. And right at that moment, the Americans basically said, we won't give you what we've promised unless you begin to spray again. So we did.
[01:01:13] Dennis McKenna: And did they? And does that continue?
[01:01:16] Wade Davis: They didn't know because President Petro stopped it when he came into office.
[01:01:20] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, well, somebody was saying, yeah, it's crazy. Drug policy, drug control, all of this. I mean, it's just. It's not rational, the way it's handled, you know, as we well know. I mean, in the first place, we know that prohibition just doesn't work. I mean, that is not. Education works teach people to make informed choices about what substances to use, whether to use them, and how to use them, and their drug problem goes away. So, yeah, it's completely. That's. I do want to mention that the essay in the book that you're referring to also you gave at the ESPD 55 conference a couple of years ago, and we'll put a link to that essay on the podcast site.
[01:02:15] Wade Davis: That'd be great.
[01:02:16] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we've been. I mean, we could go on all afternoon. You probably don't have all afternoon, but this has been fantastic, wonderful conversation. Is there anything we haven't said in this limited time that you want to be sure to say?
[01:02:34] Wade Davis: Well, I just. I just want to, you know, say how much respect I have for what you've done, all your career, your integrity, but also what you continue to do with this foundation and the podcast and Just, you know, I mean, you are a historic figure in this whole.
[01:02:58] Dennis McKenna: It's a fraction of what you do, but I do appreciate that.
I really appreciate our friendship and the work that we've done together. Most people don't know, or maybe they do, if they've been paying attention, but basically, I wouldn't have my PhD if it weren't for you.
[01:03:18] Wade Davis: Oh, that's not true.
[01:03:20] Dennis McKenna: Absolutely true.
[01:03:21] Wade Davis: It might not have been as crazy if it wasn't for me, being along, we had a lot of fun, though.
[01:03:26] Dennis McKenna: We had a lot of fun. But back in 1981, when I went down to Peru to do my graduate work, you showed up kind of unexpectedly, and we ended up going to the field. And I have no doubt that if you hadn't, I mean, it was just fantastic. And that was where we really sort of got to know each other.
And for you, that expedition was probably pretty much a walk in the park because you're used to being in the jungle. For me, there's like this whole Indiana Jones kind of wild adventure. But we succeeded, and I came back with the material, and I had wanted to study with Schultes before, but I didn´t get that opportunity. I ended up working with Neil Towers at the University of British Columbia. And that turned out to be a good, good choice for me because I got into the chemistry, pharmacology and all that, which I wouldn't have gotten with Schultes. But certainly Schultes was the inspiration for.
[01:04:36] Wade Davis: Well, you know, I think, you know.
[01:04:37] Dennis McKenna: I think that's many people. Many.
[01:04:41] Wade Davis: I think that's an important point, you know, is that you're quite right. I mean, Neil Towers was a formidable figure in the field, and he had a very dynamic lab that you and people like Tim Johns took advantage of in a great way.
But you were all students of Schultes. Schultes had those who happened to be graduate students at Harvard, some of whom really were.
Schultes is an odd character.
Walk in his shadow was to aspire to greatness. And, I mean, in 18 years studying with him, I never had an intellectual conversation.
So you had to be very self motivated with him and some students, that was good. And some, it wasn't so helpful. So I've always thought of Schultes circle as not being Harvard specific, but those who really celebrated and continued his legacy. And in that sense, you're as much a Harvard Schulte student as anyone who's ever walked the earth.
And he would think that if he were still alive.
[01:05:55] Dennis McKenna: Yeah, well, we were all certainly inspired by him. And even if we didn't study with him, he was always very kind. Every interaction I ever had with him was like, this is a man that he knows who he is, and he has a, he has a moral compass and just very encouraging and so on. So it was really a wonderful thing.
And then I should mention, I want to mention, as we said at the top of the hour, Wade's written over 24 books now, but one of his most important book, certainly in my world was “One River”, “One River, Explorations in the Amazon”.
And that's in some ways, it's a biography of Schultes, but it's also acrobatically a telling of your own adventures, many of them with Tim Plowman back in those days. So it's absolutely the best nonfiction book about the Amazon I've ever read, you know, and I recommend it to everyone.
[01:07:09] Wade Davis: I mean it, you know, nice thing about that book, too, Dennis. During Columbia's troubles, it became kind of a map of dreams for young people because it described journeys that were easy to make when I was a youth but impossible to make during the conflict. And it had a huge impact. And you can almost not encounter a naturalist, a botanist, or a zoologist. Ecologists in Colombia today, and they have a huge, huge academic infrastructure in the study of biodiversity, as you'd expect. But who wasn't just turned onto that, to their discipline by that book? And actually, the National Library was selected as one of the 25 most important books in the history of the nation.
[01:07:57] Dennis McKenna: Columbia.
[01:07:58] Wade Davis: Columbia.
[01:08:00] Dennis McKenna: I think it was a good selection. I think it's a fantastic book. Well, Wade, you know, so you and I, we're getting older. You're a couple, you're three years behind me. So we're kind of, we're geezers now.
But we're still plugging, you know.
Nice to be working with you.
It's nice to see you doing so well.
I don't see any touches of dementia. I mean, I know how I have my own, but it's great.
You're just still doing it. And I feel that's how I feel about this McKenna Academy. It probably won't make much difference, but I got to have something to do with my retirement.
[01:08:46] Wade Davis: Oh, I think you will.
[01:08:50] Dennis McKenna: We're going to do this coca forum, and I really appreciate your willingness to participate, and I think it's going to have an impact. You know, we're going to work hard on this, so I will let you go.
[01:09:05] Wade Davis: Great, Dennis, it's just a joy to be with you, my friend, all the time.
[01:09:09] Dennis McKenna: It's always, it's always good. And I'll let you know when all of the stuff is posted and you could share it with your social media networks, vast social media networks, and we'll do the same and it'll make a difference.
[01:09:24] Wade Davis: So great. Okay, brother, take care.
[01:09:25] Dennis McKenna: All my best to your wife and your kids and your grandkids. We'll be talking very soon.
[01:09:30] Wade Davis: Okay. Bye bye, Dennis.
[01:09:32] Dennis McKenna: Bye bye.
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[Outro] Thank you for listening to Brainforest Café with Dennis McKenna. Find us online at McKenna.Academy
