Wade Davis has been called "a rare combination of scientist,
scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life's
diversity." In Shadows in the Sun, he brings all those
gifts to bear on a fascinating examination of indigenous cultures and
the interactions between human societies and the natural world.
Ranging from the British Columbian wilderness to the jungles of the
Amazon and the polar ice of the Arctic Circle. Shadows in the
Sun is a testament to a world where spirits still stalk the land
and seize the human heart. Its essays and stories, though distilled
from travels in widely separated parts of the world, are fundamentally
about landscape and character, the wisdom of lives drawn directly from
the land, the hunger of those who seek to rediscover such
understanding, and the consequences of failure.
As Davis explains, "To know that other, vastly different
cultures exist is to remember that our world does not exist in some
absolute sense but rather is just one model of reality. The Penan in
the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the jaguar Shaman
of Venezuela, teach us that there are other options, other
possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the
earth." Shadows in the Sun considers those possibilities,
and explores their implications for our world.
