Wade Davis speaks at Minneapolis

One River : Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest is a book Davis wrote. He styles himself a gonzo ethnographer from Tim Leary's alma mater, and looks like a cross between Jeff Daniels and Kelsey Grammar. Trim in his expensive liberal sports coat, black jeans and talk-circuit star hair, he is amazingly articulate. Words print off his palate and ivy-league lips with authorotative literate hierarchal nonchalance. We sat 10 feet below him and 10 feet in front of him, which allowed me to examine the roots of his hair, and notice the cleanliness of his fingernails. He is famous for his zombie book, and the Wes Craven movie made from it, and he disappointingly distances himself from the film, which he calls egregious, while he considers his dope using globe trotting ivy league life style an example to us all.

Sara bought the tickets with a sense of urgency. His topic was an euology to the dying languages of the planet. Every fortnight, he explained, the last elder of a language group died, taking the entire legacy of a spoken language to the limbo of, say, Latin or worse. My first thought at hearing him was that Episcopalian ladies would swoon at his good looks, and strong men would respect him for the dangerous roads he has sashayed down, botanist collection gear in hand.

What do botanists take into the forest to collect stuff with?

I couldn't figure out the crowd. It was stacked with aging hippie prodigals at the 30 year class reunion, looking each other over for signs of gray, mental illness, poverty, low blood sugar. The crowd didn't have too many children or really normal looking people.

The guy who gave the introduction was named Jolly, and he was anything but. He was prissy, and read his entire introduction from index cards. There was one joke in the introduction, about his wife driving a zamboni, which gave him Minnesota street cred. I howled with silent, paralyzed, stricken laughter. It turned out that Jolly was a Native American. A Cherokee. And that gave him an excuse to pucker his lips and whistle on the inhale through his teeth, like entitled old academics tend to do, without being considered a puffbag of ego spores spreading his dessicated self-esteem through the audience. Apparently he is head of the science museum here, and being a Cherokee and able to wear very expensive suits simultaneously while leading a local museum is sort of a trifecta of post-modern social upmanship.

Davis strode to the podium and started in with a 23 word sentence that was perfectly formed. He couldn't get beneath the duckweed choking the surface of the pond of global anthropological outrage however. His main insight into the problem facing the world was that technology wasn't the problem, power was. That got applause. When he said he chewed more cocoa leaves than any other human in history in order to climb a Peruvian hillock at the age of 48, it got the biggest reaction of the night. Wine and cheese crowd dope jokes.

Did he really know anything about zombies. Can't tell. Did he have an opinion about Iraq? Don't know. He refused to answer a question on that from the audience, and tut-tutted the moderator's apprentice for letting the question get through the screening process. Oh yeah, he wouldn't take questions from the audience in live mode. They had to be written down and collected by ushers, passed up to the stage and screened by a non-ethnic yupp-ographic handler.

Oddly enough, despite the garish irony of his having been a Big Game Hunting Guide and giving American Cigarettes to aborigines, it was a good night. Sam wrote him a question: Why did he give chemically polluted cigarettes to Amazonian Natives if he was concerned about ecology and integrity of native life? But, hey, it never got read.

Big Game Hunting Guide? Yikes.

Oh yeah, the last question was "What should we do about the demise of the ethnosphere?" His answer was an uncharacteristically sprawling, inarticulate verbal puff for the National Geographic Society. It intends to save the world by using its connection to 250 million subscribers and viewers to make them Aware. An oddly passive prescription. He didn't actually say "subscribe to the National Geographic, that little yellow-bordered magazine famous for its pictures of naked women and children in vegetable houses."

The National Geographic magazine invented soft core porn. I suspect that hand wringing over the fate of Borneo, the Amazon, the Esquimeux, and other poor brothers of the world family is, among other things, a good excuse for trotting out the docu-porn photos of children and women and the occaisional guy. At a more sublime level, the sentimental swooning over the fate of the planet at the hands of back-hoe drivers is a kind of spiritual pornography. A guilty pleasure, beautifully photographed and articulated in cultured prose pearls, the lament for the victims of the American Gross National Product has a fascination which doesn't easily translate into political action or intellectual analysis.