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Written by Dennis (Whitewolf)
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Tuesday, 12 August 1997 |
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 Only certain rare individuals of the human race have been willing to deal with venomous snakes, dangerous microbes, deadly jungle animals, political unrest, hostile Natives, and the strength draining climates of the Amazon Rain Forest in order to increase human knowledge.
One River is the incredible story of three ethnobotanists: Richard Evan Schultes, Timothy Plowman, and Wade Davis. Davis is best known for his research into the hidden world of voodoo, documented in his book...Serpent and the Rainbow. He has authored this book with an account of the trio's travels, scientific discoveries, and mystical explorations.
One River is a hard book to categorize. It is a tribute to the career of Richard Evans Schultes, who was a mentor to Plowman and Davis. It is also an adventurous travel narrative, relating the mystical journeys of the three ethnobotanists into the worlds of Native shamans and hallucinogenic plant rituals. It also calls for the end of the destruction in the Amazon Rain Forest. Davis manages to skip back and forth between these three themes sometimes making for difficult reading. Schultes was a pioneer in the pharmacological study of psychotropic plants. As a young graduate student, he developed an interest in psychoactive plants, such as peyote. It was the descriptions of peyote visions that sparked his imagination and made him later remark, “That a plant could do such things! It was wonderful. I had to know about it.”
Previous ethnographers had noted that psychoactive plants had such profound influences on the human mind that entire religions had grown up around them. However few have tried to explain how the plants did what they did. Schultes devoted the rest of his life to the pharmacological study of such plants, and as a professor at the Harvard Botanical Institute, he inspired countless students to similar pursuits.
Schultes took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1941 and headed for the Amazon. He stayed for 12 years exploring uncharted territories in the northwestern Amazon basin in Colombia. He collected unique botanical specimens and documented ethnobotanical practices of Native shamans.
In 1974-1975, Davis and Plowman took a similar journey to South America in search of the original botanical source of coca...a plant that has been domesticated since before the Incas. Plowman died from Aids in 1989. This prompted Davis to write this book, doing so as a tribute to his friend, their old professor, and to their ethnobotanical findings. The authors descriptions of scenes and events are complemented by historic photographs by Schultes, and put together they weave a fascinating story of a world most of us will never experience.
The book carries a wealth of ethnobotanical information. Davis enlivens his descriptions with folklore from shamans, interesting anecdotes about jungle life, and fascinating ethnobotanical facts. This book guarantees that the stories of the pioneers and the shamans they encountered will no longer go unnoticed. We are beginning to see that the Amazon is a world heritage that deserves to be preserved for future generations.........
ONE RIVER: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest by Wade Davis
New York, N.Y. Simon & Shuster, 1996.
Append; biblo; glossary; index; illus; 537pp;
$27.50 (cloth) |
