Wade Davis recently sat down with The Globe and Mail to answer some questions about his new book, Into the Silence, as well as his career and personal life to date. It is a long and thorough interview, and I highly recommend reading it.

Q: How did you get interested in the story?

I was travelling in the spring of 1996 with the ecological survey across Tibet from Xandu to Lhasa during the same spring that the debacle happened on Mount Everest, the debacle that Jon Krakauer wrote about. The next fall, I went back to Everest with Daniel Taylor and he was disturbed by the commercialization of the Mountain, the ignoble scene of today. It had challenged the vision he had of Everest. Daniel and I were trying to photograph snow leopards and we got caught in unusual snow conditions and Daniel began talking about Englishmen in tweeds who flung themselves against the mountains and read Shakespeare at 20,000 feet. I became enamoured of the story.

The Guardian has just done a magnificent review of Wade’s new book: Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest.

Here is some of what Geoff Dyer had to say about the book:

Into the Silence offers a meticulous recreation of how the idea of climbing the mountain grows out of the Great Trigonometric Survey of India (which leads to the naming of Everest and establishes that it is indeed the highest point on earth); the full diplomatic and political wranglings necessary even to make a start; and the immense logistical demands of such attempts once they are under way: third time around, the supplies include “60 tins of quail in foie gras and 48 bottles of champagne, Montebello 1915″.

Still more impressive is the way Davis depicts the meeting of incompatible belief systems. While the British see the mountain as an obstacle to be overcome (by sheer force of Britishness if necessary), the opinion of their Tibetan hosts – that the spirits of the mountain, if not sufficiently appeased, will hurl them from its side – comes to seem just as plausible. It would be a mistake, however, to see one outlook as “spiritual” and the other as pragmatic. The Tibetans, quite reasonably, can’t see any point in climbing the mountain; the British, in turn, are animated by a “mystic patriotism” that is itself a kind of delirium.

Read the full review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/25/into-silence-wade-davis-review?newsfeed=true

Canadian botanist, writer, photographer, filmmaker, anthropologist and ethnographer Wade Davis has a surprisingly pithy – and cool – job title. ”Explorer-in-residence”, states hisNational Geographic business card.

”It sounds like an oxymoron,” he admits, while describing a peripatetic work schedule that has recently taken him to the Amazon, Tibet, the Arctic, Africa, Borneo, Nepal, Peru, Colombia, Mongolia, Polynesia and Australia.

He’s spent 30 years living in indigenous communities, recording their customs and rituals and how they use plants for food, medicine and for ther consciousness-altering effects.

THE BIG QUESTIONS

Biggest break Being born.

Biggest achievement Becoming a father, the most joyous and creative thing a man can do. [He and his wife, Gail Percy, have daughters, 19 and 22].

Biggest regret None.

Best investment Education, from primary school through university.

Worst investment The stock market.

Attitude to money Never give it a thought.

Personal philosophy Follow the heart, never compromise, always do the thing that most fills you with fear, risk discomfort for understanding, never confuse knowledge for wisdom.

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