Apaporis | In Search of One River
2010
Wade Davis’ book, One River, espoused his knowledge about plants and states of being in the Amazon and the work of his mentor in the Colombian Amazon, Richard Evans Schultes, were the inspiration for the Colombian documentary, Apaporis. Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist, interested in the native uses of plants, especially psychotropics. He found many such plants in the travels he recounts in the book, One River, especially coca and curare.
The movie highlights not only the natural beauty of a little-known part of the Amazon rainforest, but also the dependence of the region’s indigenous peoples on the river's resources at many different levels, including culturally and spiritually. This website was created to educate visitors about the significance the river, the people who lived in the surrounding area, as well as about the major players who influenced or were involved in the documentary& Apaporis | In Search of One River.
PLOT SUMMARY: This document takes the viewer on a mystical journey through the untrodden, war-locked Northwest Amazon. It is a window into a forbidden zone of the Amazon, patrolled by violent factions. The secret knowledge of two of the indigenous tribes, the Cabiyari and the Cubeo, their cultures and their insight into nature, life and medicinal and psychotropic plants is slowly revealed throughout the film. I was captivated by the film when I saw it in NYC during its premier in the summer of 2010. I found this website to be very informative and helpful to a better understanding of the documentary and the work of Wade Davis & Richard Shultes.
It appears that some time after the film's release the domain for this website expired and it disappeared from the web. Recently I discovered that the domain was available, so I bought it with the goal of recreating as much of its original content as possible from archived pages. I did not want someone else to purchase the domain and re-purpose the site for something that had nothing in common with the original website. The information from the original site is as relevent today as it was in 2008. Consider the information on this site for its historical value.
I remember when the film was released in NYC. It was July 30, 2010. I or I should say "we" had just finished a complex custom software development project for a NY real estate firm. They had started as a two person company and the expanded quite rapidly. Their COTS programs were not integrated and a lot of time was being wasted. Enter the company I work for and the team that I am part of. Their need for a higher-than-usual expectation of security and privacy practically yelled the need for specialized custom software apps. Many of the security breaches that occur are often the result of hackers taking advantage of known weaknesses in off-the-shelf software. Also their need to scale as the company expanded was a red flag saying you need custom software. The complexity of the job, required gruelling hours on our part. Once it was over we wanted to celebrate. Someone knew someone at the IFC Center where the DocuWeeksTM Theatrical Documentary Showcase was being held, so it was easy to obtain tickets. Apaporis was quite literally, overwhelming with its tidal wave of information and imagery from different places, times and cultural contexts, all clamoring to be processed within 74 minutes. We were all impressed. I still can conjure up memorable and haunting images from the film.
FYI: October 2009
With technical assistance and support from WWF, the Yaigojé-Apaporis National Park was created in this region, at the request of the region’s indigenous peoples who found their ancestral territories threatened by mining concessions. It was by working together, the local indigenous authorities and the Colombian National Parks authority established the 2.2 million acre protected area.They are also collaborating in the management of the park.
2008 Notes & Posts
Wade Davis speaks on the importance of preserving our ethnosphere
March 21, 2008
Wade Davis, current explorer-in-residence of National Geographic and author of the book “One River: Explorations and discoveries in the Amazon rain forest”, gives a presentation about the importance of preserving our global ethnosphere. In this presentation, part of the TED series, Wade highlights examples of cultures and ways of thinking around the world, from the curandero in the Andes to Budhists in Tibet to the Jaguar people who journey beyond the milky way, that are in danger of disappearing today.
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March 21, 2008
The documentary “In Search Of One River” is currently in post production. This is an early preview, a short segment about the ecological and cultural importance of the Amazon forest to the world.
Our team traveled the Apaporis river in the Colombian department of Vaupés, one of the most significant corners of the Amazon jungle because of its biological diversity and landscape, and its ethnographic and cultural wealth. The difficulty of fluvial access continues to restrict the interference of settlers in these places and although the communities know about the existence of money, barter continues to be their means of exchange. It is a territory in which 25 languages are spoken and many of them distinguish fifteen tones of green.
Wade Davis’ book One River is inspiration for Colombian documentary on Richard Evans Schultes
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March 21, 2008
Wade Davis’ book One River is inspiration for Colombian documentary on the knowledge about plants and states of being in the Amazon and Richard Evans Schultes work in the Colombian Amazon.
Best known for The Serpent and the Rainbow, Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist interested in the native uses of plants, especially psychotropics. He finds many such plants in the travels he recounts in One River, especially coca and curare. (The first, famously, is a curse in the First World but is a necessity in the Andes, where it promotes the digestion of many kinds of food plants.) Framing Davis’s narrative is an account of the dangerous World War II-era Amazonian expeditions undertaken by his mentor, Harvard biologist Richard Evans Schultes. Davis describes a few hair-raising encounters of his own, making this a fine book of scientific adventure.
From Publishers Weekly
The prodigious biological and cultural riches of the vast Amazon rain forest are being lost at a horrendous rate, according to the author, often without yielding their secrets to the Western world. During his years in the South American jungle, ethnobotanist Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow) has done much to preserve some of these treasures. He tells two entwined tales here?his own explorations in the ’70s and those of his mentor, the great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, beginning in the ’30s. Both men have been particularly interested in the psychoactive and medicinal properties of the plants of the Amazon basin and approach their subject with a reverence for the cultural context in which the plants are used. The contrasting experiences of two explorers, a mere generation apart, starkly demonstrates how much has already been destroyed in the rain forest. Although Schultes probably knew more about Amazonian plants than any Western scientist, he was constantly learning of new ones and new uses for them from native experts. Davis graphically describes the brutal clash of cultures from Columbian times to the present, often so devastating for indigenous peoples, that has defined this region. At times humorous, at times depressing, this is a consistently enlightening and thought-provoking study. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Production Notes Update — Return from the Apaporis
March 22, 2008
We visited, places, which do not appear on maps. Places like Buenos Aires, a settlement located on the banks of the Canarari river and populated by Cubeos, Baras, Barasanos and Taivanos. On the riverbanks of the Apaporis, we visited the Indian village of Gustavo Pachacuari, captain of the Jirijirimo Union, a settlement which is custodian of the beautiful torrents of the Jirijirimo. This is considered to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. There we attended a Yagé ritual, with dances and music of the Cabiyarí, a legendary tribe recognized for the wisdom of its medicine men and for the anthropophagic customs of their close relatives. After two days in canoe, we visited the Playa where captain Rondón Tanimuca with his family assisted in showing us the Dance of the Doll, the mask dance, which had captivated Schultes so much in his trips through South America. Upon seeing photos of the Schultes expedition, a 90-year-old Tanimucan remembered the professor and recognized two of his deceased brothers. We recorded mythologies, which recognize the particular ways of seeing and thinking of the indigenous people and settlers which populate the Amazon territories today.
There are memories related by payès (medicine men) who, when confronting illnesses, prayers and spells, reveal their conception of the world.Guided by Professor Schultes’ research, we traced and recorded with a high contrast video, unique and events little known to Western vision, such as the preparation of the curare for hunting and the preparation of coca powder for the mambeo*. We also recorded the preparation of dupa, extracted from Virola, one of the strongest secret psychotropics in the world, prohibited for many decades by the missionaries since its effects confuse reasoning more radically than yagé.
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Why is Ethnobotany important?
March 21, 2008
Ethnobotany is very important because it traces the development of humanity, even the most ancient of civilizations relied upon agriculture and the domestication of certain forage, medical, fiber, culinary and plants used for dyes. In our modern world we use less then 100 species for food, yet there are potentially thousands of plants which have yet to be seen in our local markets, and many of these species are more nutritious and flavorful then the ones purchases, yet every other year a new species shows up, a “new exotic fruit”.
Ethnobotany also traces the development of modern Medicine and Herbalism, the Paper Industry, The Chemical Industry, Rubber Industry and as mentioned above the Food Industry.
Every year new species are being discovered or are being reconsidered for modern applications in all the above Industries and Sciences. It has now become a concern of the modern world to preserve and gather all information on the utility of these plant species. And this research is not beyond the reach of the common person, it is just often times over looked, for instance; Do you know the herbal remedies that say your grandmother or great grandmother used to for illnesses? Do you know how they harvested, dyed and made fabric from simple cotton or flax? If not then you can see why this science is most important.
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Richard Schultes — The New York Times Obituary
March 21, 2008
By JONATHAN KANDELL
Published: April 13, 2001, New York Times
Richard Evans Schultes, a swashbuckling scientist and influential Harvard University educator who was widely considered the preeminent authority on hallucinogenic and medicinal plants, died on Tuesday in Boston. He was 86 and lived in Waltham, a Boston suburb.
Dr. Schultes (pronounced SHULL-tees) was often called the father of ethnobotany, the field that studies the relationship between native cultures and their use of plants. Over decades of research, mainly in Colombia’s Amazon region, he documented the use of more than 2,000 medicinal plants among Indians of a dozen tribes, many of whom had never seen a white man before.
”I do not believe in hostile Indians,” Dr. Schultes was quoted as saying in a 1992 article about him in The New Yorker by E. J. Kahn Jr. ”All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness.”
Tall, muscular, wearing a pith helmet, he hiked and paddled through Amazonia for months at a time. He collected more than 24,000 plant specimens. More than 120 species bear his name, as does a 2.2 million-acre tract of protected rain forest in Colombia, Sector Schultes, which the government there set aside in 1986.
”The last of the great plant explorers in the Victorian tradition,” was the way one of his former students, Wade Davis, described him in his 1985 best-selling book, ”The Serpent and the Rainbow” (Simon & Schuster).
But more than a real-life Indiana Jones, Dr. Schultes was a pioneering conservationist who raised alarms in the 1960’s — long before environmentalism became a worldwide concern — that the rain forests and their native cultures were in danger of disappearing under the onslaught of modern industry and agriculture. He reminded his Harvard students that more than 90 tribes had become extinct in Brazil alone over the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
”He believed ours would be the last generation fortunate enough to be able to live and work among these tribes as he had,” wrote one of Dr. Schultes’s disciples, Mark J. Plotkin, in ”Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice,” (Viking, 1993), ”to experience their traditional way of life firsthand, and to record their vast ethnobotanical knowledge before the plant species — or the people who used them — succumbed to the march of progress.”
Dr. Schultes’s research into plants that produced hallucinogens like peyote and ayahuasca made some of his books cult favorites among youthful drug experimenters in the 1960’s. His findings also influenced cultural icons like Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs and Carlos Castaneda, writers who considered hallucinogens as the gateways to self-discovery.
Dr. Schultes disdained these self-appointed prophets of an inner reality. He scathingly dismissed Timothy Leary, the drug guru of the 1960’s who also taught at Harvard, for being so little versed in hallucinogenic species that he misspelled the Latin names of the plants.
According to a 1996 article in The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Burroughs once described a psychedelic trip as an earth-shaking metaphysical experience, Dr. Schultes’s response was, ”That’s funny, Bill, all I saw was colors.”
Dr. Schultes may have contributed to the psychedelic era with his ethnobotanical discoveries, but to him these were the sacred plants of Indians that should be studied for their medicinal value. He was in many ways a throwback to an earlier epoch of scientific research. He had no interest in publicity or self-promotion. Rather than confine himself to a narrow specialty, he was a generalist who crisscrossed several scientific disciplines.
Dr. Schultes taught more by personal example than by the use of forceful intellect. His lecture room resembled an ethnographic museum, with huge maps of Amazonia, native dance costumes, demon masks, opium pipes, dried specimens of medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, and a blowgun for poison-tipped darts, whose use he sometimes gingerly demonstrated in class.
His former student, Dr. Plotkin, recalled a lecture in which the professor showed slides of masked dancers in the Amazon under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion. Referring to himself, Dr. Schultes told the class: ”The one on the left has a Harvard degree. Next slide please.”
Richard Evans Schultes traced his fascination with the South American rain forests to the fantasies evoked while he was bedridden as a child. He was born on Jan. 12, 1915, in Boston, where his father was a plumber and his mother was a homemaker. Confined to his room for months with a stomach ailment when he was about 5 years old, he listened enraptured to excerpts read to him by his parents from ”Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes,” a travel diary kept by the 19th century British naturalist Richard Spruce. The impression left by those passages was so powerful that the boy decided to follow in Spruce’s footsteps.
Receiving a full scholarship to Harvard, Mr. Schultes wrote an undergraduate paper on the mind-altering properties of peyote, based on research he undertook with Kiowa Indians in Oklahoma who ingested the hallucinogen in ceremonies to commune with their ancestors. For his doctoral thesis, also at Harvard, he chose the plants used by the Indians of Oaxaca, a southern state of Mexico. In his research there, he came across a species of morning glory seeds that contained a natural form of LSD.
In 1941, Dr. Schultes traveled to the Colombian Amazon, where he would spend most of his field research, and an area Spruce had studied. At first, Dr. Schultes concentrated on plants that produced curare. This substance, used by Indians as a fast-dissipating poison to hunt prey, also proved to be vital as a muscle-relaxant during major surgery in hospitals. The professor identified more than 70 plant species from which the Indians extracted curare.
Dr. Schultes was deep in the Colombian rain forest when news of Pearl Harbor reached him more than a week after the Japanese attack. He immediately made his way back to Bogotá, the Colombian capital, and visited the United States Embassy to enlist in the armed forces. But the United States government decided his World War II services would be much more valuable as a botanist doing research on natural rubber, particularly since the Japanese occupied the Malayan plantations that accounted for much of the world’s rubber supplies.
Dr. Schultes soon became the leading expert in the field, collecting and studying more than 3,500 specimens of Hevea, the tree family that produces the latex from which rubber is made.
Throughout the 1940’s and until the early 1950’s, Dr. Schultes lived almost continuously in the South American rain forests, with only brief visits to the United States. On his journeys through the tropics, he traveled lightly. He navigated scores of tributaries of the Amazon River, using an aluminum canoe that he could handle himself, though he usually hired Indians as paddlers and guides.
His supplies included a single change of clothing, a camera and film, a hammock and blanket and a machete and clippers for plant collecting. For food, he carried only cans of instant coffee and Boston baked beans, preferring to rely on food offered by his Indian hosts. This included the ground manioc roots that were their staple, fish, wild game, insect grubs, fruit and chicha, a drink made from fruits chewed and fermented by spittle.
His medicine kit consisted of vitamins, antibiotics and morphine — in case he broke a limb and had to be transported for days before he could receive proper treatment.
To collect and preserve plant specimens, Dr. Schultes devised a method field researchers still use today. He soaked his plants in formaldehyde diluted with water and then pressed them between newspaper sheets. ”On a good day, out in the forest, Schultes would collect 20 or 30 specimens that he thought merited further attention,” Mr. Kahn wrote in The New Yorker. ”Along a riverbank, where foraging was easier, he sometimes bagged 80 or 90.”
Often Dr. Schultes would consult local Indian shamans about the properties of these species. A number of these medicinal plants now carry his name, including, among many others, Pouroma schultesii, a bark whose ashes are used to treat ulcers, Piper schultesii, a stem brewed as a tea to relieve tubercular coughs, and Hiraea schultesii, leaves whose soakings are used to cure conjunctivitis.
Dr. Schultes asserted that contrary to popular conceptions, Indian shamans were eager to share their medical secrets with outsiders. But ”time is running out,” he warned in a 1994 article in the journal The Sciences, asserting, ”The Indians’ botanical knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves.”
In 1953, Dr. Schultes moved back to the United States as a professor and botanical researcher and curator at Harvard. Six years later, he married Dorothy Crawford McNeil, an opera soprano who performed in Europe and the United States. His wife survives him, as do their three children, Richard Evans Schultes II, a corporate executive; Alexandra Ames Schultes Wilson, a physician; and her twin, Neil Parker Schultes, a molecular geneticist.
Dr. Schultes, who retired from Harvard in 1985, published 10 books and more than 450 scientific articles. For 18 years, beginning in 1962, he edited the scientific journal Economic Botany, and over much of the same period, he served as an active member of the editorial boards of Horticulture, Social Pharmacology, the Journal of Latin American Folklore and other publications.
Among numerous awards, he received the 1992 gold medal of the Linnean Society of London, which is often equated to a Nobel Prize for botany.
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Richard Schultes — The Economist Obituary
March 22, 2008
Richard Evans Schultes, jungle botanist, died on April 10th, aged 86
In an account by Richard Schultes of his experiences among the Indians of southern Mexico he described a mushroom, previously unknown outside the region, used to create hallucinations. The account was mainly academic in style; nevertheless it excited a writer who went to the region and sampled the mushroom. His report was published in Life magazine in 1957 under the title “Seeking the Magic Mushrooms”. Thus the “magic mushroom” came to the United States, to be promoted among others by Timothy Leary, one of the high priests of American drug culture of the 1960s, and still remembered for his recipe for supine living, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”.
Although Mr Schultes never expected his botanical discoveries to affect, however indirectly, American social behaviour, he did not criticise Leary and his weird followers for their use of drugs. He merely expressed his disappointment that Leary had not spelt correctly the Latin names of plants from which their drugs were derived.
But Mr Schultes was sad that the public attention given to their hallucinogenic effects distracted from the value of plants as a source of medicines. After his adventure in Mexico he spent many years among tribespeople along the Amazon river. He collected thousands of previously unrecorded plants and reckoned that some 2,000 had medical value. Many more, he believed, were waiting in the jungle to benefit humanity. He liked to talk about curare. For many years it had been known as a powerful, but short term, poison on darts and arrows used by Amazonian natives. Mr Schultes traced the plants that curare came from. They yielded a substance now used as a muscle relaxant in surgery.
He inevitably became concerned that the Amazonian jungle and its inhabitants were disappearing alarmingly quickly. Around 100 tribes have become extinct in Brazil alone in the past few decades. As the tribespeople disappear, so does their knowledge. Mr Schultes saw it as his job “to salvage some of the native medico-botanical lore” before it was lost. Perhaps, he said, the cure for cancer “may come from the witch-doctor’s knowledge of plants”.
His orchid
Richard Schultes’s parents were immigrants from Germany. His father was a plumber in Boston. Young Richard won a scholarship to Harvard, the first member of his family to go to university. In 1941 “as a young botanist, armed with a bright, new doctor’s degree”, as Mr Schultes described himself, he was sent by Harvard on a trip to the Amazon to study medicinal, narcotic and poisonous plants. On his first day in the jungle he found a previously unrecorded orchid. He sent it back to Harvard where it was called Pachyphllum schultesii, the first of many plants attached to his name. He was due to return after a few months but stayed in Amazonia for 14 years. During the second world war he was told to remain in the jungle to look for sources of natural rubber for the United States to replace Asian plantations lost to the Japanese.
Mr Schultes sought to travel simply. His kit is a reproach to overloaded backpackers. He carried a single change of clothing, and little food: he ate the same as his native hosts. He did have a canoe, but it was light enough to carry unaided, and anyway the natives were usually happy to lend a hand. Heavy boots, he found, were usually unnecessary because jungle snakes generally struck at the neck. A pith helmet, though, he found indispensable in the rainforest. This made Mr Schultes resemble an explorer of the Victorian era, which in some ways he was. One of his heroes was Richard Spruce, a 19th-century British naturalist who also explored the Amazon region.
Like the Victorians, Mr Schultes had an unquenchable curiosity that went beyond his speciality. He wrote about the use of hallucinogens in tribespeople’s religious ceremonies. Shamans, medical men, under the influence of hallucinogens believed that they acquired supernatural powers enabling them to cure illness, locate lost articles, affect fertility and control the weather. Mr Schultes saw a connection with stories of European witches who used potions that enabled them to fly. “Flying” was an experience claimed by some of Leary’s followers. Mr Schultes’s Christianity seems to have remained untouched, but he accepted that to Indians throughout the Americas some plants are sacred. One of his books is called “Where the Gods Reign”.
Back from the Amazon with extraordinary tales to tell, Richard Schultes remained at Harvard as a teacher until he retired in his 70s. Students remember his prowess with a blowpipe that he kept in his laboratory. Each year he returned to the Amazon to collect more plants. He received numerous honours. A chunk of Amazonia preserved by the Colombian government is called Sector Schultes. He edited a journal called Economic Botany, covering a science of which he was a pioneer. Mr Schultes remained a modest man. A reporter, awed by his reputation as the world’s top authority on ethnobotany, asked how he should be described. “Just a jungle botanist,” said Richard Schultes.
This obituary appeared in The Economist (London), 2001-05-05, p.88.
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Richard Evans Schultes — Daily Telegraph Obituary
March 21, 2008
Richard Schultes who has died in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86, was the father of modern ethnobotany, the study of the use of plants by native cultures such as the Amazonian Indians, among whom he lived in the 1940s.
He was also the leading authority on peyote, ayahuasca and other hallucinogenic plants, and his researches came to influence William Burroughs, Aldous Huxley and the drug culture of the 1960s.
Schultes was regarded as the last of the great plant explorers in the tradition of William Dampier and Alexander von Humboldt. Clad in a pith helmet, for much of the 1940s and 1950s he navigated the tributaries of the Amazon in a portable aluminum canoe, relying on the hospitality of local Indians.
He documented the use by them of more then 2,000 medicinal plants, and gathered some 24,000 specimens. He also gave his name to 120 species, as well as to 2.2 million acres of rain forest protected by the Colombian government; Schultes was among the first to chard the growing threat to the eco-culture of the Amazon.
The hallmark of his work was his sympathy and sensitivity to the ways of life he encountered. He happily chewed coca powder with tribesmen, and treated the often fearsome-looking people he met with disarming courtesy. He never carried a firearm, “I do not believe in hostile Indians,” he said. “All that is required to bring out their gentlemanliness is reciprocal gentlemanliness.”
His research into plants that produces hallucinogens brought his scientific works an underground following in the 1960s, and he met both Burroughs and Timothy Leary. He afforded neither much respect. Schultes chided the latter for mis-spelling the Latin names of plants, and when Burroughs describes a psychedelic trip as an earth-shattering experience, his response was: “that’s funny, Bill, all I saw were colours.”
Richard Evans Schultes was born in Boston on January 12 1915, the son of an engineer who put plumbing in breweries.
As a boy he pressed leaves and flowers, but dated his particular fascination with South America to an illness he had at six which confined him to bed for several months. His parents read to him from Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and the Andes (1908), the travel diary kept by the English naturalist Richard Spruce, whose adventures made a powerful impression on Schultes.
He was educated at East Boston High School and then won a scholarship to Harvard, where ho soon switched from medicine to botany. Making the peyote cactus the subject of his dissertation, Schultes spent a month with the Kiowa Indians of Oklahoma, who used the sacred cactus ceremonially to commune with their ancestors.
Schultes also partook of the hallucinogen, remarking later that “it would have been unpardonable rudeness to refuse.“
For his doctorate, Schultes then studied teonanactl, the sacred mushroom of the Mexican Indians of Oaxaca, which he was the first to identify, and ololiqui, a vine whose psychoactive seeds have properties similar to LSD.
In 1941, Schultes traveled to the Colombian Amazon to investigate the source of curare, which as well as being poison had also been used in hospitals since the 1930s as a muscle relaxant. He discovered that different types of curare called for as many as 15 ingredients, and in time helped to identify more than 70 species that produced the drug.
During the Second World War, Schultes searched the Amazon for alternative sources of rubber to the Malayan plantations occupied by the Japanese. He taught Indians how to tap latex, and became an expert on the genus Heva, the principle species of rubber tree.
With the return of peace, he once more took to his canoe, and for a dozen years lived in the rain forest.
Sometimes surviving for days on end on tins of condensed milk, he fended off bouts of malaria and beri-beri, once having to paddle for 40 days while ill to reach help. On his travels he collected thousands of samples, many of which were regulaly used by shamans to successfully treat illness.
Some of these plants now carry Schultes’s name, including Pauroma schultesii, a bark whose ashes are used to treat ulcers, and Hiraea schultesii, whose leaves cure conjunctivitis.
Schultes maintained that contrary to popular conception, the Indians were eager to share their medical secrets. But, he warned in 1994: “The Indian people and their knowledge is disappearing even faster than the plants themselves.”
He returned to Harvard in 1953, where he eventually became a professor of biology and director of the university’s botanical museum.
He had a rather quirky sense of humour, sometimes demonstrating his proficiency with a 6ft blowpipe in lectures, and refusing to vote for American presidential candidates, replacing their name on the ballot with that of the Queen.
Schultes published nine books, including Plants of the Gods (1979), written with Albert Hofmann, the chemist who synthesized LSD. He received the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society in 1992.
He is survived by his wife Dorothy (née McNeil), whom he married in 1959, and by two sons and a daughter.
More Background On InSearchOfOneRiver.com
InSearchOfOneRiver.com is a historical and educational website devoted to Apaporis: In Search of One River, a Colombian documentary exploring one of the most culturally and biologically significant regions of the Amazon rainforest. The website introduces visitors to the extraordinary landscapes of Colombia's Apaporis River, the Indigenous communities whose traditions are closely connected to the rainforest, and the scientific legacy of two influential ethnobotanists, Richard Evans Schultes and Wade Davis. Combining documentary history, expedition accounts, ethnobotanical research, cultural preservation, and environmental conservation, the site offers a perspective on a region that remains relatively unfamiliar to audiences outside South America.
The website is particularly interesting because it preserves information associated with the documentary's original development and international release. Its historical material includes production notes dating to 2008, accounts of encounters with Indigenous communities, discussions of medicinal and psychoactive plants, and biographical information about the scientists whose research inspired the film. Although the documentary premiered internationally in 2010, the website's subject matter extends across centuries of Amazonian cultural history, twentieth-century botanical exploration, and contemporary efforts to protect Indigenous territories from environmental destruction.
Unlike a conventional entertainment website devoted primarily to trailers, celebrity interviews, and promotional announcements, InSearchOfOneRiver.com functions as an educational archive. Its importance lies in connecting the film with the broader scientific, historical, and cultural questions it raises. For readers interested in documentary filmmaking, Indigenous knowledge, anthropology, biodiversity, or the conservation of the Amazon rainforest, the website provides a useful introduction to a remarkable intersection of subjects.
Website History, Ownership, and Preservation
The history of InSearchOfOneRiver.com begins with the development of the documentary originally associated with the title In Search of One River. Material published on the website in March 2008 described the production as being in postproduction and introduced the film's principal themes, including the ecological importance of the Amazon, the cultural traditions of its inhabitants, and the historical expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes. These early entries help establish the website's original role as an informational and promotional companion to the filmmaking project.
The documentary itself was produced through Fundación Imagen Latina, a Colombian film production organization associated with director Antonio Dorado Zúñiga and producer Alberto Dorado. The American Film Institute identifies Fundación Imagen Latina as the film's production and distribution company, while Colombian film-industry records independently confirm its production involvement. The original website was therefore closely associated with the documentary's promotional identity, although the available records do not establish the legal registrant or beneficial owner of the domain during every period of its existence.
The site's later history is unusual. According to an explanation published on its current homepage, the domain eventually expired and disappeared from the internet after the film's release. A person who had seen the documentary during its New York theatrical engagement subsequently discovered that the domain was available and purchased it. The stated objective was to reconstruct as much of the original website as possible from archived material and prevent the domain from being repurposed for unrelated commercial content.
This restoration effort gives the current website a different function from the original production-era site. Rather than presenting itself as an active film distributor or contemporary production company, it emphasizes the historical value of material originally associated with the documentary. The current site describes its purpose as preserving information that remains relevant to understanding Amazonian Indigenous communities, the history of ethnobotany, and the environmental challenges confronting the region.
The available public information does not independently establish the present owner's full legal identity, the precise date of the domain's reacquisition, or the completeness of the restoration. Nevertheless, the distinction between the original documentary project and the later preservation effort is important. InSearchOfOneRiver.com is best understood today as a reconstructed historical resource whose content reflects both the film's original development and the interests of someone committed to keeping its educational legacy accessible.
The Documentary: Apaporis: In Search of One River
At the center of the website is Apaporis: In Search of One River, a documentary directed and written by Colombian filmmaker Antonio Dorado Zúñiga. The film follows the geographical and intellectual pathways associated with Richard Evans Schultes, the Harvard ethnobotanist whose research transformed Western scientific understanding of medicinal plants and Indigenous botanical knowledge. Rather than offering a conventional biographical documentary, Dorado uses the journey into the Colombian Amazon to explore the continuing relationships among landscape, traditional medicine, spiritual belief, and cultural survival.
The documentary takes audiences into the northwestern Amazon, particularly the Apaporis River region, where remote settlements, extensive forests, and difficult river passages have historically limited outside access. Its central subjects include the Cabiyari and Cubeo peoples, whose knowledge of medicinal plants, traditional ceremonies, and the natural environment provides much of the film's cultural substance. The narrative combines exploration, scientific history, Indigenous testimony, and reflections on the vulnerability of communities facing external political and economic pressures.
The film is also notable for its visual treatment of the rainforest. River corridors, waterfalls, dense vegetation, ceremonial spaces, and community settlements create a geographical setting that is essential to the documentary's argument. The Apaporis is not simply an attractive backdrop; it is a living environment that supports food systems, transportation, medicinal practices, spiritual traditions, and relationships among communities.
The American Film Institute records the film's New York opening as July 30, 2010, followed by its Los Angeles opening on August 6, 2010. The American theatrical version is generally listed at 72 minutes, although some promotional materials and Colombian film records describe versions running approximately 74 minutes. The documentary was presented in English and Spanish, with English subtitles for the American audience.
Colombian film records also identify a later national release under the title Apaporis, secretos de la selva, associated with 2012. This helps explain why the documentary appears under different titles and dates in film databases. These variations refer to the same underlying filmmaking project and its different exhibition contexts rather than necessarily indicating unrelated productions.
Antonio Dorado Zúñiga and the Documentary's Production
Antonio Dorado Zúñiga served as the film's director and screenwriter, overseeing a project that required access to difficult terrain and engagement with communities whose knowledge and cultural traditions were central to the story. The production combined expedition filmmaking with ethnographic investigation, documenting environments and practices that were rarely represented in mainstream international cinema.
The American Film Institute credits Alberto Dorado as producer, Mauricio Vidal as cinematographer, and Alejandro Ramírez Rojas with the music. Colombian film-industry records provide additional production information, including research contributions from Cecilia Orozco Cañas and Ómar Dorado Zúñiga. These credits illustrate the collaborative character of a project involving historical research, field documentation, cinematography, cultural interpretation, and postproduction.
The filmmaking process extended over several years. Colombia's Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico recognized the project through documentary-production support in 2005 and feature-film postproduction support in 2009. The documentary also received recognition during the Guadalajara Construye program at the 2009 Guadalajara International Film Festival in Mexico, reflecting its participation in the Latin American film-development and international exhibition environment.
The production faced challenges beyond those normally associated with documentary filmmaking. Travel through remote Amazonian river systems required substantial logistical planning, while the political conditions in parts of Colombia complicated access. The region had experienced armed conflict, illegal trafficking, and the activities of guerrilla organizations, making the filmmakers' efforts to document communities and landscapes particularly demanding.
These circumstances contribute to the documentary's historical value. It records a particular period in the Colombian Amazon while also revisiting the earlier expeditions of Schultes. The result is a film that operates simultaneously as an environmental documentary, an ethnographic journey, and a reflection on the history of scientific exploration.
The Apaporis River: Location, Geography, and Regional Importance
The Apaporis River is part of the Amazon Basin in southeastern Colombia, flowing through a remote tropical region associated with the departments of Vaupés and Amazonas. Its surrounding watershed includes extensive rainforest, riverine ecosystems, Indigenous territories, and areas of exceptional biological diversity. The river belongs to the wider network of Amazonian waterways that eventually connect with the Amazon River system, making it part of one of the world's most important freshwater and rainforest environments.
Geographically, the documentary's journey is associated with Mitú, the capital of Vaupés, and the river routes leading toward the Apaporis watershed. Mitú serves as an important regional administrative and transportation center, although the settlements featured in the film are far removed from the urban infrastructure familiar to most international travelers. Movement between communities has traditionally depended heavily on rivers, canoes, and specialized local knowledge of waterways, seasonal conditions, and forest routes.
One of the region's notable natural landmarks is Jirijirimo, an area of dramatic rapids and waterfalls along the Apaporis. The documentary's production accounts describe visiting Indigenous settlements associated with these river features and recording cultural practices in their surrounding communities. The falls and rapids illustrate the visual power of the landscape, but they also demonstrate why navigation can be difficult and why local expertise is indispensable.
The Apaporis region is not an ordinary tourism destination with developed hotels, organized sightseeing circuits, and convenient transportation connections. Much of the territory is environmentally sensitive, culturally significant, and subject to Indigenous governance or protected-area regulations. Visitors interested in the region should therefore distinguish between learning about its landscapes through documentary resources and assuming that the locations depicted are freely accessible.
The region's remoteness has contributed to the preservation of important ecological and cultural characteristics, but isolation alone has not protected it from outside pressures. Mining interests, armed conflict, missionary activity, changing economic relationships, and broader environmental threats have all affected Amazonian communities. These issues are fundamental to understanding why the documentary places such emphasis on the connection between Indigenous cultural survival and the preservation of the rainforest.
Richard Evans Schultes: The Scientific Legacy Behind the Film
Richard Evans Schultes (1915–2001) occupies a central position in both the documentary and the educational content of InSearchOfOneRiver.com. Widely regarded as a founder of modern ethnobotany, Schultes spent much of his scientific career studying the relationships between Indigenous peoples and the plants they used for medicine, food, hunting, ceremonies, and other purposes. His work was especially important because he recognized that Indigenous botanical knowledge represented an extraordinarily sophisticated body of information deserving serious scientific attention.
Schultes studied at Harvard University and began conducting field research into psychoactive plants in North America before traveling to the Colombian Amazon in 1941. What was initially intended as a comparatively limited research expedition developed into an extended period of exploration lasting into the early 1950s. During these years, he traveled extensively through Amazonian river systems, collected thousands of botanical specimens, and learned from Indigenous specialists whose knowledge had developed through generations of observation and experimentation.
His scientific investigations included curare, a substance traditionally used in hunting, and various psychoactive plants associated with religious and medicinal ceremonies. During World War II, he also conducted research into natural rubber, which had become strategically important after Japanese military expansion disrupted access to Asian rubber plantations. His work demonstrated that the Amazon rainforest was not merely a wilderness containing unexplored resources but a complex environment whose inhabitants possessed extensive knowledge of its biological properties.
Schultes eventually returned to Harvard, where he became an influential professor, researcher, and mentor. He helped train a generation of scientists who continued studying ethnobotany, tropical ecology, and Indigenous plant knowledge. His publications, teaching, and extensive specimen collections contributed to the development of ethnobotany as a recognized scientific discipline.
The website preserves accounts of Schultes's career and the public recognition he received. Among his honors was the Linnean Society of London's Gold Medal in 1992, one of the distinguished awards in botanical science. His legacy also survives through botanical species named in his honor, scientific collections, and conservation initiatives associated with the Amazon.
Wade Davis and the Book One River
Wade Davis provides the intellectual bridge connecting Schultes's expeditions with Antonio Dorado's documentary. A Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, writer, and explorer, Davis studied under Schultes at Harvard and subsequently conducted his own research in South America. His writing brought ethnobotanical subjects to a much broader audience, particularly through books that combined scientific investigation with cultural history and narratives of exploration.
His 1996 book, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest, is a major inspiration for the documentary. The book intertwines Schultes's Amazonian experiences with the journeys undertaken by Davis and fellow researcher Timothy Plowman during the 1970s. Through these parallel narratives, Davis explores the transformation of South American landscapes, the consequences of colonialism, and the accelerating disappearance of traditional ecological knowledge.
A particularly important element of the book is its examination of coca. Davis distinguishes the traditional cultural and medicinal significance of coca leaves among Andean peoples from the modern international cocaine trade. This distinction reflects a larger theme running throughout his work: plants cannot be understood adequately without considering the cultural systems in which they are cultivated, prepared, exchanged, and used.
Davis also developed the concept of the ethnosphere, describing the collective cultural and intellectual diversity of humanity. Just as biodiversity represents the variety of living organisms, the ethnosphere encompasses languages, traditions, belief systems, knowledge, and different ways of understanding existence. The disappearance of a language or cultural tradition can therefore represent the loss of information that may never be recovered.
InSearchOfOneRiver.com introduces this concept through material discussing Davis's public presentations and his concern for endangered cultures. His ideas provide an important framework for understanding the documentary's broader message. The film is not simply about rediscovering the places Schultes visited; it is about recognizing the value of the people whose knowledge made his scientific achievements possible.
Indigenous Communities, Cultural Traditions, and Ancestral Knowledge
The Indigenous communities of the Apaporis region are essential to the documentary's cultural significance. Among the peoples associated with the film and its surrounding territory are the Cabiyari, Cubeo, Tanimuka, Barasana, Makuna, Letuama, Yauna, and other communities belonging to the wider cultural landscape of the northwestern Amazon. These groups possess distinct languages, traditions, and social institutions, although many also participate in interconnected regional systems of exchange, ceremony, and ecological knowledge.
One of the documentary's important contributions is its attention to the relationship between cultural practices and the surrounding environment. Traditional knowledge of plants is not necessarily separated into the categories familiar to Western scientific institutions. A plant may have medicinal, ceremonial, agricultural, or symbolic significance, and its use may depend on relationships among community members, specialist practitioners, and inherited teachings.
The film documents ceremonies and practices associated with yagé, also known as ayahuasca, along with preparations involving coca, curare, and other plants. These substances have different cultural functions and should not be treated as interchangeable examples of recreational drug use. In their traditional contexts, some are associated with healing, spiritual instruction, hunting, or social relationships.
The documentary also records masked dances, oral histories, and community memories connected to earlier expeditions. One particularly striking production account describes an elderly Tanimuka individual recognizing Schultes and deceased relatives in historical expedition photographs. This episode illustrates how documentary filmmaking can reconnect archival records with living community memory, providing a personal dimension to events otherwise encountered only through scientific publications.
The cultural importance of these traditions extends beyond their value to outside researchers. Indigenous communities maintain their own systems of authority, cultural interpretation, and environmental stewardship. Understanding the Apaporis region requires recognizing these peoples as contemporary societies with continuing rights and responsibilities, rather than treating them simply as subjects of historical exploration.
Ethnobotany, Medicinal Plants, and the Conservation of Knowledge
Ethnobotany examines the relationships between human societies and plants, including their roles in medicine, agriculture, nutrition, technology, ritual, and everyday life. InSearchOfOneRiver.com devotes considerable attention to explaining why this field matters and how Indigenous botanical knowledge has contributed to scientific understanding.
The Amazon rainforest contains an immense variety of plant species, many of which remain incompletely studied by modern science. Indigenous communities have developed detailed knowledge of local plants through long-term interaction with their environments. This knowledge can include identifying useful species, recognizing seasonal patterns, understanding preparation methods, and distinguishing beneficial applications from potentially dangerous ones.
Curare provides an especially interesting historical example. Traditionally associated with hunting, curare preparations contain compounds that affect neuromuscular function. Research into these substances contributed to the development of muscle-relaxing agents used in modern medical practice. The connection demonstrates how traditional botanical knowledge can inform scientific discovery, although modern clinical applications require controlled research, standardized preparations, and appropriate safety testing.
The website's discussions of medicinal plants also raise important ethical questions. Traditional knowledge is not simply an unrestricted resource available for commercial exploitation. Modern ethnobotanical research increasingly recognizes the importance of informed consent, Indigenous intellectual property, equitable benefit sharing, and community participation in decisions about how knowledge is documented and used.
The conservation of plants and the preservation of cultural knowledge are closely connected. When forests are destroyed, the biological resources on which communities depend may disappear. When languages and cultural traditions are disrupted, knowledge about surviving plants may also be lost. This interconnected vulnerability is one of the central ideas linking the documentary, Schultes's scientific legacy, and Wade Davis's writing.
Yaigojé-Apaporis National Natural Park and Environmental Protection
One of the most important conservation developments associated with the region was the establishment of Yaigojé-Apaporis National Natural Park on October 27, 2009. Located in Colombia's Amazonas and Vaupés departments, the protected area encompasses approximately 1.05 million hectares of rainforest and Indigenous territory. Its establishment represented an important effort to protect biological diversity and cultural heritage within the lower Apaporis watershed.
The park is particularly significant because its creation originated with Indigenous authorities seeking stronger protection for ancestral territories threatened by mining interests. The initiative involved cooperation among Indigenous organizations, Colombian environmental authorities, and conservation partners, including WWF, the Gaia Amazonas Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
The park's objectives extend beyond conventional wildlife protection. They include safeguarding sacred sites, traditional knowledge, Indigenous governance, and the ecological systems that sustain community life. This approach recognizes that cultural preservation and environmental conservation are not separate objectives in a territory where Indigenous traditions are deeply connected to the surrounding forest and waterways.
The creation of the park did not eliminate every threat. Subsequent disputes involving mining concessions, land rights, and administrative decisions demonstrated the complexity of protecting territories that contain potentially valuable mineral resources. Research by the World Resources Institute has examined these conflicts and the challenges they pose to Indigenous rights and environmental governance.
For readers of InSearchOfOneRiver.com, the park provides a tangible example of the documentary's themes extending into public policy. The film's concerns about disappearing cultures and endangered ecosystems are reflected in real efforts to establish legal protections, strengthen community authority, and preserve one of Colombia's most important rainforest regions.
Awards, Film Festivals, and International Recognition
Although Apaporis was not a mainstream commercial blockbuster, it achieved meaningful recognition within documentary and international film circles. Its participation in festivals across the Americas and Europe helped introduce the Colombian Amazon and its Indigenous communities to audiences interested in environmental cinema, anthropology, and human rights.
The documentary was selected for the 2010 Guadalajara International Film Festival in Mexico and for DocuWeeks in New York and Los Angeles. Subsequent festival appearances included Visions du Réel in Switzerland, the Málaga Film Festival in Spain, the Cartagena International Film Festival in Colombia, and documentary events in Bogotá.
The film received a Special Prize at the 2011 Cartagena International Film Festival and an honorable mention at the 2011 Bogotá Film Festival. Its development and postproduction had also received support through Colombia's Fondo para el Desarrollo Cinematográfico, while the project earned recognition through Guadalajara Construye in 2009.
These achievements are important because they demonstrate that the documentary's cultural and environmental subjects resonated beyond Colombia. International festival participation helped position Apaporis within a wider movement of nonfiction filmmaking concerned with Indigenous rights, ecological destruction, cultural memory, and the consequences of globalization.
The distinction between festival recognition and mass-market popularity is worth emphasizing. Documentary films dealing with specialized scientific or cultural subjects often reach relatively small audiences compared with commercial entertainment. Their influence may instead be measured through educational use, festival discussions, critical attention, and their ability to preserve experiences and perspectives rarely represented elsewhere.
New York Premiere, Press Coverage, and Audience Reception
The documentary's American theatrical debut took place at New York City's IFC Center on July 30, 2010, during the DocuWeeks documentary showcase. Located in Greenwich Village in Manhattan, the IFC Center is an established venue for independent, international, and documentary cinema. Its location placed the film within reach of New York's diverse community of filmmakers, academics, students, journalists, and audiences interested in international cultural subjects.
The IFC Center's historical listing identifies several screenings attended by filmmakers, including appearances during the opening weekend and early August. These events provided opportunities for audiences to engage more directly with the documentary's production and subject matter. The film subsequently opened in Los Angeles on August 6, 2010, expanding its American theatrical exposure.
The website's current account includes a personal recollection from someone who attended a New York screening and found the documentary memorable for its imagery and concentration of cultural and scientific information. That recollection offers an individual audience perspective rather than a representative critical review, but it helps explain the motivation behind the site's later restoration.
The film is listed in the American Film Institute catalog, IMDb, and Rotten Tomatoes. IMDb identifies a small number of user and critic reviews and reports a worldwide box-office gross of approximately $97,272. This figure suggests a limited commercial theatrical footprint, consistent with a specialized documentary release, although it should not be interpreted as a complete measure of the film's educational reach or subsequent viewing history.
Rotten Tomatoes maintains a film listing but does not display established Tomatometer or audience-score percentages. Consequently, there is insufficient public rating information to characterize the documentary as universally acclaimed or widely reviewed by mainstream critics. Its documented festival participation and awards provide stronger evidence of recognition than the limited online review totals.
Colombian cultural and film organizations have also maintained information about the documentary. Proimágenes Colombia includes its production credits, awards, festival appearances, and national-release details, while RTVCPlay, Colombia's public audiovisual platform, presents the film as an exploration of the Amazon's biodiversity and Indigenous cultural traditions. These institutional records help preserve the documentary's visibility long after its initial theatrical exhibition.
Website Content, Navigation, and Educational Resources
InSearchOfOneRiver.com is organized around informational material rather than the complex navigation structures associated with contemporary commercial websites. Its principal content introduces the documentary, explains its relationship to Wade Davis's One River, and presents historical posts associated with the production's early development.
The website includes a collection of material dated March 2008, covering the importance of ethnobotany, Wade Davis's discussion of the ethnosphere, and the film crew's experiences traveling through the Apaporis region. These entries provide background that complements the documentary itself, particularly for readers unfamiliar with the scientific and cultural issues involved.
Production notes are among the most distinctive resources. They describe encounters with communities along the Cananarí and Apaporis river systems, ceremonial observations, and the filmmakers' efforts to document practices associated with traditional plant knowledge. Such material gives readers a sense of the research and fieldwork involved in producing the documentary.
The site also preserves extensive biographical material about Richard Evans Schultes, including historical obituary accounts originally published by major news organizations. These accounts place his Amazonian expeditions within the larger history of botanical science and explain why his work attracted attention beyond academic circles.
Unlike a restaurant, retail business, or hospitality website, InSearchOfOneRiver.com does not offer food menus, product catalogs, reservations, or accommodation services. Its relevant navigation consists of documentary information, historical articles, production notes, and educational resources. The available material does not establish a current schedule of public events, an active membership program, or a commercial merchandise operation.
The website is therefore most useful as a research starting point. Readers can use it to identify the documentary's major subjects and then consult film archives, academic publications, Indigenous organizations, and conservation institutions for additional perspectives.
Popularity, Audience, and Cultural Significance
The audience for InSearchOfOneRiver.com is likely to be specialized rather than general-purpose. Its subject matter is especially relevant to documentary enthusiasts, students of anthropology and ethnobotany, environmental researchers, educators, Indigenous-rights advocates, and readers interested in Amazonian history.
The website may also appeal to people familiar with Wade Davis's books or the scientific achievements of Richard Evans Schultes. For these readers, the documentary offers a visual interpretation of places and subjects previously encountered through written accounts. Conversely, viewers discovering the film first may use the website to learn more about the historical personalities and scientific questions behind it.
No independently verified current visitor statistics, search-traffic figures, or social-media audience totals were available to establish the website's present popularity. Its historical connection to a documented film release and its continued appearance in film-industry records provide evidence of relevance, but not of high contemporary web traffic.
Its cultural significance is more substantial than audience metrics alone can capture. The site preserves a connection between a particular documentary and a larger history of Indigenous knowledge, scientific exploration, and environmental protection. It also demonstrates how relatively small websites can serve as repositories for material that might otherwise become difficult to locate after a film's promotional campaign ends.
The preservation of historical production notes is especially valuable because documentary projects often generate interviews, field observations, and contextual research extending far beyond what can fit into a finished film. Even when such materials are incomplete, they can help future researchers understand the circumstances in which a documentary was produced.
The Lasting Importance of InSearchOfOneRiver.com
InSearchOfOneRiver.com occupies a distinctive place among websites associated with documentary cinema. It began as a resource connected with the development and promotion of Apaporis: In Search of One River and has subsequently been presented as a reconstructed archive dedicated to preserving the film's historical and educational context.
Its strongest contribution is the way it brings together several interconnected subjects: the scientific achievements of Richard Evans Schultes, the writing and cultural philosophy of Wade Davis, the traditions of Indigenous communities in the Colombian Amazon, and the continuing struggle to protect rainforest ecosystems and ancestral territories.
The website also illustrates the importance of maintaining access to older digital material. Film websites frequently disappear after theatrical distribution ends, taking production notes, historical context, and educational information with them. Restoring such material can help preserve connections between creative works and the historical circumstances that gave rise to them.
For readers unfamiliar with the Apaporis region, the site offers an introduction to a part of the Amazon whose significance extends far beyond its remarkable scenery. The river and surrounding forest support communities with deep cultural histories and extensive ecological knowledge, while the documentary records an encounter between those traditions and the legacy of scientific exploration.
Ultimately, InSearchOfOneRiver.com is best appreciated as a historical companion to a documentary about cultural survival, scientific curiosity, and environmental responsibility. Its continued availability helps keep attention on the people, landscapes, and knowledge systems at the heart of Apaporis, while encouraging readers to consider the broader consequences of losing both biological diversity and the cultural traditions that have developed alongside it.
