>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> Hello, good evening and welcome to the International Pavilion. I'm Maria Rana [assumed spelling] and I'm the co-director of this festival. I'm very, very proud of this year. We have an International Pavilion, which is really a wonderful thing and we have had a whole day, I think, of poetry and fiction, and just marvelous stars from all over Latin America. And now we're going to change gears a little bit. We're going to move to nonfiction. We're going to move into the Amazon, into the rainforest, and we have a marvelous program. I hope you'll stick with us through a talk by the eminent -- the preeminent historian of the Amazon and then to real life stories coming from very, very different directions of experiences in the Amazon from two extraordinary individuals. So stick with us. I became fascinated with the Amazon myself. I'm from Lima, Peru. I was born in Peru. I was raised there and came here to this country at the age of 10. And I went to the Amazon to hunt down some family stories that had originated in [inaudible], and so got to know a little bit of the terrain and become fascinated with it, not to the degree of the speakers that we're going to have at this podium, but enough of a degree to really be haunted and really awed by the rainforest itself. The beauty of it, the depth of knowledge that -- the wealth of knowledge that exists there in terms of botanical riches and in terms of the tribal knowledge. At any rate, I've been very fortunate to know John Hemming for a number of years now. It's a little bit like knowing an icon or a legend or an action figure whose image should be in stores that feature adventure gear or something. He's quite an extraordinary individual. He's a world-renowned explorer and scholar of South American history, especially that of the Amazon. He has visited and researched more tribes, including four at first contact. You know, of course, what that means. That means contact with non-Amazon people for a tribe for the first time. More of these experiences than any other non-Brazilian. He led the largest multidisciplinary research project ever mounted in those forests by a European country, and has explored totally unknown territory along the [inaudible] River. He -- as well as the Inca ruins of the Peruvian Amazon. He has written a dozen books, among them the prize-winning, The Conquest of the Inca, which I hope you know, a true marvel of narrative and scholarship, and a three volume history of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia written over the course of 30 years, which includes Red Gold, covering the period from 1500 to the mid-18th century, and then Amazon Frontier, which covers the period from the mid-18th century to 1910, and then Die If You Must, a wonderful title which needs explanation, you'll have to read why, which describes the plight of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia during the 20th century. For this work John has been awarded the Brazilian Order of the Southern Cross and the Peruvian Grand Cross of the Order of Merit. He was also director of the Royal Geographic Society in London for more than two decades from 1975 to 1996. Of his first book published 45 years ago, Peruvian Nobel laureate [inaudible] wrote, The Conquest of the Incas is an extraordinary book. In it rigorous, historical research combines with stylistic elegance to convey the tragic, fabulous history of the Inca realm and all its richness and diversity. It is as delightful to read as the best of novels, which is high praise from a laureate. Of his book about the Amazon, Tree of Rivers, which I also highly recommend, the Daily Telegraph said, few writers have the range to cover the full canopy of the rainforest from its remarkable botany to its exploration in archaeology, but Hemming is an unusual polymath. Tree of Rivers is a book written from both the heart and the head. Much discussion of the Amazon generates more heat and carbon monoxide than light. This is a welcome corrective lucid and learned, it will stand as the definitive single volume work on the subject. This evening John Hemming is here to talk about his newest book, Naturalists in Paradise. In it he tells the story of three pioneers of natural science, Alfred Wallace, Henry Walter Bates, and Richard Spruce, and their journey 150 years ago to South America to carry out an unprecedented exploration of the region. John Hemming relates the riveting white knuckle and adventure stories of these three men's experiences and tells us how the research drastically changed our understanding of the natural world. In all, Hemming has trod the land that he writes about and has met the remarkable people he describes. There are few scholars who have done as much on the ground primary research on the Amazon as the author you are about to hear. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the truly adventurous, excellent, wonderful writer, we're so lucky to have him, John Hemming. ^M00:06:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:06:49 >> John Hemming: Well thank you very much, Marie, for that lovely introduction. But also thank you for inviting me to this prestigious, national book festival. I'm very honored. Anyway, I've got a lot to tell about these three. That's the cover of the new book. On the left, Henry -- Alfred Russell Wallace, in the center Henry Walter Bates, and on the right Richard Spruce, and you're going to hear these three became quite outstanding scientists of the Amazon. They all -- they had much in common. They were all from what in Britain we call lower middle class. Their families were too poor to keep them in school after the age of 13 or 14. Each of the three of them was hauled out of school and had to become an apprentice. But amazingly each of them taught himself to an incredibly high standard as we'll hear later on. The amount they wrote was just prodigious and beautifully done. But they taught themselves entirely after hours of long apprenticeships. But more importantly, and the reason I'm standing here now, is that they each became absolutely obsessed by natural history. And Wallace and Bates had met just by chance in the library in the [inaudible] and then they became great friends hunting beetles and butterflies in the woods around Lester. And Wallace, in his apprenticeship, he was training to be a land surveyor, so he tramped the countryside with his older brother and got to know plants and birds extremely well. And when -- in 1848 when Wallace was 25 and Bates was 23, they decided almost on the spur of the moment to go out to Brazil and try and [inaudible] a living by selling specimens of what they could collect back to collectors in Britain. In the middle of the 18th century, this was before stamp collecting, it was quite the thing in Britain to have a cabinet of interesting butterflies and birds and natural history. So that was their game plan. They went down to London and met the people at the Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens [inaudible] and often they got passage on a little sailing boat. There was very little movement between Britain and -- or Europe and Brazil at that time, this is long before the rubber boom and the Amazon had practically nothing of commercial interest to the outside world. But they -- in that short period they had [inaudible] they got a wonderful agent, an agent made in heaven, who managed to sell everything they sent back. And their ship sailed from Liverpool. ^M00:10:01 They were too poor to go up there in a stagecoach, they had to sit up on the roof all night and then on the ship itself it was just the two of them sitting on the cargo. But eventually they got to Brazil. I don't see how this -- can't see what's up there. ^E00:10:28 ^B00:10:38 When they got there they were absolutely thrilled. Bates wrote to his brother, the charm and glory of the country, it's animal and vegetable productions, how inexhaustible is their study. It's one dense jungle. The lofty forest of trees, of vast variety of species, all lashed and connected by climbers, their trunks covered with a museum of ferns, [inaudible], orchids, etcetera, the underwood. He goes on and on like this. And then he, an absolutely cascade of enthusiasm about how wonderful it was. And then he says, it is a region which may fittingly be called a naturalist's paradise. That, of course, is where I got the title. Wallace and Bates spent only a few months together. They went up the [inaudible] in and around the mouth of the Amazon. And then they decided to go their separate ways. It wasn't -- they didn't have a quarrel, but they -- it's very hard for two collectors to collect together. It's a rather [inaudible] business collecting. And also, as we shall learn, they were very different characters so they parted. And -- but in those early months they were already sending back terrific collections. And their agent very cleverly got every letter they wrote, immediately got it published in a journal called The Zoologist. All of a sudden it was [inaudible] to him, it all went straight into print. And he had some pretty fragrant advertising in there, these enterprising young men have just sent back a wonderful consignment, it's got the following, and now all the juicy butterflies and beetles, birds. So he sold everything they sent back, but only for a few pence. They were getting five pence for a [inaudible] butterfly, less for smaller beetles and, anyway, [inaudible] and they were very happy with what they were doing. And then towards the end of the following year they -- each of them started making his way up into the interior of the Amazon. Movement on the Amazon was -- I think the Amazon was less inhabited at this time, in the 1840's, anytime in the last 1000 years, because all the great indigenous peoples had long since been destroyed by disease and enslavement and then there had been the [inaudible] big rebellion a decade before they got there. So there was very little movement and they could just get rides on the very few trading vessels that were going up these rivers, usually sailing but against the terrific current of the Amazon. The prevailing wind is usually -- it easily would drive the ships up. But when the wind died they were literally heaving the ship from tree to tree on the riverbank, so the journeys could take months, even years. Now that's a typical boat. ^E00:14:06 ^B00:14:15 Is that a flooded forest? ^M00:14:16 [ Multiple Speakers ] ^M00:14:20 Oh yeah, oh yes, okay. I was going to talk about each of them in turn a few words. Henry Walter Bates was, excuse me, looking rather like Woody Allen [laughter]. Hitchcock's The Birds but he was the more professional collector. He spent his entire time on the main Amazon and Solimoes River, basing himself for weeks, months, even years on end in different places, Santarem, Mannaz, [inaudible], and then going out every day collecting. And his normal working pattern was up at dawn, which is 6 a.m. We're right on the equator here so it's always sunrise at 6. First hour or two usually collecting birds and animals, and then back for a cup of coffee. That was their one luxury, coffee. And then out for -- usually collecting insects later morning. And then in the afternoon mounting his specimens and describing them. Of course, this is before the days of photography. Even if photography had been available, our guys would have been far too poor to have had it. So in the descriptions you have to describe very much every detail of that specifies, including the color and pattern. And then mounting a specimen is -- because we're in the richest terrestrial ecosystem in the world so every rodent and bird and bat and insect was trying to gobble up his specimen before he could pin it. But this is what he did, and he did it brilliantly. And over his -- he kept after year -- each year went by he kept thinking it's time I went back but he was so loving what he was doing that he stayed on and on and on. And in the end he spent 11 years in the Amazon. And in those 11 years he collected about 14,800 species, specimens many, many times that, and of those nearly 15,000 species, about 8000 were new to science. Now just collecting one specimen -- species new to science is quite a big deal, because it's hard to find it and hard to catch it, and because you've got to know so much, you've got to know that it's new, and in those years he was becoming one of the finest. Most of those 8000 new species were, of course, insects, but quite a few were birds and, I don't know if there were any mammals, but he had reptiles and -- but all three of them, there's a lot of disinterested -- they were real explorers, real scientists, because collecting was their livelihood, a few pennies they were getting for their specimens. But they -- all them did a terrific amount of work on animal behavior and Bates did -- he spent several months studying termites. He did the most detailed study of all the different types of termite [inaudible] mound and because no one wanted to buy a termite for their collection [laughter] but -- and then one of the things he noticed that one specifies of butterfly, the [inaudible], would glide through the forest and nobody -- nothing seemed to predict them. He soon realized why. When you collected them there was the nastiest little yellow smelly substance at the end of their thorax which made them inedible. Now on this picture, the second row, on the bottom one, are those inedible [inaudible]. The other three rows are harmless, edible butterflies. And their only survival -- strategy to get through life is to exactly imitate the poisonous ones. And so the top row and the third and fourth row are edible but look at how beautifully over time they've evolved to exactly imitate the pattern, the shape of the wing, the pattern, the coloration. And that theory is known as -- named after him, Batesian mimicry. He obviously got quite a lot of insects named after him as well. But that's -- to this day that is Batesian mimicry. Oh, I'm sorry. Now Alfred Russell Wallace was less professional in the sense of just devoted to collecting. He was -- I like to think of him as an intellectual tourist. If he heard of something interesting off he went. He didn't care if it was -- some incredibly tough journeys he did. If he heard of some obscure specifies of bird, off he would go. And he was interested in everything. He was interested in geology and he's now known as the father of bio -- zoology. He was very interested in the distribution of animals. He tried to have -- he had lots of -- some of his theories were wrong but most of them were -- within a few weeks of arriving in South America he blew out of the water there, except it was bird flying, [inaudible] and flying techniques were suited to their habitats and to their prey. ^M00:20:18 He said, I've cut open a totally different species of bird, hunting berries or insects on the same tree, all use different completely types of beak and completely different flight patterns, but -- and then the wading bird have different bills. But he said I've cut them open, they've got exactly the same mollusks in their stomachs. And so this kid of 25 just blew that theory right out of the water. And so Wallace, just to give you -- I'm sure most of you know the Amazon, but the size and everything, the island down in the mouth of the Amazon, Marajo, it's the site of Switzerland. The area just north of the mouth, more in the state of Amapa, the size of Great Britain. And so Bates moving up and down the main river was going hundreds and hundreds of miles. Wallace went right up the Riu Negril and then up the [inaudible] comes in from Columbia, half way up, and then right up to the source of the Negril in Venezuela and then even across the water shed onto the Orinoco. And all this time, like Bates, he was not only doing his collecting and sending back beautiful specimens, but he was doing a vast range of disinterested research. That's how beautiful the Amazon is. But we all know, you can get a sudden storm just out of the blue and so all of them had adventures of nearly being shipwrecked and drowned in rapids and so on. I guess one of the many things that Wallace a pioneer and interested in was freshwater fish. The Amazon systems got half the world's specifies of freshwater fish, but he was one of the first to -- just a minute, to draw them and. In his land surveying apprenticeship with his brother he had become quite a fine artist. But these fish he could paint them, but he couldn't send the specimens of them back because they were almost starving on their journeys and if [inaudible] catch some fish there was no way they would let him -- it would have to be eaten -- it would have to go straight into the pot. There was just time for him to paint it. But then on the [inaudible] he got up above -- well he got up above the great main rapids [inaudible] and then he suddenly found himself in among a great conglomeration indigenous peoples, mostly Tucano speaking [inaudible] who is a world expert on this part of the world. But he was absolutely bowled over. He said, because he was the first foreigner to see tribes in all their glory. Other people have seen detribalized Indians paddling their canoes or living in little huts on the riverbanks. But Wallace was now in among this cluster of magnificent peoples. And their lives revolved around these great communal huts, [inaudible], which would house 40 or 50 families. And once again, Wallace, and there was no money in this, none of these kids had any hope of academic careers, but he did some, I think, a really impressive anthropological study of these peoples. He realized he was right about their birth and puberty and marriage and death and then he did drawings and imagery of all the objects in their daily lives. And he did word -- little vocabularies of eight different peoples. Because he never read any anthropology. The whole disciple of anthropology only started in the early 1840's and he hadn't read anything. But he just instinctively I think got it pretty right. What's that? ^E00:25:08 ^B00:25:13 Oh yeah, this is it. He was absolutely bowled over by how beautiful people were and their declaration and their body paint, and then he did find descriptions of their -- all their ceremonies and dances. And he also -- he and later Spruce were both pioneers in being interested in rock art. And now it's a major branch of Amazonian archeology, but they were among the first to take it seriously. All over the Amazon rocks, particularly in [inaudible] that wasn't easy to interpret but many are not. And in them Wallace -- he [inaudible] malaria but he thought rather than just lying in his hammock feeling miserable he would go exploring on up the [inaudible] into Columbia because he had heard of two exotic animals, something called a painted turtle and a white version of the umbrella bird. He had already got a black umbrella bird. I think in fact neither of these actually existed but anyway he went right up. In the lower rivers, in the main Amazon and the lower [inaudible] because they are huge rivers, but then the rapids come thick and fast. And in that study his Indians took him up 57 rapids and then down them again. And he lost his few little surveying instruments, but he still managed to do a very competent map, because that's the one thing he had learned to do, is land survey. And his map was still valid right up until the 20th century, map of the upper [inaudible]. This is Richard Spruce III. He was -- he was the son of a primary school teacher in Yorkshire and he was -- like the other two he was taken out of school at 14 and was training to be the same thing, a primary school teacher. But he got passionate about plants. Walking to school he saw the mosses and liverworts. Liverworts are little tiny plants looking like a little human liver. They're rather primitive plants, they don't have pollen or blossoms, but he loved them. And just read you two little passages about his love of plants was pure and passionate. He confessed in a letter to a friend, I like to look on plants as sentient beings which live and enjoy their lives which beautify the earth during life, and after death [inaudible]. And then he almost apologized for his interest in these tiny liverworts, [inaudible] in Latin. It's true that the [inaudible] yielded any substance of [inaudible] value to man, nor are they good for food. But although man cannot torture them to his uses or abuses, they are infinitely useful where God has placed them. And they are, at the least, useful to and beautiful in themselves. Surely the primary motive for every individual existence. Normally people wouldn't find a liverwort beautiful but he did. Now you've noticed I've hardly talked at all about hardships, because these guys were real explorers. They never hyped up the [inaudible] dangers for one moment. But I will just read you two little passages from Spruce. He said -- he wrote, I've been stung by wasps I suppose hundreds of times, once very badly having over 20 stings in my head and face alone. Yet I've always admired their beauty, ingenuity, and heroic ferocity. Which of us had 20 wasp stings, I admire their ferocity [laughter]. But even worse is when you -- oh sorry, because he loved every sort of plant. Later in life he wrote a huge piece on -- book on palm trees of the Amazon [inaudible]. ^M00:30:05 But even worse than wasps is when you have occasion with [inaudible] ants, if anyone here has been bitten by a [inaudible] but he said [inaudible] my sufferings were indescribable. I can only liken the pain to that of 100,000 nettle stings, his feet and hands trembles from palsy and drenched from perspiration and wanted to vomit just from the pain of these ants. And then another thing he wrote was he said, it has sometimes happened to myself when deep in the forest and quite alone to be unable to find my track. It's a rather painful moment when one becomes convinced of the ways irrevocably lost. Let the reader try to picture to himself what it is to be list or lost or [inaudible] in the vast extent of the forest [inaudible] Amazon valley. I can sympathize because I have been lost in a very unexplored part of Brazil. And you realize that if you keep going in the wrong direction that's the end of you. So you have to just -- you -- the tree you were under you went out and back and out and back and out and back, around the compass until you finally found a broken sapling or something that showed where your trail was. That's only obviously when you're in fairly open forest and [inaudible] your trail is well-established. Now what took Spruce to the Amazon, he -- it was those letters that were being published by Bates and Wallace's agent. Because Spruce had already written some rather brilliant pieces about mosses and things which caught the attention of the people running [inaudible] and his great friend, George Benton [assumed spelling]. And they sent him off botanizing in the [inaudible] which he did beautifully. And then he said, why -- we've been reading all these reports of Wallace and Bates, why don't you go out and join them, because it's clearly a wonderfully rich place. So he went out the following year in 1849, in the same little boat, the same little [inaudible] and he was also absolutely thrilled. But Benton, his financial arrangement was slightly different. George Benton was a very distinguished and quite rich man but a fine botanist and he made Bates a wonderful offer. He said, I'll form a syndicate of other great collectors of plants, and they'll pay an annual fee to take anything you send back. And I'll do all the money and the paperwork and -- you said I've got 10 minutes left [laughter]. Are you flashing that at me or [laughter]? Well I've hardly got [inaudible]. I don't know what to do. Well, so anyway, so Spruce, he was always collecting new material. So he ended up spending 15 years in South America. I just don't know how much to leave out. >> You've got 10 minutes. >> John Henning: Well I was going to tell you a lot about his work in -- well he followed waters right up the Riu Negril and [inaudible] between Brazil and Venezuela on the Riu Negril [inaudible] so Spruce was moving every eight or nine months to a different botanical realm, because he knew his syndicate wanted new material that they never seen. So he was finding enumerable new plants. He collected way the upper [inaudible] and then down in middle [inaudible]. What's that? He -- Spruce also explored the river. This is [inaudible] River. It was into [inaudible] Canal. So like Wallace, he notched up exploration of an entirely unexplored river. I'd been on the [inaudible] and I can tell you it's exactly the same as it was in his day. It was very beautiful and very empty. He then moved -- then he brought his three year collection down to [inaudible], packaged it up to send back to Britain. Then there was movement revolutionized by a steamer, a steam -- it went once a quarter from Mannaz up into Peru and he took it up and then did some wonderful botanizing in Peru in [inaudible]. And then he was there for about a year and a half. And in the course of his 15 years he did about -- pioneer botanizing of about 12 different botanical realms. And he collected about 7000 plants, almost every one of them unknown to Europeans, and many of them he described for the first time. He went with his friend -- the Peruvian and Spanish friend from [inaudible]. They were [inaudible] traders and, as you know, Panama hats don't come from Panama they come from Ecuador. So they went up to Ecuador and he went with them. And, oh yes, half way up the [inaudible] River they were in the territory of the Andorra [phonetic] people and Spruce noticed that they were -- the Shaman were using [inaudible] this hallucinogenic vine they call [inaudible] but he had already seen it being used by the people -- [inaudible] people of the [inaudible] who call it [inaudible]. And it was also used by the [inaudible] in Columbia. But that -- he described it and named it and that's his beautiful -- this is the specimen he sent back to [inaudible] the bottom left is his beautiful handwriting and he called it [inaudible] after the [inaudible] name for it. And he wrote, I haven't got time to tell you all the interesting things he found about hallucinogens but [laughter] -- well, it's fascinating stuff but time is. What's this? Oh yes. When he got up into the [inaudible] he then spent a year and a half doing more -- he had 60 botanical excursions from [inaudible] and then in 1859 his life changed because he got a -- he got an assignment to try to collect Cinchona trees out of the Andes and bring them back to Europe. Cinchona is a [inaudible] of trees that -- five or six species of which have quinine in the bark. And quinine was almost the only internationally traded medicament at that time, because quinine lowers malarial fever. And people have tried to get it out of Peru and been sent [inaudible] the Peruvians realized what they were up to and kicked them out. But Spruce got -- they asked people who can we get to get the red bark Cinchona out of Ecuador. And they said well, the finest botanist we know is there as we speak, Richard Spruce. So he went, the Cinchona forest were owned by two Ecuadorians, and when he said I want to collect the seeds they said no, no way. And then they said, well all -- they like him very much. They knew him. They said, all right, to you [inaudible] okay because he was the epiphany of an English gentleman, tall and thin and dignified and a lovely sense of humor. So he paid a bit but, anyway, in the next year and a half he set about collecting Cinchona. That's a bark collector's count. And you see they chop the trees down to get at the bark. So he was appalled to see almost all the Cinchona were -- had been cut down, but a few had grown, little trees out of the stump. Anyway, at the end 1860 he proudly sent off 200,000 Cinchona seeds and they -- and then followed a month or two later. ^M00:40:05 But they managed to propagate some of the plants and they were sent out to Peru -- to India. And by -- where they arrived in 1861, by 1865 there are a 1/4 of a million Cinchona trees growing and saved a lot of lives and misery from malaria. This is Richard Evans Schultes, the greatest tropical - professor at Harvard, the greatest tropical botanist of the 20th century. And Wade Davis, many of you probably know, wrote that lovely book, One River, about Schultes. And he said, Professor Schultes, you seem to have modeled your life on Richard Spruce, was that subconscious or unconscious? And Schultes said, neither, it was deliberate, I so admire Richard Spruce. And he wrote, Spruce is -- ^E00:41:00 ^B00:41:08 Well, he wrote that Spruce is [inaudible] works is the finest that's ever been done. And he also wrote -- Schultes wrote, unquestionably Richard Spruce is one of the greatest explorers of all times. Nobody has ever heard of him but he [laughter] -- but that praise coming from Schultes [inaudible] inhaling another hallucinogen [laughter]. ^M00:41:32 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:41:38 >> John Hemming: Oh yeah, Wallace. I guess. Well, Wallace left [inaudible] after four years and went to Southeast Asia and spent another eight years there. He [inaudible] on, suddenly it dawned on him that nature was spewing out seeds and sprigs and [inaudible] but almost all of it got gobbled up but the few that survived were the fittest. And he sent this essay to Darwin, who he hadn't met but he knew his friend, Richard [inaudible]. This is a modern artist's imaginary scene of Darwin getting Wallace's paper and being -- he knew Darwin was working towards this and Darwin had actually been collecting data on evolution for 10 years but hadn't written a word of the great book. And he's so confident, Mr. Wallace's paper is exactly my theory, every paragraph is the same. And so -- but neither of them -- they both -- neither claimed priority. It was just -- and [inaudible] was also in Washington not long ago. He's a great admirer of Wallace's, and we were talking about -- and I sent him my last chapter [inaudible] and he sent me back a lovely -- he doesn't do e-mails, he -- a type written thing, and he said your description of the relation between Darwin and Wallace are wonderful and the most heartwarming I've ever read. It was nice praise coming from David. Anyway, in 1859, the year that the origin species came out, Bates returned after his 11 years and Wallace [inaudible] saw the point in the theory and so Darwin was very pleased to have this -- because nobody in Britain had 11 years non-stop collecting under their belts. So he -- Darwin became quite a father figure to him and introduced him to his publisher and then Bates wrote a brilliant book. And then Bates -- all three of them I think had no sexual experiences at all in the Amazon, because it's so empty, and few women. So Bates promptly got back to [inaudible] and got the local butcher's daughter pregnant and [laughter] married her. They had a kid and then he married her. And so the Royal Geographical Society, by now it's 1864, was in a mess. It had been run by amateurs. And they finally decided it was time they had a paid chief executive. And so Darwin said to Bates, look, you've got a young family and no job, why don't you go for this? So he applied and he had his two referees, which were Charles Darwin and John Murray, the publisher, and he got the job. And we now know nobody else applied [laughter] but he ran the Royal Geographic Society absolutely brilliantly for 30 years. He died while -- in 1892 while he was still running it. And I had his portrait above my head for my 21 years in that lovely [inaudible]. I'll just wrap up by saying, these three guys, they all ended with honorary doctorates. Wallace and Bates both came fellows of the Royal Society, which is very high. Bates was made a knight by the emperor of Brazil. Wallace got the highest honor of all from the King of England, was Order of Merit. And Wallace's private bibliography of books, papers, articles that he published in his name, 750 titles, that's not bad for kids who left school at 13 and 14 [laughter]. ^M00:45:54 [ Applause ] ^M00:46:13 >> Thank you so much, John. Thank you. >> John Hemming: Sorry it went -- >> That was wonderful. Thank you very much, John Hemming, that was absolutely marvelous. We are going to move on and our next speakers -- it's such a pleasure to have here two people with extraordinarily different experiences in the Amazon. They couldn't be more different, but they will give you a sense, I think, of the -- of the breadth of experience of the human side, the science, and we hope to capture a little bit of a conversation between them after they've both presented some of their experiences which they will do individually and before we have the conversation. But let me present first, here is David Good, who I first met David in 1991 when he was a child of three and he was living with his parents and his -- and his sister, Vanessa in Rutherford, New Jersey. And his father is an American anthropologist, Kenneth Good, Ken Good, whose book Into the Heart, a wonderful book, I was publishing as a senior editor at Simon and Schuster back in another lifetime. And his mother is Yarima, a young Yanomami tribeswoman of an uncertain age when I first met her. The children were perfectly comfortable in their New Jersey setting, and perfectly comfortable in the warm glow of their mother's love. They are his father wrote in in Into the Heart. The first and only Yanomami American children on the planet. David's father and mother had met when Ken Gordon entered the very isolated community of Yarima's tribe, which is deep in the reaches of the Venezuelan forest and proceeded to live with them for 12 years. The result was a highly detailed anthropological record of a rainforest tribe, and an unprecedented, highly human account of life among what some scholars have referred to as the fierce people. The book, Into the Heart, was a breakthrough of sorts in anthropological letters, but David and Vanessa, and later Daniel, who was born after I first met David, Ken and Yarima's children, became a singular tribe that would learn to live on that tenuous bridge between two very different cultures. Twenty-four years later, David Good is the head of The Good Project, it's called The Good Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the healthcare, education, and well-being of the indigenous people of Central and South America. His family's history has been televised in National Geographic and written about in People magazine and the New York Times, and London Times. And David has inherited a unique heritage, and being one of the very few members of the Yanomami tribe who has lived and been raised in the outside world. As he has put it quote, we have much to learn and gain from the Yanomami, a great and proud people, though my village has no written language, no calendar, does not count beyond two, and is unaware of what is beyond their topical borders. ^M00:50:02 I have learned from them and experienced with them the essence of what it is to be human. The Yanomami, free from distractions and woes of modern technology and societal strife, are intimately intertwined with the environment and they have taught me much about genuine human interaction. Ladies and gentlemen, David Good. ^M00:50:25 [ Applause ] ^M00:50:32 You need to stand up so you -- >> David Good: Yeah, sure. >> You can stand a [inaudible] right there. >> David Good: Okay. Yeah, thank you, Marie, for that introduction. And thank you for having me here at the National Book Festival. It's an honor. Yes, so gave you a little bit of background as far as, you know, my family story and our family story. So I'd like to share with you today is more of a, you know, a personal story of pictures and some video clips and you can see a little bit about our family history. A little snapshot of what life was like in the jungle. And then I'm going to tell you and share with you a story of my return to the Amazon in 2011 to reunite with my mother and share a little bit about my experiences of being not only Yanomami apart of that Yanomami tribe, but as an outsider, as an American, or [inaudible] as we call it, experiencing my own heritage and indigenous roots for the first time. Yeah. ^E00:51:38 ^B00:51:45 I believe this is your presentation. >> Yes, that's my stuff. >> David Good: I'll find it. >> Can I switch it to the right? >> I only have one presentation. >> Does he have -- do you have the wrong -- do we have the wrong clicker perhaps? ^M00:52:10 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:52:15 >> David Good: Sorry for that. ^M00:52:16 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:52:40 >> Absolutely, absolutely. We are going to -- while David puts that together, and I assure you, it's an extraordinary story of David going back to find his mother in the Amazon, which we will suspend in almost thriller fashion to move to Mark Plotkin. Now I had met Mark Plotkin in Rio de Janeiro last year when we both were asked to speak at a [inaudible] conference. The first time actually a global [inaudible] conference was held in South America, Latin America. With his infectious passion about the Amazon, the continent and the Americas, the rainforest, Mark was the star of the entire show. I think I must've decided there and then that he would make a marvelous speaker here at the Book Festival. Although the book I really wanted him to talk about was one that was published, was it what, 20 years ago? Don't worry, it's a perennial. Mark Plotkin has been an ethnobotanist and plant explorer of Latin America and an expert on rainforest ecosystems. He is the cofounder of the Amazon Conservation Team, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving South American communities, rainforests, sorry, and a tireless advocate for working with indigenous communities toward that goal. He completed his Bachelor of Liberal Arts at Harvard, his master's degree in Forestry at Yale School of Forestry, and his Ph.D. at Tufts University, during which he completed a handbook for the [inaudible] that recorded their medicinal plants. He went on to do research at Harvard under the renowned ethnobotanist that you saw on the screen when John Henning was speaking, Schultes, Richard Evans Schultes, who was an extraordinary mind in, I think, ethnobotany in general and tremendously respected and you had the great -- good fortune to work with him. Mark is the author of numerous books including Tales of the Shaman's Apprentice, Medicine Quest, The Killers Within, The Deadly Rise of Drug Resistant Bacteria, and a children's book version of The Shaman's Apprentice as well. In May 2010 Mark received the honorary degree of doctor of humane letters from Lewis and Clark College, the citation declared, and I like this so much, that he was receiving that honor for teaching us that the loss of knowledge and species anywhere impoverishes us all for combining humanitarian vision with academic rigor and moral sensibility and for reminding us always with clarity and passion and humor that when we study people and plants, we are simultaneously exploring paths to philosophy, music, art, dance, reverence, and healing. Mark Plotkin, ladies and gentlemen. ^M00:55:45 [ Applause ] ^M00:55:51 >> Mark Plotkin: Thank you, Marie, it's great to be here. Thank you all for staying late. Let's have the first image. Okay, so I want to take you into the rainforest where I've been working for 33 years. I just came back from the setting of Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. So I'm going to set the stage, what happened before, what happened during, and what's happened since. The rainforest, as you know, is supposed to be the greatest expression of life on earth, although you can't see it from here, right [laughter]? But as you all know, it's rapidly disappearing. And I went there as an ethnobotanist and to write Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice to collect that knowledge, sent there by the great Richard Evan Schultes, the father of the science of ethnobotany, a friend of John's as well, and this is what a lot of the Amazon looks like, climate change you see, this village, in which Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice is set, and the [inaudible] 40 feet. So what happens in the Amazon affects us here, and what happens here affects us there as well. Even if I'm losing every other image. ^M00:56:53 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:56:56 Pardon? ^M00:56:57 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:57:08 Okay. Fine. So this is where my book starts, in the Northeast Amazon. A civil war had broken out. I hired a bush pilot to drop me at the most remote airstrip in the country of [inaudible] north of Brazil. He flew me as far as he could fly me, took me to a little airstrip, I got out, and unloaded my [inaudible], unloaded my backpack, unloaded my bag of [inaudible] flour. And he said, by the way, stay away from the women because if you don't the men will come after you and all of the arrows have poison tips. Have a good visit, I'll be back in two months and he flew off. ^M00:57:45 [ Inaudible ] ^M00:57:47 >> You're hitting the wrong button I think. >> Mark Plotkin: Pardon? >> The wrong -- you're hitting the wrong button I believe. >> Mark Plotkin: What's the right button? >> It should be the right arrow. >> The right arrow. >> The right one, you have to hit the right one, yeah. >> Mark Plotkin: But as I said, I've been working with these people for over 30 years, which is has given me a relationship with them, which is quite unusual in terms of scientists working with indigenous people. And my first book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, came out of that relationship. As an ethnobotanist I was there to learn and to listen, which American's aren't particularly good about, and record their medicinal plant knowledge. And what I found was that a single shaman may know and use over 100 -- over 300 species of medicinal plants. Here you see the shaman's apprentice, [inaudible], this is a result of the shaman's apprentice program, because with the advent of missionary activity, the knowledge was not being passed on. Here he is treating a bacterial infection of ear. And, again, this is why when shamans talk about the interconnectedness of all things, the greatest threat to our species is not deforestation, it's not climate change, it's not terrorism, it's not nuclear war, its drug-resistant bacteria which is killing somewhere between 30,000 and 300,000 Americans a year. Now here is a primitive tribesman treating a bacterial infection of the ear. So, as a student of history I believe the past predicts the future, 80% of our antibiotics today in the high-tech age comes from nature. And it's nature we must return to find the medicines of the future from people like these indigenous tribes people, who know a lot more about nature and a lot more about healing in many cases than we do. This is my favorite shaman of all time. When I got to the village I said well is there anybody who speaks Portuguese. I studied Portuguese in college. And this one little boy went running off and came back with this fellow. [speaking foreign language] we're chatting, we're chatting, we're chatting. I thought I really made a friend. And he stopped and he smiled and he says, well a white man huh? He says, you know, I've killed about 18 of them. But you seem to be like a nice guy. So I asked a local missionary and he said take this fellow very serious because he's killed many Indians and white rubber [inaudible] who trespass on traditional lands. ^M01:00:01 Twelve years later he revealed himself to be the paramount shaman of the region. That's a story for the Q and A. Here he is preparing a potion to treat diabetes. Diabetes is one of my many obsessions. Both my grandmothers died of diabetes. This man dropped a woman's blood sugar level from over 500 to just over 100 in 12 hours using local plants. There is no physician at Harvard or Yale or Oxford or Cambridge who can do this. This is what's in the rainforest, and this is what's disappearing when we see this forests go up in smoke. >> Right. ^E01:00:31 ^B01:00:36 >> Mark Plotkin: [inaudible] contacted peoples. One of my best friends was an uncontacted Indian. This is a -- this is [inaudible] they were contacted a little bit before I got there. They were true hunter gatherers. They had no agricultural. They carried fire from campsite to campsite. I know a joke in [inaudible], it's [speaking foreign language] means, has your fire gone out? Which is, have you died? Which [inaudible] love, they never get tired of it. So I've been telling this joke for almost 30 years. They still -- it's a real knee slapper amongst the [inaudible]. But they know stuff that we don't. They know the forest better than anyone. The other Indians say they're the best hunters, they're the best ecologists, they're the best healers. In the old days, in the not too distant past, people would leave uncontacted peoples alone. Why is that? ^E01:01:23 ^B01:01:29 >> Poison tips [laughter]. >> Mark Plotkin: Because they didn't want to be contacted. This is actually an art exhibit from Havana, Cuba expressing why uncontacted people should be left alone, but that's changing now with the advent of all the worst aspects of capitalism to the most remote corners of the Amazon. This is the magic frog which the [inaudible] use for hunting magic, which is now being looked at in the laboratory as a treatment for high blood pressure and a treatment for drug resistant bacteria. Like I said, the shamans talk about the interconnectedness of all things. And this is the great Schultes himself, [speaking foreign language]. I don't know how you're translating that. [speaking foreign language] is the most important, most spectacular national park in the Amazon. Schultes labored for 41 years to have this declared a national park, and the Amazon Conservation Team has worked with the Columbian government to double it in size. It's now over -- bigger the than size of the state of Massachusetts. Here's what it looks like today. But my work, in a sense, started here. Because it was Schultes' work here that inspired me, and when the drug war spread to the Columbian Amazon, he sent me to [inaudible], which was [inaudible] incognito in terms of ethnobotany, and now I have the [inaudible] connected by going back and work where Schultes got his start. Here's [inaudible] which has just been doubled in size as I said, and one of the reasons it's been doubled in size is to protect three tribes of uncontacted Indians, which were living outside the park, another inside the park, and now they're protected. And this is [inaudible], the great shaman that I told you was my first friend there, who has become the head of the shaman's apprentice clinic. So as I talked about in Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, how to get this knowledge passed on, it's now been passed on and they've set up clinics to offer medicine to their people in a traditional manner. Again, many of my colleagues from Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice are now working as indigenous park [inaudible] protecting the forest and the culture. The bottom line here is that these people have been presented with a false [inaudible]. You can be an Indian living in the rainforest or you can move to the city and have air conditioning and GPS and internet, it's not true, [inaudible] is false. You can be an Indian, you can live in the rainforest, you can protect your culture, you can map your lands, you can live the life that you decide to live instead of having it forced on you by the outside world. But if we're to protect the rainforest and protect these people, it's about helping these people, as David will be talking about, make informed choices about the life they want to lead, and about the rainforest they want to inhabit. Thank you very much. ^M01:04:05 [ Applause ] ^M01:04:11 >> Thank you so much. And now David. You probably want to take the podium. ^E01:04:15 ^B01:04:22 >> David Good: Okay. Thank you, Mark, for that insight on your experience with the [inaudible] tribe. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the Yanomami tribe and my personal experience among the Yanomami. This is more of a personal family story. So it's not an academic and it's easy on your brains. So you can follow along here. So the Yanomami are a remote, indigenous group that reside in Southeastern Venezuela in the Amazona state. Their territory also spills into Brazil. So these are pictures that my father, Kenneth Good, had taken years ago. Now this is an aerial shot of a [inaudible], which is a Yanomami home. And here is sort of an inside shot of the [inaudible]. And you can see a little bit of the family structure of the Yanomami. So here's a map of Venezuela. Now normally I would point to you in Southeastern Venezuela, you can see -- I would point out the territory, the Yanomami tribe. And here's a picture of, of course, you know, with every story there's a back story, there's some sort of origin story. So in order to tell mine I had tell you a little bit about, you know, where I came from. So here's a father -- a picture of my father, Kenneth Good, who was in the Amazon in the '70s to measure protein intake of the Yanomami diet and how that was related to warfare. Here's a picture my father taking notes and weighing game. And so during his time there he learned the language, he learned the culture. He essentially became one of them, moved into the [inaudible] and hunted with them and fished with them and eventually, you know, what was supposed to be just a research program to measure protein and he was supposed to go back home and publish his dissertation, but it didn't turn out that way. He ended up literally falling in love with the culture and particularly one person, Yarima, who is my mother. And so here's some pictures of my mother and me and our little Yanomami American family. So on the left there's me at the bottom, my mother, Yarima, holding my sister, and on the right is a picture of me hitching a ride with mom, typical Yanomami style. And I just put this in last second because I really wanted to share some video clips of me when I was an infant, toddler, just sort of hanging out Yanomami style. So I'd like to play that. ^E01:07:03 ^B01:07:12 ^M01:07:13 [ Music ] ^M01:07:44 Can you tell which one is me [laughter]? ^M01:07:46 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:08:23 And this one is particularly one of my favorite home videos. ^M01:08:28 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:08:37 So growing up, you know, in the first five years of our lives we were a Yanomami American family, made several trips back down to the Amazonas. We made a home in Rutherford, New Jersey and we literally had a foot in two worlds. But, you know, mom did a very good job of adapting to the American lifestyle in a sense that what she had to go through and what she -- all the new and -- just every aspect of this culture was novel to her, and then what she had to do to adapt was amazing and it was beautiful in a way. But I think, you know, in the end she really missed her Amazonian family and from the way I see it is that she couldn't really, you know, imagine not being able to phone call, e-mail, Skype or anybody from your family for, you know, six years or so. So here's some pictures of us growing up. Here I am as a little boy learning how to shoot a bow and arrow with the boys. Usually little boys learn how to go around the [inaudible] shooting, you know, looking for lizards and little birds. And then here's mom in the -- in the wilds of New Jersey. She's -- here we are at the [inaudible] at the beach hanging out and at the left on a carousel. And, of course, mom getting the typical 1980's perm, so should would like that. ^M01:10:02 And of course, French fries, yeah. I had many memories as a kid, you know, eating French fries and my mom is -- she absolutely loved them. And this, I remember my father telling me this is one of his favorite pictures that he like very much, because he could see, you know, us, there's my brother, my sister, and then two Yanomami children from the Yano -- from the territory. And, you know, even though we're from two drastically different worlds we didn't care. You know, we didn't care if one was naked or one was clothed, one spoke English, one spoke Yanomami. You know, one could count beyond two and one couldn't. We were just hanging out, you know, we were just being kids regardless of our, you know, the cultural barrier. So, you know, like I said, after about five years there was a big -- well separate -- mom couldn't quite handle it anymore, and though it's a complicating convoluted story, you know, basically she separated from the family and she remained in the jungle and we stayed up here in the United States and that was going to be the last time I would see my mom for 20 years. So for the next 20 years, from when I was five, you know, I coped with a lot of identity issues and also feelings of abandonment. Because as a young child when you're five, your mom is there and she isn't, and you just internalize it as abandonment as a young child. And, of course, how else would a five-year-old internalize it. You know, you think you're not good enough as a child for her mom to stay home with you. So I dealt with that for about 20 years. And then through my trials and tribulations I finally was -- had come to a point in my early 20's while I was in college that -- where I accepted who I was a Yanomami American and became proud. And as soon as I was able to accept the, you know, reasons as to why my mom left it was like the flood gates had opened. Now I wanted to learn everything about the Yanomami. At one point I renounced my heritage. But when I had come to this point I decided, you know, this is a part of me, this is part of my life history, and now I want to do everything. I wanted to read every book, watch every video about your Yanomami. And then finally it came to a point where, you know what, maybe I could actually find mom. So when I was 24 I graduated college, Eddie Stroudsburg University with a Bachelors in Biology, and I decided this is my opportune moment to go back to the Amazon in Venezuela to reunite with my mom, and I did just that. I embarked on a journey and took the same path that my family and I have taken two decades ago. And I remember feeling when I was going up the Orinoco River, like I remember these scents, I remember these smells, the feel of the sultry air, and the foliage, and there's just the, you know, I don't know what it is, genetic memory or, you know, maybe it just was in the deep recesses of my mind from being five here, you know, 20 years ago, but I felt myself getting closer. And one major obstacle, there are many hurdles, most of them are bureaucratic, but one of the major obstacles getting up there was going passed the [inaudible] Rapids and you're going up these rapids, whether it's dry season or rainy season, it's always dangerous, and I've had friends shocked by electric eels. There's always stories of people near death situations and -- but to me -- the thing for me was monumental to be here, to stand on these rocks and watch the [inaudible] because, you know, over two decades ago my father was here at this very spot and it was just like, you know, you read about something in history, but then to actually go and see it, you know, that history virtually unchanged was monumental for me. So during this trip I sort of did similar to what my father did. We had an aluminum outboard motor and I got out and we started pulling, you know, pulling the motor -- the boat up the river and we're just being absolutely careful of all the dangers along the way. And, you know, one of the Yanomami helping us slipped and nearly got swept away. And then actually that same Yanomami, a little while later, his name is Ruben [assumed spelling], he actually got shocked by an electric eel. So, you know, I'm thinking every step I'm taking I'm thinking oh man, I hope it's not me. It hasn't happened, but, you know, I'm sure somebody it will. So we got closer to the banks of the [inaudible], which is a village that mother is from, and the village that my father lived with for so long. And they all run to the banks of the river because they don't get visitors too often. They hear the motor and it's like a big event. They scream [speaking foreign language]. And everyone starts running to the banks of the river. So that's why they're here waiting for me to arrive. So we get to [inaudible] and we figure this is where we should go because this -- I figured this is where my mom would be, and all of our reconnaissance that we've done two years prior we thought this is where she would be. This is just a selfie of me being nervous, you know, walking into the village. ^E01:15:08 ^B01:15:14 So we arrived in the [inaudible] but my mom was nowhere to be seen. She was away in the forest, in the plantain gardens, as was told to me, you know, collecting -- getting -- gathering plantains from the garden. So we decided to set up the hammock and just sort of wait for her arrival, because a relative of mine had dashed away to go get her. So this is my first moment, my first immersion experience among the [inaudible] right here, and man, I was just mobbed. I had so many hands all over my body, pulling my nose, my ear, you know, my beard because, you know, facial hair like that is rare and uncommon among the Yanomami. So you could see, they were just all, you know, kids climbing the hammock with me and it was a great moment. So here's a little video clip, my first initial immersion experience [inaudible]. ^M01:16:08 [ Speaking Foreign Language ] ^M01:16:19 No, you know, I had friends tell me that, when I was five I was understanding some Yanomami, you know, missionaries that had known me from years ago saying yeah, they recall me as a five-year-old, you know, speaking, or least understanding some Yanomami. Now I remember in 2011 when I embarked on this quest to find my mom, I can only recall two complete Yanomami phrases. One was [speaking foreign language], which is I'm hungry. And the other one was [speaking foreign language] which is my butt itches. So those were the only two phrases that I was working off of. Of course, you know, from that time on I grabbed out the Yanomami dictionary and started learning more, you know, appropriate and relevant words. And then -- and then about an hour and a half later mom walks into the village. It was just hush and, you know, I hear whispers of her name, Yarima, Yarima. And then I knew right then and there when she walked in that was her, you know, I recognized that face. And so I stood up out of my hammock and I approached her and I just realized there's this cultural barrier preventing us from really speaking to each other and all I wanted to do was go up and bear hug her, but the Yanomami don't do bear hugs and I didn't know exactly what to do, so it was a little bit awkward. You know, I just stood up there a few feet away from her and put my hand on her shoulder and I said, mom, it's me, Dave, I'm home. And, you know, after a few minutes I was getting flash flooded with all these memories mom going to the carnivals, going to, you know, festivals, you know, in Rutherford, and then we both just sort of broke down and cried and I just want to share that moment with you. Literally a moment, sorry. Well, you can see here, thank you. ^M01:18:07 [ Speaking Foreign Language ] ^M01:18:27 You know, from pictures and reading and [inaudible], you know, I can intellectualize what it would be like to stay among the Yanomami. You know, I mean, I knew ahead of time that my mom was going to be topless but, you know, to see it actually and to see your family, an indigenous family and see the Yanomami, you know, like I said, you read about it in the books. And then you go there and you realize, you know, wow, these are the same Yanomami that I've read in the books and you can -- not only that, they're my aunts and uncles and my brothers and sisters. It's really, really surreal. ^M01:18:58 [ Speaking Foreign Language ] ^M01:19:03 So that's that moment. So mom and I reunited after 20 years of separation, and I knew right then and there I didn't care why she left, I didn't care at all the moment -- the events leading up to her separation, you know, what was going through her head, what had happened. That didn't matter to me. All that mattered to me that she was alive, she was well, I was able to find her, and now we can start on this beautiful relationship together, learning each other's language and each other's culture again. So here's a picture of mom and me. And on the right of Yarima, my mother, is [inaudible], who is my half-brother. And when I was first introduced to him as [inaudible], I said oh, [inaudible]. And he goes no, no, no, Ricky Martin, Ricky Martin [laughter]. So I'm thinking how the hell in the middle of the Amazon is this guy referring himself as Ricky Martin. ^M01:20:01 But it goes to show how much change has occurred in the last decade, or couple decades or so. And I've, you know, and I've come to learn, you know, over the last few years the type of acculturation changes that are going through and frequency of contact with outsiders, and some good, some bad. To me it seems like mostly bad but, you know, so my brother is Ricky Martin. And then I met the headman, or he's an elder in the village now, no longer really considered the headman, but he was the headman of -- during my father's time and he was another exciting reunion, and he christened me with my Yanomami name, which is [inaudible]. And what I've been able to research and through my interviews, [inaudible] roughly translates into sort of detour, or a roundabout, or a long way around something. And so, yeah, my name is Detour, so I'm not really sure, you know, how that vision came to him. But the way it was explained to me through one of the Catholic missionaries [inaudible] was like I had left my village 20 years ago just took a really long detour back to my -- to home. So I quickly got settled into the village and got to meet some of the other villagers, and very quickly I was integrated part of their kinship network and their village and home life and very quickly I felt very much at home. I didn't know what to expect. I thought either I would hate this culture or I would just -- or I'd love this culture. And, you know, I could still reject and go home. But I realized now, and back then, that I was so much at home and I really loved being there among the Yanomami and my villagers. And is another picture of me and a woman in the village. And this is just -- I'm showing you here what I slept in. This is a hammock, the [inaudible], to help keep out, you know, mosquitoes that could vector malaria and also vampire bats. And then I want to share this picture. This is a night shot of the [inaudible] inside. And, you know, opening up the aperture and keeping it open for about 60 seconds that's the shot that it gave me, and it was so beautiful. And this is a reminder of one of my favorite moments in a Yanomami [inaudible] is at the end of the day, after a hard day's work, we're just hanging around in the fire, swinging back and forth. Mom is in her hammock, I'm in mine and we just sort of -- just sort of -- just started chatting with each other, and mom's English started coming out. And she goes [speaking foreign language], and [speaking foreign language] is a term of endearment a mother would say to her son, she goes [inaudible] New Jersey, New Jersey, it's good, she goes [speaking foreign language] good, [speaking foreign language], which is her way of saying Pennsylvania, good. She goes [speaking foreign language], I want French fries, I want pizza, I want peaches, I want apples, and she goes you take me there. And for me it was huge because, you know, that's mom's indication of saying she wants to come back here. You know, maybe not necessarily to stay but to visit, you know, the United States again, of course to see her family and everyone. So, how we doing on time? >> Wrap it up. >> David Good: Okay, wrap it, okay. So I'll just -- some pictures in the day in the life of Yanomami, just shooting -- you know, learning how to shoot a bow and arrow. My brother, Ricky Martin, was very good at instructing me how to, you know, live like a Yanomami and so on. So, you know, start scaling trees and getting good -- better with the machete. You know, making certain fruit drinks and wearing headdress -- certain headdresses for parties, and I just wanted to soak it all in. I wanted -- really wanted to be Yanomami, or learn how to be, you know, more of the culture. So, excuse me sorry, I'll skip through a lot of these here. And, you know, we're -- so here's a -- of course, you know, the Yanomami live a life based on reciprocity, so they shared everything, but I had, you know, some my own goodies, which was jelly and crackers. So when I took the jelly and crackers out the whole village descended upon me, surrounding me, and they really wanted those [speaking foreign language], those crackers. So, of course, I shared all of my supply of crackers that day with them. I experienced shamanism. I didn't experience it, but I experienced it in action, I observed it and tried their hallucinogen, [inaudible], which is, you know, that'll be a story for another day, probably, you know, over beer at the bar I'll tell you about that. I helped mom collect firewood. Because, you know, my connection to the Yanomami is my mother, I've always wanted to follow her around and do things that she did, but it was breaking some of the social norm. So I was kind of like, you know, helping mom collect firewood, help her go crabbing and so on. But these are the things that only the women do. So when I went out and joined them it was kind of like, you know, a little silly for a Yanomami to see a man do those kind of things but I think they understood. So I'll end with this last picture here. This is particularly one of my favorites because mom told me in her broken English that you, you know, telling me that I was here a long time ago in that video that you saw, I like to make -- I like to think that's the connection that she was making, you know, when I was just a kid playing in these creeks, and now here I am, come full circle 20 years later and I'm back in the same creek, you know, with my family and among Yanomami. And I'll end it -- I'll end it there. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. Come back, Mark. ^M01:25:37 [ Applause ] ^M01:25:43 >> That is quite a story. That is quite a story and David has actually written a book about it. It's not out yet. It will be out this fall. It's called The Way Around. So it's about detours. And I don't want to take up too much time with my own questions because I want you to come and ask questions at the microphone please. But I do want to ask about the question of being -- of protecting tribes that have been uncontacted. Because here is a story of a contacted tribe and the -- and the result of this extraordinary -- when I saw him last, three-year-old who has become this very American young man who went back to try to re-investigate or renew and relearn a culture that he had lost for so many years when his mother went back to the jungle and he stayed in Rutherford, New Jersey. So I want to talk with you, Mark, I want to ask you the question, the very important question about protecting uncontacted tribes. How -- and, of course, we heard this wonderful talk from John Hemming, taking us all the way back 150 years from Wallace, Spruce, and Bates who were, you know, considering these questions then, and now a great deal more of contact has been made. Tell us how you feel about this and what you're -- how you -- what you think we should do? Do we need to rewind? Do we need to go back? Do -- what do we need to do at this point from your point of view? >> Mark Plotkin: Well there's two ends of the spectrum on this. This is a big debate in conservation and anthropology circles right now. One is that we should leave them the hell alone. And the other is that we have to get in there and contact them for their own good. And every case is different, but frankly, intentional contact, which is usually driven by missionaries or mining interest, has been a disaster, and this goes all the way back to 1492. There are no uncontacted tribes that don't know there's an outside world. And I know this from the inside [inaudible] as soon as they start seeing planes go over they know there's an outside world. People that don't have contact don't have contact because they don't want contact. And I think it's a human right to make that choice. It's a human right not to have people invade your territory and we should recognize it as such. There are cases where places have been overrun, some places in Peru, and people do need to be helped because they're dying from introduced diseases. But the idea like we have to get in there and save them for their own good because we know better than they do, it doesn't play out so well in the world right now. And so I think that contact should be a last resort and not a first resort in almost all cases. And I just wrote an editorial about this in America's Quarterly which will be out soon, and my [inaudible] talk focuses on that. So if you want more information check that out and be sure you check out Marie's talk on [inaudible] which explains a lot of why Latin America is the way it is, and this ties right back into that as well. >> Thank you very much for that. You know, I wanted to ask about the question of shamanism. You had the experience with, you call it [speaking foreign language] which is [speaking foreign language], right? >> David Good: No, no. >> It's not, it's different. >> David Good: It's different. [speaking foreign language]. >> [speaking foreign language] is the - is -- >> David Good: The hallucinogenic [inaudible] that they -- >> Is it through -- is the bomb through the nose or? >> David Good: Yeah, yeah, through, yeah. They refer to that the bomb, yeah. >> The bomb through the nose, okay. >> David Good: It's like a bomb. >> Right, right. And of course you had your tales of your shamanic experience, and I -- there is apparently, and I know this from the Peruvian context, there is now a whole tourism that's built around people going in to have the [inaudible] experience, or the nose bomb or whatever it is, that it seems that there's a kind of commercialization in a way of the rainforest ways. This has to -- you have to have an opinion about this somehow. ^M01:30:04 Could you tell me what you think? >> David Good: Yeah, commercialization of hallucinogens or that -- >> Or just the fact that your brother is Ricky Martin, you know. >> David Good: Yeah. Yeah, well, you know -- >> It's not just progress. >> David Good: Well, you always put progress in quotes and, you know, I always -- when I talk about progress I always refer to this article, you know, [inaudible] International article, you know, Progress Can Kill, and you know, the thing is when I talk to a lot of Yanomami and I talk to a lot of the, you know, scientists and anthropologists that worked among the Yanomami, they all say that the Yanomami, they want -- they want education, they want -- you know, they quote unquote want the school, they want to learn the ways of the [inaudible], but for me, you know, I don't -- I am not entirely convinced that they're actually aware of the implications of those kinds of progress and change. And when they do receive it, and this is true among the Yanomami and among, you know, another tribe I work with, the [inaudible], you know, you give them education and then what? You know, they never really make it outside of their territory. They go to school and then they can't adjust in that new culture, the new education infrastructure and they just end up dropping out. And what do they become? They get involved with drugs and alcohol, prostitution, you know, and they become [inaudible] either in their territory or they bring that back into their home, which is a shame. Now I'm not accusing Ricky Martin doing that, you know, in my village, but I think he's on the precipice of a very delicate, you know, connection between the people of [inaudible] world and his world, because I feel like he's one of the Yanomami, you know, influencing Yanomami that has sort of an idea of what it's like to live in the [inaudible] world, how to think like -- when I say [inaudible] outsider, think like them, acquire goods like them, and how to use [inaudible], the money, you know, to acquire things. So it's going to take many more visits and years, I believe, to really understand, you know, for me personally to make a sound opinion on what the future is for the Yanomami. Because when I explain the Yanomami I cannot -- we cannot homogenize them and generalize the tribe based on one snapshot, based on what I just showed you. ^M01:32:25 [ Inaudible ] ^M01:32:26 Yeah. I would have liked to have shown you pictures of what the Yanomami today look like. A lot of them are -- a lot of them are wearing glasses. They're walking around the city with satchels on their way to their, you know, government jobs, like office work, and it's just like blowing my mind. Because the Yanomami have [inaudible], you know, the ones that you read about in the forest. So they're dynamic people with a broad range of -- spectrum in the acculturation process and, you know, like Mark said, history shows that it usually ends up for the worst and for the better, but I have to believe that there's something we can do, and to give them the tools to be able to cope with the modern changes. >> And from the scientist point of view? >> Mark Plotkin: Well I was teaching a class on rainforest conservation healing with the great shaman [inaudible] from the [inaudible] tribe, featured in Tales of the Shaman's Apprentice, and this woman came with us and said that I was in a terrible automobile accident 20 years ago and I've not been able to sleep right since then. I go to the doctor and she gives me Valium and then I can't wait up. It doesn't cure me. And he says, give me your machete. And he walks three meters over and chops [inaudible], puts it in a pot, fills it with water, gives it to her. And I think, okay, this is, you know, pretty typical shamanic Amazon healing. And she says okay, now what? And I ask the shaman, and he says that's it. And she says, I mean isn't he a shaman, isn't he going to give me hallucinogens or dance or consult the spirit world? And I asked him and he goes no, that's it. And I'll never forget this as long as I live, she made this [inaudible] like oh, what a crock. And she stands up, takes three steps, pow right on her face. Total face plant. We thought he had killed her. I mean she was out cold. It was like a Hollywood movie. We were slapping her and throwing water on her. Finally she wakes up and walks off. The next morning she comes in, [speaking foreign language], I'm cured, I slept through the night. And I said to the shaman, how did you do that? He didn't take a case history or nothing. He says, oh I looked in her eyes. Okay, so iridology. It's as old as the Egyptians and probably a lot older. I said okay, show me how you do it. So he pulls this woman over and he looks at her and he goes, yeah, she's okay. And I said oh good. And then he looks at her again, he goes oh but her husband is a mess [laughter]. [inaudible] Boulder, Colorado, 3500 miles to the north, and I tell her this because she didn't speak [inaudible] and she turns white and she says that's true, my husband fell last night. I called him before I left the hotel. He fell and broke his arm. And I translated this to the shaman and he says, no that's not the problem I see. It's his knees. Fast forward six months and I'm having dinner with them in Santa Monica and I said Randy, can I ask you a question? He says, yeah. I said, how's your knees? He goes why do you ask? I screwed them up in high school playing football. They've never been right. Now I think you can teach somebody to look in somebody's eyes and figure out if they're getting enough sleep are they getting enough sex, but can you look in somebody's eyes and figure out what's happening with their spouse 3500 miles away. That is not something they're going to be teaching in Harvard Medical School any time soon. And that's without the use of magical plants. Now I've done plenty of [inaudible] with the Yanomami, and I've done even more [inaudible] in the west. These are fundamentally different systems. So when people say, how do Amazonian shamans heal, every tribe is different. And I want to make sure all those things survive, for their good first and foremost, but for ours as well. Because every system of medicine does something right. I don't understand iritic medicine, I don't understand Chinese medicine, scientifically it makes no sense, but it works. If not, how come there are so many Indians and Chinese people [laughter]? But all systems of medicine do something right. And I want to see all of them protected first and foremost for the people themselves and for us as well. >> Can we have your questions, please, at this point? Please come forward. Go ahead. >> It was all so interesting, thank you. I had a question about your parent's relationship. Did your father see your mother again? I know that after she left you went back. >> David Good: Yeah. >> And then you referred to your half-brother, Ricky, who was his father? I mean, did your mother have another relationship and what was like? >> David Good: Right, okay, yeah, so first question was yes, in an indirect way. I was able to bring my mother to [inaudible], Mission, which is a Catholic [inaudible] Mission in the [inaudible] and today they have a diesel generator which -- that powers a satellite dish, and that satellite dish gives you internet, but it's on periodically, maybe once or twice a day. So I came up with the idea, okay, well let me try Skype. So one day it just -- it just dawned on me out of nowhere, I'm like okay well let me -- let me see if this will work. And I sat mom down, I couldn't really explain Skype to her but, you know, I just sat her down in front of the laptop and I Skyped my father and for the first time in 20 years they spoke to each other over Skype, and they saw each other. And when I saw them interact, the way they just spoke to each other fluently in Yanomami, it's just like for me as a kid, it was like oh great, mom and dad is back together again, you know. But for me it made me realize oh, I can see why -- how they fell in love. I can see it now, the way they interacted with each other. And the second question is, my -- Ricky, yeah he's a son of my mom but a different father, yeah. But I don't know that back story, yeah. >> Next question? >> I'm just wondering if you have some theories or hypothesis about how the U.S. and Western medicine can incorporate some of these remarkable plants and healing techniques? >> Mark Plotkin: Yes, many obvious. One is the drugs themselves. An alkaloid is an alkaloid is an alkaloid. When they looked at collections made by some of these great British explorers that John talked about, 100 years earlier they're still there in the plants -- in the [inaudible]. Number two is the potions. This is one of a great overlooked area, that they mix things together. And this is a very long story but I'll give you the short version. When I was with the Yanomami I wanted to see how they made [inaudible], they made [inaudible] the same way that the Indians did to the east, which is they [inaudible], which is deadly poisonous with [inaudible], which is chemically inert. That's kind of weird. And I tracked down the expert on the biodynamics of [inaudible], the pepper and he said it increases the bioavailability of the blood. So how naked Indians with no chemistries we know could take two of 80,000 plants and mix them together and produce something more infinitely more toxic, this chemical -- biochemical medical genius. So that's another [inaudible] we can learn. The most exciting is poisons. The difference between a poison in medicine is often just a question of dosage. Go home and eat 500 Aspirins if you don't believe me. Okay, [inaudible] said this 500 years ago, there's something on the internet this week about a Brazilian wasp where they're taking the venom and using this to treat cancer. Very promising. So that's three obvious ways in which we can learn from these people, if it's done right, if they're compensated, if it's done ethically, which is something that pharmaceutical companies haven't been very good at. And finally, shamanic diagnostics, how you look in somebody's eyes and diagnose them, how you look at their fingertips and diagnose cancer, I don't understand, but I've seen it done successfully. So there's lots of ways to do it. The point here is that a culture is not just a list of medicinal plants. It's medicine. It's art. It's song. ^M01:40:00 It's philosophy. It's the ways they treat the earth. So there's lots of lessons to be learned from people like these. As an ethnobotanist it's the medicines that I find the most fascinating. But I know that's not the end of the road. >> Thanks. >> Next question please. >> A personal question again, has your father remarried and also has he been teaching anthropology for the last 20 years, or what has he been up to? >> David Good: Yeah, no, he hasn't remarried. And yes, he's still, you know, teaching anthropology, it's been, you know, many years now that he's been teaching. >> Are you still planning to bring your mom to -- you haven't brought her to New Jersey yet? >> David Good: New Jersey, no I haven't brought her back. You know, I really want to make that happen. I just need to make sure I have all my ducks in a row, and I have all the paperwork and [inaudible] n order and that, you know, that my mom is safe from any sort of outside influences that may want to skew my mom's, you know, or interfere or intervene or twist, you know, my mom's return journey. I just want to make sure she's -- if she still wants to do this that she -- it's as low-key and as safe as possible during her journey back here. But I understand that, you know, a lot of people will probably be intrigued, you know, when she gets back here. We're probably going to go straight to McDonald's when she gets here [laughter]. >> She still hasn't seen Vanessa and Daniel [assumed spelling], right? >> David Good: Daniel no, Vanessa briefly overs Skype but just for a few brief seconds. So I think, you know, the last time I down there in 2013 she continually asked how they are and what they're doing. And I bring photos, pictures, and everything to them, yeah. >> Last question, please. >> Hi, thanks. It was really interesting. Specifically about sort of uncontacted tribes and potential medicines that exist in the Amazon, how do you discover that and navigate that without sort of corrupting a culture or, you know, allowing pharmaceutical companies to sort of destroy what's there for that one resource? >> Mark Plotkin: That's a good question. And not an easy or a quick one to answer well. But you have to understand that most tribes are contacted, that there is a very strong record, and this will be in my next book, of important medical leads that have come from uncontacted tribes after they were contacted, like the [inaudible] in Brazil, this is a fascinating story. I got a call from National Geographic. They said we want you to come look at this. I went over there. There were pictures taken by Jesco von Puttkamer, a famous German Brazilian photographer [inaudible] that have been shot by [inaudible] arrows with [inaudible] and they were covered in blood. Now [inaudible] kills by paralyzing the diaphragm and you suffocate. You don't bleed to death. So I took one look at this and I said there's an anticoagulant in there. And they looked at it and found a new anticoagulant. It never made it to market for complex chemical reasons, but it shows that even a single tribe may know something which can revolutionize medicine. But like I said, it only has to be done right. So no, I don't want to contact uncontacted tribes to find their medicines or steal their medicines or commercialize their medicines. There's plenty of tribes that have stuff we should be studying and make sure it's not forgotten, and make sure it doesn't disappear when these rainforests are destroyed. Because if it is, we're cutting off our nose to spite our face, we're acting against our own self-interest. And the final point I want to make on this, I did a paper on the ethnobotany of warfare. And in it I pointed out that the Romans and the Greeks, which we always are proud to consider ourselves the heirs of, destroyed their environments. Why did the Greek Empire fall? Why did the Roman Empire fall? Because they cut down all their forest. Their armies, the greatest armies of the day, fought on wood. Their ships were made of wood. Their catapults were made of wood. Their spears were made of wood. Their shields were made of wood. There's no forest left in Greece. There's no forest left in Italy. So we're the heir to a tradition which fowls its own nest. And if we don't learn from that lesson we will repeat it. >> Here, here. >> Wow. We have been [applause], here here -- we have been, so we're out of time. We have been through those extraordinary three kids who left school at 13, became one of the greatest naturalists in the -- of the Amazon, Wallace, Bates, and Spruce. Thank you very much, John Hemming. And we have gone through this extraordinary, sort of adventure journey, kind of bumpy, but I hope you've enjoyed it. These are really wonderful perspectives on the Amazon. Thank you for coming [applause]. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:44:32