Environmental activist David Suzuki calls Wade Davis "a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet, and passionate defender of all of life's diversity."

Davis is happy to be known as one of life's eternal optimists. He believes in humanity's capacity to be creative in the face of adversity, and in nature's capacity to regenerate and make itself new — to be resilient.

The renowned anthropologist has been a National Geographic Society's Explorer-in-Residence, he's made film documentaries, lectured and spoken all over the world, published 24 books, as well as over 300 scholarly and popular articles. Davis was also the 2009 CBC Massey Lecturer.

His most recent book, Beneath the Surface of Things, is a collection of essays, on everything from the significance of the ascent of Everest, to the art of exploring, to the idea of the sacred.

IDEAS producer Philip Coulter met Davis near his home on Bowen Island, off the coast of British Columbia, for a walk through the woods to talk about his ideas, his new book, and the natural world around us.

Here are some highlights from their conversation.

"One thing I always say to young people who are impatient with the pace of change is to consider the values of their great-grandparents, or even their grandparents in some cases, on issues of race, the position of women, attitudes towards the environment, the legitimacy of diverse interpretations of the spiritual realm, almost any single value.

"Not only would you disagree with your great-grandparents, you'd probably find what they believe morally reprehensible, much as you might honour their memory. And the question is how did that change so quickly? Change is driven by political forces, but change can only happen — that kind of profound change — when there's some catalyst, some spark that shifts the entire dynamic."

"What really sparked our ability to transform the way we think was a strange group of anthropologists, contrarians, all who came together around the legendary Franz Boas at Columbia University and the Museum of Natural History in New York. He was the first to really ask how the nature of human perceptions are formed,he coined the notion of culture, as we understand it to be. His big breakthrough came in Canada, and this is why it's so important. He was a physicist who began to see, during his Ph.D. in Germany, that the way he thought about things depended on his point of view, and formed how he thought about things.

"When [Boas] was in Baffin Island, he was caught out in a terrible blizzard and his life was completely in the hands of his Inuit companion. He realized, 'who the hell are we to call these people primitive? What the hell does that mean? They're geniuses. They forged a life from the cold'. And by the same token, he then came out of the Pacific Northwest and encountered what could only be described as high civilization in an entire world without agriculture that had never succumbed to the cult of the seed. So he began to think anew, and his thoughts were the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom."

"And if you today, for example, think it's normal for a Jewish boy to pursue the Buddhist dharma, if you think it's normal for two women to have a family, as long as there is love in the home, if you think that every religion is legitimate provided it satisfies the spiritual needs of people with doing no harm — you're a child of anthropology. These ideas came about from these unbelievable thinkers, and they weren't comfortable. They were persecuted. They lost their jobs. They were hounded by the FBI, attacked for the subversives that they were. Most of them — many of them — were women. Margaret Mead, the incomparable Zora Neale Hurston, Ruth Benedict, Margaret's lover. And Benedict famously said the purpose of anthropology is to make the world safe for human differences. These were unbelievable pioneers."

"When we speak of climate change or the biodiversity crisis, these are very serious situations that threaten all of humanity. But it's important to remember they weren't caused by humanity. They were caused by a particular worldview with a certain idea of nature. Most people around the world interact with the natural world not through a kind of a metaphor of extraction, but through some notion of reciprocity, of basic iteration, of the idea that the Earth owes its bounty to people. People, in turn, offer fidelity to the world."

"The human footprint on the Earth is so ephemeral. We only really came into our own around 65,000 years ago... The key revelation of our era, and one that I think in time will be as consequential, is the vision of the Earth from space brought home by Apollo, which has absolutely transformed the way we think about everything. The other revelation also from science, also from a great journey, was the gift of genetics. And in our lifetime, geneticists have proven true what philosophers have always hoped, that we're all interconnected, that we are one big human family. That means if we accept the scientific truth that we share the same genetic endowment, it means that we share the same genius. And how that genius is expressed is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation and adaptation.

"Every culture shares that genius. And that's why every culture has something to say and deserves to be heard. And every culture at the same time, and this is a great lesson of anthropology, is a product of its own choices, its own history, its own circumstances."