He was born in 1955 in New Orleans, where he grew up with a strong interest in natural history, and educated at Harvard, the Yale School of Forestry and Tufts. He was director of the WWF Plant Program and Vice-President of Conservation International in Washington. He founded the Shaman's Apprentice program, a collaboration between shamans and ethnobotanists, to pass on traditional plant knowledge. He begins the first chapter by describing the fateful occasion when he recognized his vocation.
Few people can recall the particular moment when they decided how to spend the rest of their lives.
Mine came during a Harvard University night school lecture on a chilly September evening in 1974. That one moment opened the door to the fulfillment of a dream and to an adventure that is still unfolding. The classroom where the lecture was held was like an ethnographic museum. One wall was covered with huge green maps of the Amazon, the flat terrain fractured by the blue lines of rivers whose names were familiar to few outside that region. Another wall pulsated with the red and black, crazy-quilt patterns of South Pacific bark cloths, laboriously crafted by islanders who had pounded brown paper mulberry bark until it was soft and malleable and then colored it with natural dyes from the forest around them.