this book recounts some of the many journeys made over the course of my work as an ethnobotanist and anthropologist, student and writer. The initial chapters, covering travels through northern Canada, the high Andes, Amazon, Orinoco and Haiti, touch upon those seminal experiences and encounters that led me as a student to appreciate and embrace the key revelation of anthropology, the idea that distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. The latter half of the book, those sections dealing with the plight of the Penan in Borneo, the pastoral nomads of northern Kenya and the fate of Tibet, suggests something of the dark undercurrent of our age, the manner in which ancient peoples throughout the world are being torn from their past and propelled into an uncertain future. The book ends with the redemptive promise of Nunavut, the Inuit homeland recently established in the Canadian Arctic.