And Andes are there.

The mountains in the Himalayas are higher than those in the Andes.

In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city.

Some 1,500 miles south of the tropics, between Chile and Bolivia, the Andes completely change.

like the Andes' western slope, to show forth in one array, contrasting climates, zone by zone.

I've been back several times for filming, most recently for Untamed Americas it's the Altiplano in the high Andes of South America, and it's the most otherworldly place I know.

And I'd say that it deserves, in the spirit of Wade Davis' talk, to be at least put up there with these wonderful creation stories of the peoples of the high Andes and the frozen north.

And even though Mount Chimborazo isn't the tallest mountain in the Andes, it's one degree away from the equator, it's riding that bulge, and so the summit of Chimborazo is the farthest point on Earth from the center of the Earth.

It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined.

And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma,