Stewart Brand Ted Streshinsky/Getty Images
He has been mentioned in our pages three times before today. Now, on the fourth occasion, it is about Stewart Brand’s Long, Strange Trip:
In 1966, Stewart Brand was an impresario of Bay Area counterculture. As the host of an extravaganza of music and psychedelic simulation called the Trips Festival, he was, according to John Markoff’s “Whole Earth,” “shirtless, with a large Indian pendant around his neck … and wearing a black top hat capped with a prominent feather.” Four decades later, Brand had become a business consultant. Continue reading
That was then, this is now. Coffee is more valuable than grass. And the value of coffee that is as 
Amie and I recently met with an artist who paints on silk. In 
Our assumption is that most people want to sense how a place they visit is different from where they normally live. Commonalities are also helpful for the sake of comfort and the travelers we have gotten to know through our practice in the last 2+ decades are much like us: interested in the balance between things we already understand and things that make us wonder.
Yesterday’s 
In the 2+ decades since that analysis, times have been difficult for the artisans of Costa Rica even as the tourism sector as a whole has grown dramatically. It is enough to say that something must be done in Costa Rica to valorize the artisans who have been able to hang on, and to likewise showcase the remarkable renaissance of artesania in this amazing country. The campesino in the photo to the right is from an artisan who carves coffee wood, with coffee farmers his primary subject. We received that carving as a gift in 1998 and we recently met the artisan who made it. He has managed to hang on.
It may be true that scientists have not been the most compelling communicators, but that is no excuse for our inaction. As someone who left a 
Organikos 