Spotted in Redwood Regional Park in the East Bay.

Today I had the opportunity to check out Taller Lenateros, a small workshop that takes recycled materials and produces incredible paper, books, and art. From their website:

A publishing collective operated by contemporary Mayan artists in Chiapas, Mexico. Founded in 1975 by poet Ámbar Past, the Workshop has created the first books to be written, illustrated, printed, bound (in paper of their own making) by Mayan people in over 400 years. Among its multiple objectives are those of documentation, praise and dissemination of Amerindian cultural values: song, literature, plastic arts, and the ancient Mesoamerican tradition of painted books.

The Leñateros’ rescue of old and endangered techniques such as the extraction of dyes from wild plants, contributes to the conservation of Native American languages, and benefits the ecology by recycling agricultural and industrial wastes, transforming them into art and beautiful books.

I’m wrapping up a fantastic in Chiapas, Mexico, where Ariel Chait and I participated in the annual meeting of CoopSol. Small scale coffee producers from around Latin America got together with the roasters and retailers of Cooperative Coffees to talk about the current state of Fair Trade, best practices in Fair Trade and organic coffee production, and where the future of specialty coffee is headed. Based in San Cristobal de las Casas, we held meetings at CEDECI, a training center for local indigenous people; in the mountains near Acteal, the home of Maya Vinic coffee; and around the picturesque city of San Cris. For Ariel and me, it was a great opportunity to meet a lot of good people and talk about Acopio Movil, the project we’ve been working on at Cal.

Check out the gallery below for some pictures from the week and a video featuring fellow participants.

Video:

Cafe Campesino and FECAFEB in Chiapas, Mexico from Paul G on Vimeo.

A short conversation with Tripp Pomeroy and Elias Chocanapi in the coffee fields of Maya Vinic near Acteal, Chiapas, Mexico.

I-89 south of Montpelier.

Fresh tracks snowshoeing on the Heavenly Highway at Bolton Valley.

We see a range of opportunities made possible by this technology, including the possibility of sharing producer data with consumers that buy the coffee at retailers elsewhere. We’re very interested in knowing what people think about their coffee, how much source information they’d like with their coffee, what specifically they would like to know more about, and so on. We’re also considering how we might create a mechanism (an online platform of some sort) to allow consumers to contribute more directly to the farmers that produce the coffee that they love.

In November we launched a small survey to begin to gauge opinion on these questions. We used e-mail mailing lists and social media to get the word out and offered no reward for completing it. More than 135 people responded to the survey and though the sample size is small, we believe some of the findings reaffirm our suspicions about people’s love for coffee and thirst (ba-dom-chh) for more information about it. Below we’re sharing some of the key findings.

First, though, a profile of our respondents:

• The majority (80%) of respondents are between 26 and 35 years old.
• The majority (83%) of respondents have some graduate level education.
• The gender breakdown of respondents: 52% male – 48% female.
• On a scale of 1-5, 87% of respondents said their coffee knowledge could be ranked between a 2 and a 4.
• 60% of respondents said they had between 6 and 15 coffees a week. 12% said they had more than 15 cups a week.

Selected findings on coffee generally:

It took a while, but fall is here.

I just returned from eight days in Mexico. This shot from the Sian Ka’an Nature Reserve about two hours south of Tulum on the Caribbean. Highly recommend making a trip down there if you’re in the neighborhood.