Brainforest Café

Delvin Solkinson is a visionary permaculture designer and art culture creator from the Elpinstone Rainforest of British Columbia, Canada. Holding four Diplomas, a experimental Masters and Doctorate in Permaculture Education, he teaches permaculture design, writes articles and books, makes videos and creates learning tools with his beloved wife Grace. He is the Diploma Program Coordinator for the Permaculture Institute in the USA, a Diploma Tutor With the Permaculture Association Britain, and Dean of the Permaculture School at Pacific Rim College. He recently co-created a 80 hour online permaculture course with Dr. Elaine Ingham's Soil Food Web School including 74 teachers from 22 countries.Senior Managing Editor of CoSM Journal of Visionary Culture since 2009, Delvin has served on the Board of Directors for CoSM Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, lived and worked there as senior staff member, and done a six year Future Ministers Training with Alex Grey and Allyson Grey. Grace Solkinson grew up on a small family farm nestled on the edge of the woods and spent her childhood and young adult years diving deeply into animal husbandry while raising and showing a variety of livestock and poultry breeds. Specializing in herbalism, food preservation and green building she is an Instructor on the Permaculture Design and Resilient Ecosystems Diploma at Pacific Rim College, on the Dr. Elaine Ingham’s Soil Food Web School permaculture design certificate and on many other courses with her husband Delvin.Serving as the Product Manager at CoSM Chapel of Sacred Mirrors for many years, Grace co-created artifacts of visionary culture including art prints, sculptures, clothing with artists Alex Grey & Allyson Grey with whom she did a five year Future Ministers Training. Celebrating happily ever afters with her business Grace Alchemy, she creates commitment jewellery and geek rings for engagements, weddings and milestone moments.

Lucy Walker is an Emmy-winning, twice Oscar-nominated director renowned for creating riveting character-driven nonfiction. Her films have won over 100 awards including two at Sundance and two at Berlin and include Mountain Queen: The Summits of Lhakpa Sherpa, Of Night and Light: The Story of Ibogaine, Bring Your Own Brigade, The Lion's Mouth Opens, The Crash Reel, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Waste Land, Countdown to Zero, Blindsight, and Devil's Playground. For Netflix she directed/executive produced How To Change Your Mind, executive produced Ram Dass, Going Home and produced Why Did You Kill Me?. She was born in London and graduated from Oxford University before winning a Fulbright Scholarship to attend NYU's Graduate Film Program, where she supported herself with a successful career as a DJ.

Steve began learning about tropical ecosystems, indigenous and local people in 1974 at the age 15 when he went to the Rio Polochic River area in Alta Verpaz, Guatemala as a volunteer paramedic with the NGO Amigos de los Americas where he supported volunteer MD’s/ Dentist and provided vaccines to youth in the nearby small mountainous villages.  A few years later he visited a village of Angotere  Secoya indigenous people in Peru who live near the Colombian and Ecuadorian border with a Spanish Jesuit Missionary Luis Uriarte. That initial visit led to Steve living with the Angotere Secoya community on the Santa Maria River for 9 months in 1978 where he lived with a family and studied the diet and medicinal plant use in this community of 35 people. Shortly after that field research he met Tim Plowman at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Tim sent him to visit Dr. Schultes at Harvard on his way back College of the College of the Atlantic where was earning his BA in Human Ecology.  After earning is degree, he spent a year traveling in Peru and Bolivia working with friends and colleagues as an Ethnobotanist for hire looking at Andean Tuber Crops, returning to visit the Secoya people and other wanderings. He was then accepted as the first Fellowship student at the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden studying with Ian Prance, Mike Balick and colleagues in the Institute of Economic Botany. He conducted field work in the Andean and Amazon regions. He did his PhD research on Andean Tubers Crop complex. He then was hired by the National Academy of Sciences as part of the Board of Agriculture Committee on Managing Global Genetic Resources. He was then hired as the Chief Botanist for Latin America at the Nature Conservancy but met Lisa Conte who invited him to help start Shaman Pharmaceuticals along with Dennis, Mike Tempest.  35 Years later he is the Chief of Sustainable Supply, Ethnobotanical Research, and IP at Jaguar Health, where he focusing on the integration of traditional ethnomedical knowledge and the development of  novel therapeutics. He has focused on reciprocity with local collaborating communities and the conservation of biocultural Diversity. Over theses 3.5 decades he dedicated himself to the sustainable harvest and management of the miraculous Croton lechleri tree, also known as the Dragon's Blood tree, found in the Amazon rain forest. Steve’s efforts have been crucial in developing Crofelemer from this tree into an innovative plant-based prescription medication, which is the first FDA-approved oral Botanical drug. He has also focused his research and collaborations with local and Indigenous communities in various regions, including Africa and South East Asia with a focus on the conservation of biocultural diversity.  Most recently he and many ethnobotanical colleagues who were scientific strategy team advisors to  Shaman, formed the Entheogen Therapeutics Initiative (ETI) that has led to the formation of Magdalena Biosciences, a joint venture between Jaguar/ETI and Filament Health in Vancouver, Canada.

Alisha Holloway is a data scientist and population geneticist with expertise in genomics and statistical analysis of big data. She held an assistant professor appointment at UC San Francisco School of Medicine, where she was the founding director of the Gladstone Institutes Bioinformatics Core Facility. She earned a PhD focused on molecular evolution at the University of Texas at Austin.

John O’Connor is from Kalamazoo, Michigan. His recent book, The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, explores the obsessive world of Bigfoot believers. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, GQ, Creative Nonfiction’s True Story series, and elsewhere. He teaches journalism at Boston College. His upcoming book traces a historical path from Terence and Dennis´s McKenna "Experiment at La Chorrera" to our current psychedelic moment.