Stephen Brooks grew up in North Miami, Florida and in the spring of 1995 he witnessed a playground full of indigenous children get sprayed by a Chiquita Banana crop duster. The experience rocked his world and from that moment on, he has dedicated his every waking moment to seeking sustainable alternatives. Stephen immediately started an educational tour company bringing students from the States and Europe on impactful tours throughout Costa Rica. His goal was to not only show the beauty of the land and it people but to show the reality. The reality of the rainforest destruction, the reality of decimation of the indigenous cultutes and the havoc that the US multi-national agro businesses were creating in these beautiful and peaceful lands. Most importantly Stephen wanted to demonstrate solutions of another way treating the land, its inhabitants and each other. From this dream, The Punta Mona Center for Sustainable Living and Education was born and now almost 18 years later is one of the worlds best example of tropical agriculture and has an extensive collection of useful plants from around the world on 85 off the grid beachfront acres. Tens of thousands of people from around the world have had their lives deeply influenced at Punta Mona and inspires them to see how the world could be. All of Punta Mona's buildings have been built from fallen trees, the electricity comes from solar panels and most of the food served in the open air kitchen comes from the land.
In 2003, Stephen decided he did not want to continue to support the petroleum industry and wanted to show that there were options to air travel and Stephen organized 24 people on 2 buses anda truck and drove from California to Costa Rica on recycled vegetable oil making many international television news programs and fron page newspaper article. Stephen did the journey again in 2004 and it was on that trip the Kopali Organics was founded. Kopali Organic is an organic, fair trade snack company supporting small indigenous farm cooperatives around the world. In 2006, Stephen founded La Ecovilla and Tacotal, two neighboring ultra-ecological planned communities located on a crystal clear river w/ deep pools outside of San Jose, Costa Rica. That same year Stephen hosted Edible Adventure for the Travel Channel and in the following years hosted several television shows. He just gave his second TED talk that was entitled "If you don't like the way things are.... Then start a village!!
Stephen is full of ideas and is constantly dreaming up new ways that he can help improve the world.