This obituary came late. I intended to write it much earlier.
Where others saw irreconcilable difference, Lafcadio Cortesi saw possibility. Indigenous leaders, corporate executives, idealistic campaigners, and skeptical bureaucrats—he moved among them not as a negotiator or emissary, but as someone who genuinely believed each had a role to play in keeping forests standing. Over four decades, he proved that belief correct. From Papua New Guinea to Sumatra, the British Columbia coast to boardrooms in New York and Jakarta, Lafcadio helped build coalitions that, against the odds, preserved both land and livelihoods.
It was not ambition that drove him. Colleagues recalled his disdain for hierarchy and his indifference to recognition. He was often barefoot, sometimes dancing, always laughing. But behind the unassuming manner was strategic acuity. When local communities in Indonesia sought help resisting the spread of oil palm plantations, he didn’t speak over them or for them—he listened. Then he leveraged his position at Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Stand.Earth, and later Canopy Planet, to amplify their demands in ways that multinational firms could not ignore.
His impact was measurable. Office-supply giants and fashion brands revised sourcing policies. Old-growth forests in Canada’s boreal and Southeast Asia’s tropics were spared. He did not claim these outcomes as his own. Instead, he credited the power of persistence, partnership, and good meals.
Cooking was his second language. A master of improvisational cuisine, he saw in the kitchen the same principles that animated his activism: generosity, attention, joy. In the Berkeley “Kampung” where he and his wife Jo Anne raised their daughters, he was the centrifugal force of a close-knit community—organizing Thanksgiving feasts, Grateful Dead dance parties, and backyard conversations that dissolved the boundaries between work and friendship.
His capacity for connection traced back to a restless and curious youth. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and raised in Manhattan, he traveled to Kathmandu at 16 to study temple monkeys. At Reed College, he wrote a thesis on the sacred and profane in myth, foreshadowing his lifelong effort to link the material with the moral. It was there that he met Jo Anne, the partner with whom he would share every phase of his life.
Indonesia shaped him profoundly. He arrived there in the 1980s with Volunteers in Asia and returned again and again, drawn to the forests but more so to the people fighting for them. In Papua New Guinea, villagers still spoke of him long after he’d gone. He had earned their trust not through words, but by showing up—year after year, unflagging and unselfish.
He disdained cynicism. Even when campaigns stalled or governments yielded to industry, he urged his colleagues to stay hopeful, stubborn, and kind. He once said the work should be “as much fun as possible,” not as a form of escapism, but because the stakes were too high to lose heart. “Gentle, stubborn, convinced of our cause,” a friend wrote after his death. “And with as much fun as we can have.”
In 2023, a 35-acre forest in York, Maine, was dedicated as Lafcadio’s Woods. Trails now thread through wetlands and granite ridges where children can wander and fall in love with nature. It is a fitting tribute—not a monument, but a living place. He believed forests were not abstract causes, but relationships to be honored. What he left behind was not just a string of professional successes, but a culture of care, irreverence, and courage that endures in those who keep walking his path.
