(The view to inner Tusheti - the high Caucasus - from the Abano Pass. Our single-track road snakes through the foreground) I've never traveled a more dangerous road - and, having not yet journeyed the Andes, I've never enjoyed such a wondrous mountainscape as the one we experienced this week in Georgia's high northeast region of Tusheti, bordering Chechnya and the Russian Federation. (The Georgian flag flying at the top of the Tushetian village of Omalo, at nearly 6,000 feet

(JQ with Mindia Jalabadze from the National Museum, at a Neolithic-era [5900BC] archeological site where ancient clay wine vessels were discovered, nearly identical to those still in use today) Near the town of Marneuli, about an hour south of Tbilisi on the way to Armenia, you can see a nondescript hill of brown earth at a close distance. Take a sharp right through an off-road jungle of heat-scorched sunflower fields, and as you approach, it begins to take on something of a

(with Ramaz Nikoladze in his 'wild/Fukuoka' Tsolikouri vineyard, early July) Few works on agriculture have inspired me more than Masanobu Fukuoka's seminal masterpiece, One Straw Revolution, where he describes a hands-off style of plant growing that encourages a maximum degree of biodiversity. In his wide view, man's role is not strictly that of raising a single crop (at the expense of all other life), but rather, to enhance and protect the health of all the local life on on