The price of a cup of coffee

What does a cup of coffee cost? Maybe around $1.19 at a convenience store... and even less than that when we brew it at home. Coffee is cheap, and pretty much any of us can drink it any time we like. But, as with most agricultural production, coffee production entails many more costs than consumers in industrialized countries are compelled to consider when we lay out our cash. What is the real price for a cup of coffee? This is what I have been trying to figure out for quite some time now. Here is what I know.

Coffee has traditionally been grown, at least in the Western Hempsphere, in tropical forests under the shade of a diverse understory. These areas by nature are centers of extreme biodiversity, and they provide critical wintering habitat to many species of North American migratory birds. These forests, in addition, are powerhouses where carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and converted back into oxygen--a process our planet depends on to keep levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere down to a safe level.

As the demand for coffee has grown, coffee producers have turned to new farming methods to achieve a more large-scale crop. More coffee can be produced in the open sun than beneath the understory cover of these tropical forests, so forests have been clearcut to make way for agricultural land that can be cultivated to meet the growing demand for coffee. Farming this way increases the need for fertilizers to artificially enhance the soil and for pesticides to protect the crop from new threats. The implications are severe: Crucial habitat for exotic and migratory birds, as well as other species, has been lost, leading to rapid extinction--very often killing off species that humans had not yet even discovered. The loss of the flora which naturally enriches the soil with minerals has led to the dumping of chemicals all over the land. Basically, these lands that were once forests with rich and healthy soil are now barren, dry, and on life support. These chemical fertilizers cannot keep the land arable forever; one day that land will become useless, unable to support any green life. The chemicals from the fertilizers and the pesticides have to go somewhere--so they eventually end up poisoning the water supply. Not to mention that every lost acre of forest is a loss for the atmosphere; carbon dioxide builds up, as fewer trees are around to convert it.

The human labor cost is dire as well. When people of industrialized nations demand lower prices on coffee, the true cost of producing that coffee does not change. Since we, the consumers, are no longer bearing that cost, then we know that someone else must be--the laborers on these large-scale coffee farms. They work long hours in the hot tropics, receiving an inequitable wage for their labor. They have no choice--somehow they must earn a living for themselves and their families. We in America thought that slavery had been abolished long ago. Yet we consume products like coffee, whose artificially deflated prices make it easily accessible in large quantities to everyone (coffee was considered a luxury not so long ago), and we do so without any regard for the labor conditions under which it was produced for us. That sounds a lot like slavery to me.

When consumers make ethically sound decisions in their purchases, that action speaks very loudly to those who operate in the production of commodities. If we choose coffee that is organic, fair trade certified, and shade grown, we are supporting a return to environmentally sound agricultural practices as well as a fair wage to those whose livelihoods are linked to our coffee consumption. Sure, you pay a higher price for coffee when you make these decisions--but the price you pay is much closer to the "real" cost of coffee than the artificially deflated prices that we see on most mainstream brands. Just as meat would be far more expensive to consumers if it were not subsidized by the government (another reason to go vegan), other luxury items like coffee, and even chocolate and cane sugar, wear attractive price tags today that do not reflect their true cost.


I have made a switch to buying only organic coffee that is fair trade certified. It can be difficult to find coffee that is explicitly guaranteed to be organic, fair trade certified, and shade grown. What is the interplay between these three elements? I have been doing some research to find out, and I came across this excellent site called Coffee and Conservation. Take a look at this link for some practical guidelines on how to ensure that your coffee is truly produced in an ethically sound and sustainable manner, from an environmental and a social viewpoint. I encourage you to explore this site some, as it is packed with valuable information about what is sustainable and what is not, and what we as consumers and concerned citizens of this planet can do about it. The cost of producing a cup of coffee may be far removed from us, but we will all inevitably bear the cost of our choices in the end.

It's easy eating green

Many people who are disgusted by the world climate crisis do not realize that one of the top contributors to greenhouse gas emissions is connected with their diet. Eating vegan or vegetarian does more to reduce emissions than does driving a fuel-efficient, hybrid car. Unbelievable? Check out the following articles:

Vegetarian is the New Prius

Kathy Freston, in this article dated 18 January 2007, cites the findings of a recent report released by the UN, which points to livestock production as "one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." She also reports on the results of research conducted at the University of Chicago, in the following statement:

[Researchers] noted that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as much crops as we'd need if we just ate pasta primavera, faux chicken nuggets, and other plant foods. On top of that, we have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times as much fossil fuels--and spewing more than ten times as much heat-trapping carbon dioxide--as does a calorie of plant protein. The researchers found that, when it's all added up, the average American does more to reduce global warming emissions by going vegetarian than by switching to a Prius.

You can read more about the UN report in the following article on the website of the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations:

Livestock a Major Threat to Environment

How about this article by investigative journalist Jeffrey St. Clair, which points to cattle production as a top threat to the health of the Western U.S.'s public lands?

Till the Cows Come Home

The following article, written by Dan Brook, points out that the two gases that comprise 90 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are carbon dioxide and methane--both of which are emitted by large-scale cattle farms at the rate of millions of tons each year. The article also addresses livestock cultivation's role in the destruction of the world's rainforests, which are absolutely crucial to the removal of harmful carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Another Inconvenient Truth: Meat is a Global Warming Issue

There is so much evidence out there that it is difficult to deny, once you begin studying the issue, that the current state of the planet is inextricably linked to the human population's unsustainable diet. Consider the following quotation from the Kathy Freston article:

The United States alone slaughters more than 10 billion land animals every year, all to sustain a meat-ravenous culture that can barely conceive of a time not long ago when "a chicken in every pot" was considered a luxury. Land animals raised for food make up a staggering 20% of the entire land animal biomass of the earth. We are eating our planet to death.

And yet, it is so easy to eat a vegan or vegetarian diet. Sites like Vegan Outreach and GoVeg.com are designed to show how simple it can be to eat a healthy, delicious plant-based diet, and how such a lifestyle benefits the quality of life on this planet for so many creatures in so many different ways. There are vegan and vegetarian cooking sites all over the Web--you can even check out my vegan food blog and from there, explore the many vegan cooking resources that it links to.

I could not consider myself an environmentalist and justify eating an animal products-based diet--the global harm caused by animal agriculture is just too evident. Many people would feel the same way, I believe, if only they knew the facts.

This Sunday, 22 April, is Earth Day--and I believe it is one of the most critical Earth Day celebrations in the history of our country, as more people are aware this year than ever before of the dire climate crisis which our world faces. Please, do not ignore the facts surrounding animal agriculture. Take a look at these articles, and if you are still not satisfied, do some more research. If we truly hope to reverse the destruction of our global environment, one of the crucial steps we must take is turning away from animal-based diets and toward a safer, healthier, greener alternative.

Mad world...

I live in a world that seems, every day, to be more and more racked with madness and pain. Genocide in Africa, war in Iraq, hurricanes and tsunamis and tidal waves more devastating than we have ever seen, corporate control of the world's food supply, suffering everywhere you turn... and most recently, yesterday's senseless massacre on the Virginia Tech campus. Millions of children are raised in broken homes... millions more have no homes at all. Across the planet from me, young women and girls are daily being taken from their homes and sold as sex slaves; across town from me, the homeless population of this city walks the streets, in need of food and shelter and medical care--basic rights that ever elude them as they beg and plead passers-by for tonight's dinner.

As I reflect on this world which spins sickeningly, like a Tilt-a-Whirl, two thoughts scroll continually through my mind--thoughts not on my own behalf, but on behalf of this insane world. One is in the voice of Darius Rucker, whose repeated chant sounds hauntingly near.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

My generation has grown up in a world that is more lost and broken than ever before; we as a whole have seen more rejection, more addiction, more senseless violence than our parents did in their formative years, and it only worsens as time goes by. We are faithless and godless; we are the iPod generation, increasingly detaching ourselves from reality. To deal with the pain of our rejection? To build a reflective shell and hide our hearts from the slings and arrows?

The other voice I hear is that of the messiah, whose desperate cry two thousand years ago rings poignantly true in this day.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

These words cut to my very bones. Don't we feel forsaken? Are we not a world in despair, at the mercy of a society gone mad? So much death. Rape. Murder. Sickness. Starvation. War. Addiction. Rejection. Hate. Fear.

But the man who cried out those words was not forsaken by God--he was a part of God's ultimate plan. He was God's ultimate plan. A plan for redemption... a plan for hope.

Hope? That's difficult. Sometimes, don't circumstances just seem hopeless? Yes. I let myself ache and fear and despair, sometimes. But then I search God--I cry out, God, why have you forsaken your world? And I am reminded... When Jesus conquered death, the whole world trembled at the power of God. The God of today is no different--he is still powerful, and he still holds victory over death and fear. I wish that living was easy, and I wish I had answers to all the many questions that one could ask of a God who allows such things to come into a world as we see day after day. But I don't understand--I just have to trust, and believe that the heart of God is love and redemption. We, even amid the madness, are not motherless children, for we have a God who aches for us and longs for us to come home.

The blustery day

Days like today are days that make me feel the most alive--the sky is thick and dark and the wind is unhindered. The windows are open and I am curled up on my futon wrapped in my fleece jacket with a book and a glass of red wine, pausing from my reading every few moments to listen to the wind play the trees like pan pipes. There is no rain, only the expectation of rain--but when will it come? And when it does come, will it be announced by great peals of thunder, or will it steal in gradually, patient and taut with all the energy of a sweet symphony?

Spring and summer in Georgia are hot and mellow, a fever that dulls first the mind and then, eventually, the heart and soul. All is heavy, and the air just becomes thicker and denser, until you feel you are swimming in a yellow delirium as thick as molasses.

Then one day, you awake to the whisper of the air to the trees, the grasses, the clouds and birds and all the world. And you go out, and it whispers to you too, and cuts sharply into your mind as acid through oil. Suddenly the world is alive with energy and purpose, and it intends to whirl you along. You stand, spread-eagle, and your hair flies away and your eyes well up from the air-blasts, and all around you and within you is electrified--the earth, the sky, the water, and all life driven by the same energy, all connected by the bonds of shared excitement.

When I go out tomorrow, the earth will be strewn with life--petals and blossoms that gave themselves up to the fury of the storm. All will be calm, all will be quiet like glass, like the grave. The air will be a little thinner and the earth a little lighter, and my mind a little freer, a little more awake and aware. Every breath, every nerve, every pump of my heart are an exhilarating gift that I cannot, in that moment, take for granted--a life so simple, yet too extraordinary to comprehend.

Wild at heart?

"Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest."

(Thoreau)

I remember a time in eighth grade when I was on a field trip to Cumberland Island, and one of the counselors at the nature center there took us on a walk through a salt marsh. It was a hot, stinking, South Georgia kind of day. At one point my classmates and I were all sitting along the edge of the boardwalk, and our guide was standing ankle-deep in the thick, pungent-smelling mud. She picked up a handful of mud and began to explain to us how clean and pure it was, and how indigenous people would use it on their faces to cleanse their pores, just like a modern Swiss facial.

Then, holding out her hand toward our big group of prissy fourteen-year-old girls, she asked us if anyone wanted a salt-marsh facial. Every one of us shrunk back, shrieking. I thought she was joking, but she persisted in her offer, just waiting for one of us to seize the moment. After a deliberating moment I, without a doubt the shyest and most reserved one of the class, volunteered.

The mud squished softly through my fingers as she put a dollop into my palm. The crude odor, far from a luxurious spa scent, wafted into my nostrils as I raised my hand to my face. I hesitantly painted the first streak across my cheekbone; the mud was so cold and wet on my skin that my arms and legs prickled, but it was soft and relaxing. After that first stroke, I wildly smeared the entire fistful over every patch of skin, even down my neck halfway to my collar. I remember the exhilaration I felt, as if layers of worry and artificiality were being unraveled around me. I knew that everyone else was laughing at me because my behavior was so unprecedented, but I laughed because I felt life pulsing up and down my body, and because I was breathing in the smells of the real world, right under my nose, and a part of me for the first time in ages.

The healing power of violets

I love wildflowers. I love them for their special, unique beauty that a neatly trimmed flower-bed can never duplicate. I love the way that each flower has its own season in which to bloom and flourish, whether it is the summer sunflower or the winter gentian. I love the way they sing, raw and unrefined, like the folklorists of the earth.

The season of violets is just coming to a close--they first began appearing in February and lasted through the chilly season, and now are yielding to the spring bloomers--dandelions, wisteria, and others. But violets have a special meaning to me...

Here, I will share with you an excerpt from a narrative I wrote about a time in my life when I was truly depressed, and how God used the world around me to lift me out of the pit I was in. I hope you enjoy it.

* * * * * * *


True friends walk with you through the low places in your life. Friends I didn’t know I had were the friends who saw me through depression, encouraged me to continue holding onto what I had, faithfully believing that everything would take a turn for me if I allowed it to happen. And so I held on and on, and learned to lean on them for strength.

Sharon knew I loved wildflowers. Their beauty sometimes gave me peace, their fragility sometimes made me feel not so alone. I was at her house one Saturday afternoon early that spring; I sat on the swing in her backyard, staring at the ground beneath me where various feet skidding against the ground to halt the swing had worn a bare spot in the earth. The dirt was black and spongy.


“Laura, look! Wild violets!” I looked up and saw Sharon kneeling in the grass across the yard. I dropped from the swing and walked over. She knelt before a deep green patch that had looked like grass from farther away, but as I knelt down beside her I saw the deep violet-blue flowers whose tiny heads emerged from the greenery. I smiled as I studied their form—they were like newborns, with soft and pliable faces. The markings on the petals looked like eyes squeezed shut, too sensitive to the sunlight; they turned away to face the soft green below them.

I stretched out my body and lay flat on my stomach, my face next to the violet patch. Resting my cheek on the ground beside them I could feel the feathery leaves tickle my skin. I saw the flowers eye-to-eye now, the firstborn of spring, and for several minutes I lay there with them.

Sharon stood up to leave me alone with the flowers. As she did, I propped up on my elbows and turned to her, smiling. “I’ve never seen violets before…” Then I got to my feet and walked away with her, leaving the young flowers to nap placidly in the gentle afternoon light.

From "Time to Weep, Time to Heal"
March 2006

Dilemma

This morning's Accounting Policy class session was one of the most difficult hour-and-a-half lectures that I have ever had to endure. To give you an idea of what happened, I must first explain that my professor is on the corporate board of Kimberly-Clark Corporation, a company whose products I refuse to purchase because of its disregard for conservation ethics: More than 80% of the pulp that Kimberly-Clark uses to produce its Kleenex brand tissues is virgin pulp, straight from Canada's ancient Boreal forest. The company is actively engaged in the destruction of one of the last remaining intact biomes in the world, a rich ecosystem which is home to myriad diverse species and is a carbon storehouse whose survival is essential to the fight against global warming. In short, I find that Kimberly-Clark has no environmental ethic whatsoever.

This morning in class we had a guest speaker--the Chief Financial Officer of Kimberly-Clark was there to share with us some of the business practices of the corporation and give us some insight into what makes the company so profitable. I found his talk to be utterly disappointing. He made no mention of Kimberly-Clark's environmental position, even though we are standing in a day and age in which we must take action to curb global warming and otherwise protect our planet which we have ravaged and raped to near-barenness in many locations. Furthermore, he shared with us that Kimberly-Clark is looking at outsourcing much of their human labor to India, where labor is cheap and few investments must be made in the workers to keep them happy since they need the jobs so badly that they will work under nearly any conditions. I was enraged on the inside as I listened to this presentation.

What did I do? Well... I refused the giveaways that our speaker offered. I could not explain why. If my professor were not so linked with Kimberly-Clark, I would have considered confronting the CFO about the company's policies regarding the environment. As it was, however, I felt like I could say nothing without putting my grade in jeopardy. Am I a coward? What would you have done?

If you click on the banner above, you can read about the destruction that Kimberly-Clark is wreaking upon the Boreal forest, and you can send an e-mail to the CEO of Kimberly-Clark, Thomas Falk, as well as to the company's VP of environment, Ken Strassner. You can urge the company to make changes in the way it obtains its pulp for the production of its popular paper products, and you can explain that you will not purchase any Kimberly-Clark products as long as they refuse to change. Please, take this step. We are losing a treasure than can never be replaced, and it disappears a little more each day. It makes a difference. Let them know that we as consumers will not settle for complacency when it comes to our planet.

...

What We Need is Here

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.

--Wendell Berry

A change of scenery

As my fifth year in Athens begins to wind down, I have to say that I am looking forward to a change. I've always been a somewhat restless individual--after being in one place for a while (both in a literal and a mental sense), I feel like it's time to move on. I don't like feeling as if I have built up a "history" somewhere. I know that I should be comfortable with who I am, and indeed I am comfortable with that... I guess it is just that I become less comfortable with the people around me, either because they seem to have not changed much, or their changes have taken them down an entirely different road than the one I am traveling.

In the town where I lived for the first eighteen years of my life, a place where everyone knew your name AND your GPA AND your criminal record (not that I had one), I felt like I built up a history and that after awhile, it was just expected that I would follow the precedent I had already set. People, as we well know, are dynamic creatures; nevertheless, others are surprised when they find that you have changed--and not only surprised, but also disappointed, skeptical, and sometimes plain disrespectful. By the time I was about thirteen, I no longer felt I could be true to myself, as I was becoming someone altogether different from the girl I had been all my life. I was stuck in a mold, and it took an exodus for me to finally express myself freely again.

Now I'm twenty-three years old, and I have to say that I am a much different person than I was when I was eighteen and a newcomer to Athens. Athens is without a doubt a much larger town than my hometown, but still I have found my way into tight-knit circles where I have projected a particular image of myself, and now that the image is somewhat inaccurate I feel (to make use of a trite yet apt expression) like a round peg in a square hole. So though I love the Athens atmosphere, I do truly look forward to the time when I can shut the door on this era of my life and start over in a new city.

Does this cycle ever end? As you get older, do you change less--or do you just care less about the pressure you feel from the people around you? I don't want to feel like my life is all about things starting and ending; I want it to just go on, and to be comfortable within whatever shape the notch happens to be that gets carved for me.

I think I still have a lot to learn...

Blood Mountain

I was ever so thankful this weekend for a chance to get away--from Athens and my computer and life as I know it right now. My backpacking class drew to a close with a class trip to Blood Mountain, Georgia's fifth highest peak, in Blairsville. I am sure I have said this before, but when I am hiking, I feel closer to God than in any other moments of my life, because I feel like I can really worship Him in a pristine corner of His creation, somewhere special and holy and undefiled by human touch. Even among people who do not believe in the God I love, there is a sense of awesome wonder when one is out in nature... looking out at a distant mountain peak, or down into a hazy valley, or through the ground cover of dead leaves at the first wildflowers of spring that are beginning to push their small, shy heads up out of the rich earth. In this place, it is hard to deny the existence of some power that is greater than yourself.










Let everything that has breath praise the Lord...