The Environment Show #397, 1997 August 9

This is the Environment Show. It's about our stewardship of the Earth and the beauty
and mystery of life in all its forms. The Environment Show is a national production made
possible by the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Packard Foundation, the Turner Foundation,
the J.M. Kaplan Fund and Hemings Motor News, the Bible of the Collector Carhabi, 1-800-CAR-HRE.
Your host is Peter Burley.
Coming up on this week's Environment Show, 800 million people in the world today get at
least some of their food from urban gardens in urban areas. Efforts are now underway to
cultivate even more urban land. We'll take you to Chicago, where nearly half the produce
handed out to welfare mothers is grown right in the city.
Listeners comment on contaminated fish and the price of salmon. Urban dwelling crows
may not be your favorite birds, but you'd be surprised at how human they get. A portrait
of the road to Timbuktu. And to the Earth calendar, we go plunging through a river of space
dust. These stories and more coming up on this week's Environment Show.
The number of people living in cities is expected to double in the next 35 years and feeding
these people will put a stress on the world's food supply. But renewed interest in growing
food in urban areas is looked at by some as a way to provide good, cheap food to city residents.
Lee Farben reports from Chicago where urban gardens are popping up like mushrooms. Last
year they produced 8,000 pounds of food for the city's needy.
The Farmers Market Nutrition Program is part of the WIC program, Women Infants Children.
WIC is a federally funded nationwide public aid program that distributes food coupons
to needy families. It also puts nutrition centers in inner city neighborhoods. Ron Wulfert
is an educator with the Urban Gardening Program at the University of Illinois Cooperative
Extension Service in Chicago. You go into a center and it's almost set up like a grocery
store and so the recipient comes in and they can pick up milk, concerials and things
like that. But a lot of these centers are in inner city neighborhoods and there's really
a lack of access to fresh vegetables in a lot of our inner city neighborhoods. And so
the idea was since we are doing gardening here in the city and we have a number of fairly
large gardens was to have some of our garden groups, community gardens grow vegetables
for these WIC centers. Several community gardens are growing zucchini, cucumbers and tomatoes
for two WIC centers serving roughly 6,000 recipients. Our gardeners are inner city gardeners
and community garden groups are actually getting paid for the produce. So not only are
we providing some access to fresh vegetables to some inner city residents, we also have
inner city residents that are developing another source of income through growing vegetables
for the farmers market nutrition program. The Cooperative Extension Service also has
a program to distribute samples, recipes and nutritional information about the vegetables
both in the WIC centers and in the community gardens. In fact, sometimes they prepare
dishes right out in the garden as a demonstration. Chicago, like many cities, has plenty of land
available for gardens. And a lot of our inner city neighborhoods, especially here on the
south side of the city, you can go down the street from my office and you can find in about
a 10 block area you will probably find 30 or 40 empty lots. Many of these lots are owned
by the city which permits them to be used for gardening or greening projects. A lot of
them have had been become areas of fly dumping. So you've got trash, pollutants, cars,
parked on them, they're very compacted. A lot of the time it's very unusual for us to find
a lot where the soil is suitable to go right in there and start doing something. We always
test for heavy metals, lead, mercury, you know, before we do anything, especially when we're growing
edible crops. That's why they do a lot of raised bed gardening rather than churning and planting
a lot itself. The Cooperative Extension Service provides technical assistance to community groups,
often church groups, about starting gardens and keeping them up. The whole thing when you get into
community gardening is not only the aspect of teaching people how to grow their own food but the
effect that a community garden can have in an inner city neighborhood that changed that it can
break about the rallying point that a community garden can really be in an inner city neighborhood.
A lot of inner city neighborhoods, the residents often feel very isolated. They don't get to know
each other and a garden I've seen it happen time and time again, a garden can just be the instrument for change
in a neighborhood. Ron Wolford of the Cooperative Extension took me to visit one of the gardens that
grows produce for the WIC program. If the inner city is an unusual place for vegetable gardens, this place is
even more unusual. We're in a yard at the Cook County jail complex. It's a less secure area.
Meaning it's outside the main cell blocks and not directly under the two guard towers that are
nevertheless visible from where we're standing. Still, we're surrounded by double fences topped with
razor wire and there's a video surveillance camera mounted on a tall pole right above our heads.
We're in a corner between a basketball court and a softball field at the edge of a 10,000 square foot
garden. It's 95 degrees under a blazing July sun, so the cooling machinery is going full out across the yard.
But have a check. I saw some Japanese beetles on here. Japanese? Yeah, they're real shiny. They look like metallic.
They're metallic insects. So how do we get rid of them? We don't have to. Well, I don't think you have to
watch. Just watch them in case we get, you know, I only saw one or two. So, once we got a whole bunch
of metal, I think you have to worry about it too much. Well, for this chatting with Ed Simmons,
who runs the jail gardening program. This year, we got cabbage, onions, collards, tomatoes,
peppers, zucchini. This is garden number one. Okay, here in garden number two, which we just extended
this year. We have watermelons, canelopes, peppers, celery, and zucchini.
The garden is maintained by detainees in the Department of Community Services and Interventions
pre-release center. Some 300 non-violent prisoners, most of them awaiting trial or sentencing,
help tend this garden. First of all, it's getting outdoors, getting fresh air on a daily basis,
and knowing what this program is about, like the WIC program, women, infant and children.
They love the fact that this stuff is going out to these families. As they always tell me,
Mr. Simmons, we got a feed to babies. The jail garden project started four years ago,
an executive director, Dave DeVan, read about a gardening program in San Francisco,
and asks Simmons to start one here. Some of the produce raised at the jail goes to the WIC program.
Some goes to soup kitchens around the city, including one called the inspirational cafe.
And it's a couple of times that I've gone to like inspirational cafe when the people are there,
like getting food, because you know there's a lot of homeless people that hang around the kitchen.
And we're taking all of this stuff in. You should see the smiles on the kids' faces. Mama,
we're going to get some of that food when we go in there. You know, I mean, it's really touching.
It's really touching. With what you can do with seeds and soil, it shouldn't be anybody starving.
It shouldn't be anybody starving. I mean, you see all the vacant lots around the city.
And I guess the communities just don't know who they should talk to, you know, that they can go to
the city as a group and get permission to use that particular lot, you know, like you see these
abandoned buildings once they tear them down, it's just vacant lots. And with the right backing,
it can be done. It definitely can be done. I mean, I've seen it. I mean, I'm a part of it.
Now I figure if you can do it in a jail, it should be real simple in the community.
For the Environment Show, this is Lee Farb Minion, Chicago.
As humans seek to grow food in the urban landscape,
scientists are gaining insight into the ways of creatures who've always known that cities
are good places to find a meal. Dr. Kevin McGowan is the associate curator of birds and mammals
at Cornell University. He studies crows in Ethica, New York, often by climbing up trees,
and he says the crows are a lot more interesting than people might expect.
The Environment Show's Thomas Lally speaks with him about the secret life of crows.
The original range of the American crow was probably somewhat restricted when Europeans first
came to this continent. Most of the eastern United States was forest. Crows are not birds of the forest.
They're birds of kind of open parkland. They like trees to nest in, but they like open space
and open ground to forage on. So there probably weren't that many crows around in the eastern
United States in Canada. It was probably mostly ravens. I understand that their social structure is
quite complex and in many ways resembles humans. If you could just explain the social structure
and as well as the familial structure. Okay. American crows do have a very complex lifestyle.
They have their very social birds. They get in these large congregations during the winter,
but also they have a less obvious sort of social life. In that they have extended,
they live in extended family groups. In many parts of their range, although not in all parts of
their range, young birds, once they're raised, don't leave their parents and go off and try to
become breeders right away. In fact, most of them don't become breeders till they're around four
years old, something like that. So while they're waiting to find a breeding spot, they stay with
their family and help their parents raise young in subsequent years. So what you find is you have
a breeding male and a breeding female with up to, oh, what does in other individuals that are
still with them, their kids that are still with them in their territory and they all may be feeding
young at a single mass. These family relationships go on for long, long number of years. I have
some that I have at least a couple of birds that are six years old and are still with their
parents helping. They've been helping their parents for six years and they haven't yet made the
move to try to become a breeder. Also, some of these crows come and go. They don't stick around on
the territory all the time, but yet we'll leave and come back. Sometimes the young go down to
Pennsylvania, spend the winter, come back and join their parents on the breeding territory
when breeding season starts in March the next year. Sometimes brothers will go off with
with each other that a brother finds a breeding spot next door to the family territory.
And some of his younger brothers may go with him and help him instead of being helping the
the parents for a while. So it's a real complex sort of thing. They obviously know each other as
individuals. They're continually interacting for years and years after other birds, normal
passurines or normal thong birds would have long, long since severed ties with their parents.
Crows seem to play. They, a lot of birds play and then plays kind of a slippery concept on. We
have to sort of define what it is and what it isn't. Very definitely, crows do
appropriate things with inappropriate objects. They like to do that a lot. Especially all young
corvids, young birds do a lot of adult type behaviors with the wrong things. So just like
little kids like to have their own set of play dishes and things like that. When young crows and
young jays are growing up, they spend a lot of time harvesting and hiding rocks and sticks and
things like that. Normally they would be hiding food to eat later on, things like acorns and
other bits of stuff that they find to save for later. I did get to watch a quartet of young crows
the other day that had a multi primary, feather from an adult crow that they were
seem to be a prized object and they were running around on the ground chasing each other trying
to get the feather. Then whoever got the feather was very proud of himself and ran away while the
other guys tried to grab it from him. So they do a lot of things like that. Dr. Kevin McGowan is the
associate curator of birds and mammals at Cornell University.
Joining us now with an update on our listener comments is Stephanie Goetheman. Stephanie,
what do we have this week? Well not too long ago we aired a segment on eating seafood and since
then our listeners have flooded us with calls about fish. Here are a couple we decided to look into.
A caller from New Jersey called us from a cell phone to ask this question.
Although certain fish are contaminated, if you remove the liver and the other internal
organs is the flesh as contaminated as the rest of the organs. While each state takes care of its
own fish consumption advisory, Pat McCann, a research scientist at the Minnesota Department of Health,
says the EPA often turns to the state of Minnesota for facts.
Fish are not as good as humans at metabolizing contaminants. So the liver and other internal
organs aren't as highly contaminated as like a human liver would be. So they don't process the
contaminants as well. Some contaminants are concentrated in the fat, such as organochlorine
pesticides and other organochlorines are concentrated in the fat. So removing the fat will reduce the
contamination that you would eat. But contaminants like mercury are actually stored in the muscle tissue
in the flesh flesh that you eat. And so by removing the organs or the fat you won't remove mercury.
And Andrea Noel from New York wanted to know about salmon.
I would like to know why the price of salmon seems to be decreasing. So I try to eat
gosh environmentally mindedly I guess. And it's caused me to become really suspicious. Why can I buy
salmon now at the grocery store for $3.99 a pound? Thanks.
Our answer comes from Glenn Spain who is the Northwest Regional Director of the Pacific
Coast Federation of Fisherman Associations. More than 40 percent of the worldwide salmon market has
been invaded and absorbed by farm fish operations primarily in Chile and in Norway. These are
essentially cultivated fish. They're cultivated in fish pans. There's not wild fish and as
result they're really an interior food product. That's it for this week. Thanks, Stephanie. We hope
you'll share your comments with us. Give us a call. Our number is 1-888-49-Green.
We all have places which are special to us. For some they're city streets, for others they're deep
in the wilderness. While most of the world's population lives in large cities there are still places
where humans are in the minority. Mark Jenkins is the author of To Timbuktu, a journey down the
Niger. He presents a portrait of an area in West Africa where long distance communication comes
not from telephones but from drums. The drummers have arrived. Three muscular men in
tattered shorts each with a different sized drum. One drum is large and fat and untapored.
One is bottlenecked shaped, one is narrow and tall. The drums lie on their sides on the ground,
their heads face in a small fire in the middle of the village. Naked children are springing across
the commons adding bouquets of brown grass to the flames. Sorry Kita, our guide, says the drums
have skinheads that grow soft from the dampness and have to be dried to become taught.
As it grows dark the drummers begin tuning their instruments. Each man searching for a voice only
he can recognize. The sounds the drums make are astounding. Cracking detonations is loud as a
firecracker but deeper, richer. They rumble the jungle.
Sorry says the drums can say many things but when they call other villages they say only big things,
a birth, a death, a dance, a stranger, a wedding, a fight. Tonight they're saying come,
come to our village. Strangers are here. We are deep in the heart of West Africa in the Futa
Hologne, a mountain range that separates Sierra Leone and Guinea. This village is called Bombaya.
There is a telephone in this village. There are no telephone anywhere here. A few attempts
that roads have been washed away. Villages still communicate with each other via drums.
Sorry says the sound of a drum can be heard 10 kilometers away. It would take a runner an hour to
go that distance and a runner could only go to one place. We have come to one of the last obscure
places on earth. Some were not yet crosshatched with highways and bound with wire. Places with no roads
and no wires are bigger than other places. Distance hasn't been distorted. People claim the world is
getting smaller as if it were some green and blue ballooned leaky air. Africans don't buy this.
To most Africans the world is enormous. Why? Because they walk. They have no choice. They are poor.
If you must use your own legs, your own blood, bone and sinew to travel from one place to another,
a mile is still a mile and the world is boundless. Places with no roads and no wires are also
more mortal than other places. They are so because you cannot escape. You can't fly away or drive
away or phone for help. If you want to leave you must walk. If you cannot walk, you must have the
help of those around you if they will help you. Thus kindnesses are not overlooked. Mistakes not
forgotten. Coward is not forgiven. In such a place or on an expedition into such a place, what goes
around comes around. Everything boomerangs. Mark Jenkins is the author of Two Timbuk 2, a journey down
the Niger. It's published by William Marrow. Stay tuned, the Earth Calendar is next.
This week the Earth plunges through a stream of dust. Thanks to our atmosphere,
none of it will reach the ground, but they're going to put on one heck of a show.
Every year around August 11th we pass through the Perseid Meteor Stream, a river, a thin river of
little pebbles and sand grains of meteoroids in space. This year it's going to be happening on
the night of August 11th, actually after midnight on the morning of August 12th. Our orbit around
the Sun, the Earth's orbit around the Sun, carries us along in this big circle once a year.
And part of that circle is intersected by the Meteor Stream. It's always there, it's always going by,
but we go plunging through the stream at the place in our orbit where we are about every August
11th or August 12th. Alemna Groverd is the associate editor at Sky and Telescope magazine.
He says that Perseid Meteor showers are an event that no one should miss, and he says that
Perseid meteors are about the size of great nuts. They have the consistency of a cigarette ash,
but are still really spectacular. They're coming in at a speed of about 37 miles per second. That's
about 113,000 miles per hour. They carry an awful lot of punch, even if they're just these tiny little
eraser headsides objects. With that much speed, the air friction heats them up quite hot. In fact,
they leave a quite hot column of air behind them, and on a good dark, clear night, you can see
this quite well from anywhere from 40 to 60 miles down below where we are, and that's what you see.
A little streak of light moving across the stars called a shooting star.
The Perseid meters are actually debris from a comet called Swift Tuddle. Like all meteors,
the Perseids contain the raw material from which the solar system was made. This is water, methane,
nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide. The Groverd says that meteorites are infrequent
problems on the earth, but they can really pose a problem for objects in space. Meteors are an issue
when there is an intense meteor shower. As happens, maybe once every few decades, there is concern
that we might lose a few satellites. This is a problem. The Perseids happen every year. They're not
intense enough to be something that the space program can't live with. It's just one of the
hazards of doing business above the earth's atmosphere. The Groverd suggests going out
after midnight and finding a place with little or no artificial light. This year, the best viewing
will be right before dawn when you can expect to see a shooting star every minute or so.
Today, we know what meteors are, but McRoberd says that until a relatively short time ago,
scientists did not believe meteors were even worth studying.
For a long time up until in fact about 1833, astronomers didn't pay attention to meteors.
The very word meteor comes from the same route as meteorology weather. Atmosphere, it was thought
that these were just things happening in the upper atmosphere like lightning or hail or something
like that. It wasn't until comparatively recent times, the last couple of centuries, that it
was realized these are objects striking the atmosphere from deep in the solar system, that these
are astronomical objects orbiting the sun like tiny little planets. Earlier than that, people either
took them just as part of nature the way the stars themselves were viewed or had weird
conjectures about what they might be. Shooting stars have inspired poets and artists for years.
I hope none of them find out that meteorites and meteors are nothing but slush and dust,
because I suspect that the inspirational qualities of slush and dust are limited.
Thanks for listening, this is the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley.
This is the Environment Show, and I'm Peter Burley. Still ahead. We're joined by a country farmer
and author named Gene Logstin. He speaks about living a good life in Ohio on 32 acres. His new book is
called An Invitation to Gardening, where he encourages everybody to get their hands dirty.
We talk green about coffee. Rainforests are being cut down for your morning cup of Joe.
But by drinking shade-grown coffee, you can save the forest and birds as well.
And the musical duo Magpie joined Kim and Reggie Harris to sing about us and our place in the
scheme of things. These stories still ahead on the Environment Show.
As we heard earlier, small scale agriculture holds tremendous promise for meeting the world's
food requirements. But as urban agriculture is rising, many small farms in rural areas are
disappearing and they are replaced by huge corporate farms. Resisting this trend is Gene Logstin.
He lives on a 32-acre farm in Ohio, raising a wide range of crops and animals. Logstin is the
author of the Country Farmer, and most recently, the Country Farmer's invitation to gardening.
He spoke with the Environment Show's Thomas Lally. Why do you feel that people should be gardening,
that it might be a good thing for them?
Well, I think writers, I want to share the fun I get out of it. That's really the basic reason.
I can give all kinds of reasons. Of course, my other reasons in my book does. But I think,
first and foremost, we have a wonderful life. I know that there are a heck of a lot of other people
who would enjoy this kind of life and don't know about it. The reason I know that is they write
me letters. You can tell that they are dissatisfied with the way they are living.
Usually they will be, oh, suburban, have a good job. One man complained that they had four
televisions in their house and his children were still fighting over the programs. He said,
there has to be a better way to live than this. I just think a whole lot of people would enjoy,
you know, get it, have a better quality of life if they would learn to look around their local
neighborhoods and look deeper into their local neighborhoods and derive the enjoyment that they
think they get by going to Disneyland right around home and then in conjunction with that,
start growing their own food and in conjunction with that, learn how to fix it so it tastes really good.
You can hardly find a restaurant that you can afford anywhere where the food is any good really.
That is my main. I think that is what inclines me to write all these crazy books.
But secondly, I think, as I explained in the invitation to gardening, I think that if
let's say just the third of the people in this country or even a fourth of the people in this country
of our 250 million people, if they did this, if they started gardening seriously,
it would act as kind of a balance, a bolster, a support to our very, very shaky economy.
You know, everybody thinks because of stock markets jumping 100 points a day these days, you know,
that everything is fine and dandy. Oh, I am just sure it's not. Mainly because of all the
downsizing and the job displacement that's going on and the fact that when we do have an increase
in jobs, normally they're very low quality or have very little satisfaction or meaning to them.
And so all the more with people then as sort of a byproduct of gardening start to enjoy life a
little better and see some meaning in it. Also, you know, the GDP is a growth domestic product they
call it now. You know, that's kind of the sum total of all the money that changes hands commercially
in the country. Not counted in that is all the many, many acts, work, jobs, people do for nothing,
you know, babysitters, especially older retired people who babysit for nothing.
Well, the garden itself, you know, the amount of food, I read some place one year, I don't know
which year, but the article said statistically that the value of the food raised in gardens in one
year that year was greater than the net profit of farmers who had that year. You know, I don't know
what the significance really of that is, but it does underline the fact that
where gardeners produce something of great value. And this is not reckoned in the GDP. And if
if all the, all the so-called charitable or private work that people do for nothing,
if they did not do that, I don't think the government nor the insurance companies,
any kind of medical program could afford to stay in business, you know. This kind of money,
unspant, uncounted is absolutely vital to our economy and gardens are part of that.
Now, why do you reckon that gardening and farming for you and for those folks that you share
experiences with find it so pleasurable and rewarding? What is about it that makes it that way?
You know, if you're trying to think about that metaphorically or spiritually, it's the reward,
first of all, for me, is physical. How can I say this? I like the feeling of the sun on my back.
You know, I like the smell of rich earth. I like to get out in the garden and get hot and sweaty
and then come in and take a shower and sit on the porch and have a drink. You know, I like the
sense of what's the word, the sense appeal, the sense gratification that comes. I think it's
a very innocent and healthy kind of sense gratification. But then, of course, growing out of this also
is a very, very significant spiritual dimension. And I think in a word, it's sort of like satisfaction.
Life is hell, really. You know, if you really get right down to it, living is not very
pleasant thing in general, especially the first part of your life, you're worried about your
children and making living in the second part, you're worried about dying. So, under the
pall of reality, I think, any way that you can achieve a spiritual refreshment, satisfaction,
whatever you call it, meaning. Very many people can get meaning from life through their religion.
And I've never really been able to do that, I guess. So, personally, I suppose gardening and farming
become a sort of religion for me, a way to see meaning in life, value in what I do.
But isn't farming and gardening hard, grueling work and didn't our modern, the aim of our modern
industrial society, the goal was to free us from slaving in the fields. Yeah, what did they do?
I was in Washington, DC here a couple of years ago. And what I saw was people out in a very
hot, August day jogging. You know, they were sweating. They were submitting themselves to just as
much unpleasant grueling labor as we used to submit ourselves to, and I still do, to making hey
in a hot summer day. The human body, the human spirit, I think, needs, desires really wants to have
a certain amount of unpleasant physical work. You know, I've been building a haystack.
And I can go out there now and every time I look at that haystack, it's so well shaped, if I may
brag a little. And I had to learn this, you know, because nobody does build haystacks anymore.
Just looking at this thing and all the hard work I put in, it makes me extremely proud,
it makes my grandson, and my son, extremely proud too, because seeing nothing worthwhile is accomplished
in the world without some kind of hard physical or mental work, which is the same thing.
And for a civilization to become so soft that it tries to get away from this, it's just a sign of
decline and a sign of unrealism. Gene Logston speaking with Thomas Lalley. Logston is the author of
the Country Farmer and the Country Farmer's invitation to gardening, both are published by
Chelsea Green.
We're talking green and I'm your host, Peter Burley. Today we're talking about shade grown coffee.
Coffee is a huge industry and in fact next to petroleum is the second largest
export industry, legal export industry in the world. It also involves millions of acres where
coffee is grown in Africa, in South America, and in Central America. And that has a huge environmental
impact. In coming times you're going to be hearing more about shade grown coffee and how this may
diminish the environmental impact of the growing of coffee. So we want to hear your views and hear
from you. Our number is 1-888-49-Green. I have four guests with me today. Eric Holst, he is with the
Rainforest Alliance, which is an environmental organization and he's involved in their
agricultural certification program. He's in New York and also with me is Paul Ketsov and he's the
CEO of the Thanksgiving Coffee Company. He also created Songbird Coffee, which is perhaps the only
certified shade grown coffee in the marketplace. Also with us is Jeffrey Parrish and he's a
conservation or an anthropologist. He's with the Nature Conservancy and the Wings of America
Program and he's written extensively on coffee and coffee growing in shade grown coffee.
And finally David Griswald, who is the president and founder of Sustainable Harvest Coffee Company,
which imports coffee. So Eric Holst from the Rainforest Alliance, I'd like to start with you.
What is shade grown coffee and how is it different from any other coffee that all of us drink?
Well, growing of coffee under shade is the traditional manner that coffee has been grown through
centuries and the reason it's so much attention on that concept right now is because in the last
25 years or so there's been an emphasis on growing coffee in another way which is called
Technified or commercial coffee growing where shade is removed from the coffee farm, resulting in
all sorts of environmental side effects and the excessive use of chemicals or fertilizer and
pesticide. So what the conservation community is interested in doing is promoting this traditional
system of coffee growing which is really more environmentally benign. So in brief, there was a time
when coffee began to be sold extensively when the coffee grower grew the coffee bush underneath
the forest trees that were already there. He cleaned out the brush and planted the bush.
Exactly. And what's now happening is you describe it is that in order to increase yields or whatever
the trees are coming down and the bushes are remaining so what we're seeing is coffee grown on
open land that used to be forested. Exactly. Jeffrey Parish, what is the ornithological and more
importantly the general ecological significance of this shift to growing more and more coffee
out in the open rather than under trees? Right. What we've seen with the loss of shade over
the coffee plants is not only some environmental impact in terms of the increased use of pesticides
and therefore chemical contaminants in the environment but we've seen a huge reduction in biodiversity
or more specifically the number of species of plant and animals that normally can occur in a
shade grown plantation because the shade grown plantation is very much like a forest habitat.
So you will see reductions in the numbers of bird species, the numbers of different sorts of
mammals, everything from rodents to monkeys. Then you can see reductions in all other types of
plants and animals as well. So it's really what we're seeing as a reduction in biodiversity
from those plantations. And this is occurring because lands that used to be forests with coffee
growing underneath are now coffee fields. Exactly. They really shift from a forest like habitat to one
that's really sort of a low open scrubby habitat which generally harbors a lowered by a lowered
diversity of species and also can't foster or provide habitat for the species that are really threatened.
And presumably increases erosion and everything else that goes with it I suppose. Exactly.
So how extensive is this phenomenon? I'm sure somebody listening is going to say well so what?
Is this how much of this is going on? Is it something that really is of concern globally?
Yeah it is very much of concern globally. What we see is in different countries large proportions
of the coffee that's under cultivation has the shift has already occurred from shade or from the
shade grown coffee to a more dignified coffee cultivation. For example in a Columbia you may see
up to up or above 80 percent of the coffee now grown under sun conditions whereas originally much
of it was grown under the majority was grown under shade conditions. And Costa Rica you're seeing
other similar trends however in some places there's still great refuges of shade grown coffee
and really that's the way we have to look at it as a refuge. For example in El Salvador much of
the coffee but it's still grown by small farmers who depend on the shade as a natural fertilizer
the shade trees as natural fertilizers. And so that takes me to Paul Katsaf who is in the
business of selling and creating a market for songbird coffee a shade grown coffee. How do you
get into this? Suppose I'm a consumer how do I know that like if I want to get shade grown coffee
how do I do it and how have you found it's been to try to create a market for this stuff?
Well you know creating a market doesn't just happen overnight it takes years and years of evolution
of a consciousness. Right now we have we're in 12 years of a consciousness shift in the in consumers
and in the industry about 1985 we had a consciousness that said flavor was and price were the
important things in coffee so the choice the consumer had was between good coffee good tasting
coffee and bad tasting coffee but around 1985 social responsibility relative to the Nicaraguan
situation in the El Salvador human rights situations change made a shift a quantum leaf shift
leaf shift in the way people thought about coffee really some people in 1990 organic coffees
began to be important and today shade coffees are important so we see an evolution or a shift
from product emphasis to issues emphasis. Now David Griswalder in the business of importing coffee
is this shift which Paul has described something that you can make work for you as you import coffee
any of the United States. I can make it work for for my company if consumers start to demand from
their roasters that they purchase certified shade coffee 130 million Americans every day
sip coffee and it seems to be the one decision that you can make in support of saving tropical
forests but people have to ask their roaster or their retailer is it shade coffee and and demand
that it be certified shade by a third party group because that's the only way we can be sure
it's to a coffee for both habitat and for the farmers. So if you import shade coffee which I
gather you do you talk about certification how do you know that it is and how does the certification
program work. As the importers we focus on visiting every single farm we buy from every single
year but in addition to that we use groups like the Rainforest Alliance and their eco case field
who send out technical people in each country in Guatemala Costa Rica and the like who go and visit
the farms and take extensive notes and ask questions and check on the level of chemical use
on the level of shade every issue that's important as this concept is developing so it's actually
independent certifiers that do it. In light of the shift towards sun-grown coffee and a shift
away from shade grown coffee is it fair to say that when I drink a cup of coffee that I've
brewed from stuff I bought off the supermarket shelf I am contributing to the decline in
songbirds in North America. Assuming it's not shade grown coffee. Well I think that the industry
experts are probably the best but generally at this point in time we have to make in us you're making
a decision to buy that shade coffee most of the commercial coffees the I won't name any names
but the ones that are really on the supermarket shelves are likely to be sun coffees and we have to
it really depends on the country where they're coming from and the actual way in which those
beans were grown. I'd like to say that answer the question that you asked by saying yes you
contributing to the demise of habitat and specifically indicator species like birds and where it's
taken 25 years to go from almost total shade grown coffee in the early 70s when I got into the business
of coffee to now where sun is the major way in which coffee is produced and we're at a crossroads
right now and we have figured out a way to get consumers involved in helping us make the change back
to the old traditional method of growing coffee. Okay well this obviously is a vast job of communication
to the consumer and to everybody else so I've asked Kate LaPont to join us she's the chief editor of
Coffee Talk Magazine in Seattle Washington. Kate are you there? Yes I am. My question to you is
if you sell Coffee Talk Magazine you're selling a product to people who are interested enough to
and coffee to buy your magazine. Is the shade coffee story something that that your readers
are interested in? Yeah actually our readers are in the business we're a trade publication
so there are the people that are retailing the shade coffee and the roasters and the retailers.
And what are they telling you? Is this something that works for them?
Something that works. Selling shade coffee is opposed to anything else. Yeah well you know you've
got to have a mix you've got to have the consumers that are coming in and looking for shade coffee.
The way to do that is to educate them on the issues. You know offer them pieces
educating them on shade coffee direct them to websites that are educating them on shade coffee
create the demand for it and then sell it. Well I will just let me just drop in and say that
creating songbird coffee has been an absolute we amazing experience from me as a businessman.
And we're listening now to just for people understand this is Paul Ketsoff from the Thanksgiving
Coffee Company. So how did you do it? Well the American Burning Association came to me and said
we like the history of your company for the last 25 years you've been representing these kinds
of issues and we'd like to work with you on creating a product that could have the the songbird name
and the American Burning Association logo on it and we want to sell this to our
birding members. So we created a package called songbird coffee and we've been selling it
to and making it available to a birding the birding community to wild through wild birds unlimited
bird stores and the response has been totally incredible. Birders love birds there's a passion
there that is as spectacular as the passion for fine coffee. Okay combination of the two has been
a wonderful thing for the I believe for the birds. In our final minute that's left Jeffrey
Parrish as a conservation or an ophthalmologist are we talking about stopping the decline of forests
by preserving those that are left in the coffee business or is there any possibility of creating
so much demand that actually some of these forests could be replaced. Nutri is planted in conjunction
with a coffee culture. Right I think probably the greatest progress that we make with by the
encouragement of shade coffee is through the certification processes and increasing the money
that these farmers are receiving. I don't I wish and I hope that we can can create such a
demand that the entire world only wants to consume shade grown coffee. I think the
we do run that risk of increasing demand such that coffee producers have to continue to
continually increase their production and which is one of the factors that encourage the
conversion from shade to sun coffee. What we can do and something that I know that eco-ok that
rainforest alliance we're thinking about is looking to the reforestation of some of the
sun coffee plantations and so that would be an alternative to continually manipulating the
understory of existing pristine rainforest. Okay well I'm afraid our time is up. My guests have
been Eric Holst from the Rainforest Alliance and Environmental Organization Paul Katsoff from
the Thanksgiving Coffee Company Jeffrey Parrish Conservation Ornithologist with Wings of the
America program and David Griswald who is the founder of Sustainable Harvest Coffee Company.
We've been talking green our number is 1-888-49 green and I'm your host Peter Burley.
Everything we do has an impact on the environment even drinking coffee but we could make choices that
lighten our impact on the earth and singers Kim and Reggie Harris teamed up with a duo called
Magpie. Their song we belong to the earth says we've got to make choices that will make things
better for our kids.
We belong to the earth.
We belong to the earth.
We belong to us.
We belong to her.
A strand in a web or we.
A strand in a web I believe.
To own it we cannot dare to dream.
It's a web that we didn't we.
It's a web that we didn't we.
We belong to the earth.
We belong to the earth.
It's not that she belongs to us.
It's we belong to her.
A strand in wind and in rain is a seed of what will be.
It awakens the power that goes down below.
It causes through you and through me.
We belong to the earth.
We belong to the earth.
It's not that she belongs to us.
It's we belong to her.
It's we belong to her.
Kim and Reggie Harris with the duo Magpie singing we belong to the earth.
It's from their album spoken in love on long tail records.
Thanks for being with us on this week's Environment Show.
I'm Peter Burley.
Before you drink that next cup of coffee buy a cassette copy of the program called 1888 49 Green and ask for show number 397.
The Environment Show is a presentation of national productions which is solely responsible for its content.
Dr. Alan Chartock is the executive producer.
Thomas Lale is producer and Stephanie Goysman is the associate producer.
The Environment Show is made possible by the W. W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Turner Foundation, the J. M. Kaplan Fund and the Packard Foundation.
Also, Heming's Motor News, the monthly Bible of the collector car hobby, 1-800-CAR-HRE.
So long and join us next week for the Environment Show.