The Ecology of Coffee

Most mornings, of course, you won’t notice any of these things, because you’re saving your brain for classes and because you haven’t had your coffee yet. Coffee is another interesting environmental story. St. Olaf students drink a lot of it, and faculty like me may drink even more. It’s a performance drug, and it’s part of America’s drug culture. Because of its caffeine content, it will help you stay awake in your classes. It might even stimulate your brain cells to think about the ecological design of campus coffee. We don’t grow coffee on campus, so those of us who drink coffee have our primary social, economic and ecological impacts elsewhere.

Traditionally, coffee has been mainly grown in the mountain forests of Central America and Africa, where it’s intercropped among larger trees. But a lot of coffee these days is grown on plantations in full sun, because such plantations involve lower labor costs. These plantations have lots of effects. Workers in countries like Costa Rica and Honduras don’t get paid much. And the loss of shade trees affects not just the coffee plants, but migratory birds. Your morning coffee affects not just your nervous system, not just workers in Central America, not just the dimensions of international trade, but the birds that show up in Minnesota in the Spring.

Responding to these impacts, some companies have begun to offer fair-trade, shade-grown coffee, and St. Olaf offers that coffee in our cafeteria and Cage and Lion’s Pause. If you drink coffee in Stav Hall, you drink Peace Coffee. That’s because Katie Harrod (`03) was interested in ecological design, and she got students in the Environmental Coalition into conversations with our foodservice, which thought that good coffee was a good idea.