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Use your amazing market power to save wildlife habitat!
above, in a photo by Ellen Griej, a couple of people walk in a shade coffee plantation. The coffee plants are the understory, note the big trees growing among them to provide shade. This coffee plantation is in Veracruz, Mexico. The big trees offer foraging habitat for songbirds and other wildlife. Studies have shown that many of the migratory birds that fill the North American forest with song each spring actually winter on coffee plantations.
Above is my 14 x 18 Drink only Shade Coffee poster, which shows some birds of the Northwest that depend at least partly on shade coffee plantations for their wintering habitat. Note the Western Tanager on the top right.
Sun coffee in Costa Rica, with special thanks to Audubon Magazine
The other, new, way of growing coffee, developed in the 1970's, is "sun coffee." In a sun coffee plantation, the coffee plants grow in the open, with no trees at all to shade them. There is barely a place for a bird to land on a sun coffee plantation, although I'm sure some birds can use them in some way. It's amazing how Indigo Buntings have learned to use corn fields in Illinois. There are also intergrades, in between full-shade coffee and full-sun coffee, where the coffee plants are shaded sparsely by shade trees or where they are shaded by non-native trees such as Eucalyptus that are not as valuable as native trees to wildlife.
Below see the tool I use to help me drink only shade coffee, but still save money over buying coffee at a coffee shop, where I can't be sure some of the coffee being served isn't from a sun coffee plantation.
Here is a shot of my trusty Stanley, which I fill with shade coffee from Tony's of Bellingham coffee; or coffee from Poverty Bay of DesMoines, WA (see sign below); or coffee from Thanksgiving Coffee of Ft.Bragg, CA which will tell you exactly which shade farm produced your coffee; or Cafe Mam of Eugene OR which works with some Mayan collectives in Chiapas; or Starbuck's informatively-packaged Shade Coffee which benefits the environmentally-critical Triunfo region in Mexico; or some of the estate coffees Starbucks sells; or most Cafe Appassionato Coffee; or Cafe Ladro of Mexico which sells mostly to businesses; as well as other excellent shade coffees that I may have forgotten to mention.
Here's a sign in Seahurst (?) Park where the local shade coffee company puts it all out their in their signage: Good going, Poverty Bay!
Certification
I attended a recent seminar put on by the Northwest Shade Coffee Campaign at which Russell Greenberg, the scientist who first alerted the world to the importance of shade coffee, called for a pro-certification stand by the shade coffee movement.
Many of the coffees I just mentioned are not certified, but the companies involved vouch for their coffees, and activists generally believe them.
Greenberg argued, however, that only a certification system like the one that exists for organic foods can really work in the long run. Otherwise, he points out, companies will simply make meaningless claims about their coffee if & when shade coffee becomes popular. Greenberg expressed a lot of skepiticism about claims being made currently, and I'm not quoting him but I seem to remember names like Equal Exchange & Trader Joe's. These companies apparently are not forthcoming about the shade status of their coffee or in the latter case where it's even from. Greenberg was also highly critical of Whole Foods, which pushes organic coffee but rejects the shade coffee idea apparently on principle.
Shade trumps Organic
For songbirds however, shade coffee trumps organic: If you want to help the birds, inorganic shade coffee is much better than organic sun coffee, and that point doesn't seem to ever be disputed by the ornithologists in the business. The birds can live with some pesticides and fertilizer a whole lot better than they can live with no trees.