New Books In Environmental Studies

Is life without coffee possible? Before you answer, first admit that you know almost nothing about the plant that you depend on to deliver you conscious into your day. You will learn from Jeff Koehler’s wide-ranging history Where the Wild Coffee Grows: The Untold Story of Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Ethiopia to Your Cup (Bloomsbury, 2017) that the true origin of coffee is the cloud forest in the Kafa highlands of southwest Ethiopia, where it is a wild-growing, shade-loving tree. How Caffea arabica migrated first to the Arabian Peninsula (which accounts for its being incorrectly named arabica instead of ethiopica), then traveled further to Brazil, Indonesia, Kenya, and beyond, is a fascinating tale. This local plant becomes a global necessity; a tropical variety evolves into the cash crop of Central America, a monoculture of short plants crowded into straight rows. But on its home ground, coffee doesn’t play by these rules. Ethiopians consume 50 percent of their production domestically. “Coffee is our bre