Tea Time

At this week's Intersessional Meeting of the FAO Intergovernmental Group on Tea in Washington, the hotel provides hot water and cups, and the "captains of tea" from all over the tea-growing world bring samples.

I had the great privilege of joining this two-day meeting as part of my sabbatical, during which I am working on a two-volume reference book entitled Geography of Coffee & Tea for ABC-CLIO, publishers. I have a lot to learn about the geography of coffee and even more to learn about the geography of tea.

Having no diplomatic credentials, I was very grateful to be admitted to the meeting as an observer, and gratified to be included in one of the Working Group on Climate Change, whose official members are shown above at our (covered) poolside meeting. I was able to participate as a geographer with this group of top tea researchers from Sri Lanka, India, and Kenya (shown left to right).

We developed a report (based on our chair's discussion paper) that will guide the FAO-IGG on tea as it prepares to help tea growers around the world adapt to climate change. Building on the PRECIS regional climate model from the British Hadley Centre. Climate change and tea production are spatially quite variable, and climate varies temporally as well. Because a given cultivar of tea remains in place for 40 years or more, climate adaptation means mapping the best tea cultivars for future conditions. We have taken a small step toward using GIS to provide decision support for farmers adapting to change.

I had been doing most of my recent writing on the teas of Sri Lanka, so I was delighted to meet quite a few Sri Lankans, and to ask directly about the uses of :"Ceylon" and "Sri Lanka." The colonial name (Ceylon) of the country had so much global recognition that it is still used to refer to the tea, even though the country itself has reverted to its pre-colonial name (Sri Lanka).

Map & legend:
Almar Teas

As I was discussing this, Sri Lanka's trade minister invited me to a tea seminar and tasting later in the week, to hosted by the only ambassador at our meeting, the Hon. Jaliya Wickramasuriya. The event was both informative and enjoyable.

We learned about the trade in Ceylon tea, the care that is taken with protecting its reputation, and its importance to the Sri Lankan economy. We also learned about Walter's Bay, a U.S. company that maintains as much of the tea commodity chain as possible inside of Sri Lanka.This is a cost-effective way to promote social sustainability in tea processing.

At the end, we were treated to a tasting that included all of the Sri Lanka's regional appellations.

2018 Updates: I eventually had to abandon the encyclopedia project -- a semester off from teaching was not nearly enough time to complete it. But the experience did expand my beverage horizons and let to a new colloquium on tea and climate change.

The group I met with in D.C. continued its work, and though it took a different shape than originally envisioned, it has led to a comprehensive report on climate change in the tea industry, which includes thoughtful ideas on both cause and effect.

The Road (?) to Belmopan

Always looking ahead to the next adventure when I should be finishing the current one, I have started looking at maps that will help us to plan our Geography of Chocolate course (actually called Mayan Gold) in Belize next year. When doing quick look-ups of travel distances online, I was surprised that it could take so long to get around in what I thought of as a fairly small country.

As I investigated further, I was reminded of the New England adage -- often repeated with a fake-Maine accent like the Pepperidge Farm man -- that "You can't get there from here."

Click the image below to see that Mapquest's error message is almost identical to our regional cliche, even though it appears next to a clearly-marked highway joining two small towns less than 20 miles apart.

Google Maps proved a bit more intrepid -- if software can be said to have an adventurous spirit -- when I queried the same trip. Apparently avoiding a washed-out bridge on the Western Highway, it suggested the use of remote, unimproved roads requiring five hours to cover 120 miles.

It is a good reminder of the value of a healthy dose of skepticism and solid geographic skills, even in an age when computers seem to have all the answers. A new colleague at ISIS (where we will be teaching, in San Ignacio) was able to confirm that the direct route actually is open. Important bridges are sometimes lost, such as the 2008 washout of the Kendal Bridge in southern Belize in Tropical Storm Arthur, and apparently the major databases have erroneous information about a lost bridge between Belmopan and San Ignacio.

Many of our BSU colleagues and students have visited Belize for study or service trips, and we have met quite a few educators and students from Belize as part of several partnerships in the country. We are very much looking forward to our chance to get to know the country formerly known as British Honduras. We love quiet adventures, so a country whose three largest cities have barely 100,000 residents between them is quite attractive. Belmopan is, in fact, among the smallest capital cities in the world. Only the capitals of Vatican City and about three dozen island nations and dependencies have smaller capitals.

Ironically, one of the major bonuses of visiting Belize will be the chance to visit a site in Guatemala that we missed on our 2008 coffee trip there. Many people suggested a "side trip" to the Maya ruins at Tikal -- which would have required a flight or a truly inordinate amount of bus travel. From our digs (no pun intended) in San Ignacio, however, this will be a brief jaunt.

Mainly, however, we look forward to meeting our students and traveling with them to the cacaolands of the south, and as time allows, exploring the Cayo district, which includes Mayan ruins of its own at Xunantunich.

And for all of this, the Hawksworth Bridge will ensure that we really can "get there from here!"

Sortin' for Dunkin'

From my travels to the coffeelands of Nicaragua, I have learned that there is a market for every bean. From planting to pruning to harvest, and through the many stages of drying, milling, and roasting, coffee beans in are sorted.

Several years ago, I was with students on a sorting area at Selva Negra when a student asked what would happen to the rejected beans. "Dunkin' Donuts" was he answer, only half in jest. This came to mind while I was hand-milling pergamino coffee that was from Finca Mil Flores in Nicaragua. Among the many excellent beans, I noticed one inferior bean, enough to ruin a batch -- or to start a perfectly normal batch at DD.

Geography of Chocolate

When I was shown these cacao husks being composted on a small farm in Nicaragua, I could not help but admire the surprising variety of colors. I was visiting the farm with students as part of my 2010 Geography of Coffee study tour in Jinotega and Matagalpa. Although Coffea arabica and Theobroma cacao are not close botanical relatives, the geography of chocolate is remarkably similar to that of cacao.

All of my visits to Nicaragua have included Castillo Cacao, an artisanal factory in Matagalpa, and as the cultivation of cacao (from which chocolate is made) continues to expand in Nicaragua's coffeelands, we intend to make cacao farms a regular part of the program with Matagalpa Tours, as we will in January 2013.

And just as my interest in the geography of coffee has now led me to work on the geography of tea, librarian Pamela Hayes-Bohanan and I have now been invited to teach an entire course on the geography of chocolate at the Institute for Sustainable International Study in Cayo, Belize. Our two-week class -- Mayan Gold -- will combine Pam's expertise on Mayan culture with my growing understanding of the global trade in chocolate and cacao (the food and the crop, respectively), and is available for easily transferred credits.

Interested students can contact me for details at jhayesboh@bridgew.edu, or contact ISIS directly.

Under the Skywalk

Late-afternoon sun illuminates the supports for the old railroad bridge that has been transformed
into the Walkway Over the Hudson.

Last Thursday was a perfect day to enjoy exploring sites both new and familiar -- a wonderful afternoon and evening spent about halfway between our home and a very important errand in Toronto.

The first part of the journey was zooming along the familiar Massachusetts Turnpike (the driveway of my summer, as it turns out), exiting a bit earlier than usual to take I-84 into western Connecticut. Because I'm writing this, it is apparent that we survived passage through Hartford. In my experience, Hartford is a scary pocket of daredevil driving in Connecticut, which has by far the best driving conditions in southern New England. (This is like having the best swimming conditions in Hell, but I digress from my digression.)

As part of our Bridgewaters Project (the lifelong pursuit of places sharing the name of our adopted hometown), we wandered off of I-84, through horse country and into the bucolic (though recently somewhat sordid) village of Bridgewater, Connecticut (population: 1,824).

After a wonderfully surprising coffee-shop visit along Route 9, we came to the real highlight of our evening -- a visit with our friend Jeff Anzevino, a friend from our undergraduate days as geography students at UMBC. The Hudson River has captivated Jeff, who works as a planner for Scenic Hudson by day, sleeps in a cozy home high above the river by night, and takes masterful photos of its tugboats in between. Jeff lives about halfway between our home and the homes of our extended families, allowing us sporadic visits through which he has passed along his passion for this river.

On this particular visit, we trawled from bank to bank with Jeff and a fellow river booster, enjoying the fish, the trains, and the unique human and physical geography of the river and shoreline in the vicinity of Highland and Poughkeepsie. The most remarkable part of that view is the Walkway Over the Hudson, the result of  successful collaboration among countless visionaries in the region, Jeff not least among them. The abandoned railroad bridge whose pier is shown above now supports one of the world's highest and longest pedestrian bridges, a walkway that allows pedestrians to enjoy a view from the sky above a remarkable river. Moreover, the bridge greatly increases the ability of people to commute by bicycle, so that many people can now get across the river, onto a train, and into New York City or Albany without ever getting in an automobile. (Read more about the importance of this in my How We Ride post.)

The bridge is visible in the background of this somewhat hazy photograph, along with a vessel that is itself another important facet of the river's story. Jeff's avocation as a musician connects him to a much more famous champion of this river: Pete Seeger, whose ship the Clearwater has long served -- quite literally -- as a vessel for environmental education along the Hudson. The converted coal ship was being tended at the of of a sailing day when we found it berthed in Poughkeepsie.

I am thankful also to my friend Hilary -- another geographer -- for pointing that proposed hydrofracking -- in the pursuit of supposedly "clean" natural gas -- is a threat to the Hudson River. The Marcellus Shale where fracking is proposed lies mainly outside of the Hudson River Valley. Pete Seeger and the Clearwater have been among those resisting the project. Formal regulatory comments from Scenic Hudson detail some of the specific threats, while Sean Lennon (yes, that Sean Lennon explains the threat to Pennsylvania and New York landscapes, and water supplies in those regions and New York City itself). Nearly 10,000 people have joined Hilary in the No Fracking Way group on Facebook, which continues to work to protect water and land from what would be the equivalent of a slow, massive spill underground.

A few years back -- before I had seen much of it up close -- I enjoyed the stories of the Hudson that begin William Least Heat-Moon's Riverhorse: A Voyage Across America. In some ways, it is like a riparian version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Read more about the Hudson in my Tappan Zee birthday post.

That errand, by the way? We were picking up our kid, who had been on a service trip to China with Me to We, a Canadian youth organization.

Cups and Summits

SPOILER ALERT. This is an article about two terrific films, each of which connects coffee to political economy. My best advice is to watch them (you will not regret it) and then perhaps read what I have to say. That said, in the comments below, I will refrain from giving away the details of the fictional work.

The films discussed are The Girl in the Café (HBO feature film, 2005) and  Black Gold (documentary, 2006). Viewers of both films should watch (and carefully listen) through the end of the closing credits.

For some reason, I learned about the 2005 film The Girl in the Café only recently, during one of my frequent searches for films related to coffee and anything related to coffee shops or to the romantic side of coffee. Kelly Macdonald (Gina -- a young woman, not a girl) and Bill Nighy (Lawrence) bring all this and more to a film that works on many levels, so I am glad finally to have found it.

The first level is a nerd-meets-nerd romantic comedy, heavier on the romance than the comedy, the romance unfolding at an excruciating pace. From a chance meeting in a crowded London café, the May-December couple tip-toed around their mutual attraction until our DVD timer read 54 minutes before the first kiss. By then I was yelling at the screen like that old man next door in It's A Wonderful Life.

As the pair moves toward resolution of the film's romantic tension, a deeper tension emerged, along with the film's real purpose. Lawrence is a British finance official who is part of his country's negotiating team at the 2008 G8 meeting. For the purpose of the film, the meeting was chaired by the United Kingdom but held in Reykjavik. The 2008 meeting was actually held in Scotland, but it was indeed chaired by the UK.

The G8 meetings are gatherings of the heads of state and finance ministers from eight large countries (known as large "economies" for the purposes of those who view the world primarily in economic terms). Since 1975 (when they began as a G6 meeting), these meetings have been a place where a small roomful of heads of state make commitments on finance and trade policy that have profound implications for all the people on the planet. For the past decade or so, the summits have made rhetorical commitments to improvements in the lives of poor people -- promising to reduce the number of childhood deaths related to malnutrition, for example. They are part of a similar cycle of summits in which economic power tends to be consolidated while democratic power becomes increasingly peripheral.

In the film, this is signaled as the couple's romantic getaway passes transitions from the awkward moment with coworkers at the airport to the gradual realization of their arrival in the security bubble. It is at this moment that viewers of another coffee film will begin to notice parallels. As in the 2006 documentary Black Gold, our introduction to the meeting of the most powerful people on the planet is the revelation of the police and military power used to keep ordinary people out of the meeting.

And young Gina's accidental status as an ordinary person inside this extraordinary security bubble becomes the central conflict of the film. As reviewer Alessandra Stanley so aptly describes her role, the young girlfriend is the id of both a member of the negotiating team who usually divides his humanity from his profession and of the screenwriter, who wishes that his film could transform politics in the way that the character he created does within the film.

Clearly, it has not happened yet. And the 2008 presidential election has not changed the behavior of the United States in such settings. In both The Girl and Black Gold, negotiators give lip service to humanitarian goals, while arrogantly insisting that the free-market absolutism will have better results than actual changes improvements in aid, debt, and trade for impoverished countries.

I conclude this post with an example that arrived in this week's mail. Among the varied excerpts in the September issue of Harper's magazine is a piece described as Editing and entitled Brazil Nots. It shows the changes that President Obama's representatives at the June 2012 Rio+20 conference requested to a summit declaration entitled "The Future We Want." Some of the changes are more subtle than others, but all reveal a stronger commitment to ideological purity than to tangible results for the world's poor. (Bold words are additions; strikethroughs are deletions. I have put the entire excerpt in italics)

Eradicating poverty is the greatest global challenge facing the world today and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development. In this regard we are committed to free humanity from extreme poverty and hunger as a matter of urgency.

We recognize that promoting universal access to social services can make an important contribution to consolidating and achieving development gains.

We strongly encourage initiatives at all levels aimed at providing enhancing social protection for all people.

We appeal to invite all States, relevant international organizations, the private sector, and all major groups to enhance their efforts to achieve sustainable changes in consumption and production patterns while creating new economic opportunities and decent work, and securing good enhancing living standards and protection of vulnerable groups.

We reaffirm the urgent need to deepen the reform of the global financial system and architecture based on the principles of equity, sovereign equality, independence, common interest, cooperation and solidarity among all States.

We urge developed countries to undertake significant changes in the lifestyles of their people to move towards a more sustainable future for all.

Each of these paragraphs is from a different part of a 53-page document. A quick perusal of the final draft document suggests that the Obama Administration got some but not all of the changes is requested. Having seen both Black Gold and The Girl in the Café, I can easily envision the negotiators justifying each of these changes, and I would love to see Gina take these characters down!

Ravitch Recants

During the 1990s, Diane Ravitch was a national leader in the charge to "reform" schools through greater emphasis on testing and by fostering competition among schools via free-market schemes known as school choice. To her credit, she has recanted this two-pronged approach. Hear what she has to say about the effect of these "reforms" on education and educators.

The Daily Show

For the past four years, I have been part of a team that has taken Project EarthView to schools, mainly at the middle-school level. We have taken close to 40,000 students -- in small groups -- into our giant, inflatable globe (see videos and the rest of our blog). Students are fascinated, impressed, and engaged in learning when they encounter this unusual learning environment.

But in schools that are in the throes of anguish over standardized testing, we are literally not able to get in the door with this kind of innovative learning. Fear surrounding false, high-stakes metrics of student achievement put such schools on virtual lock-down, with every minute of the day committed to a fruitless pursuit of test scores.

In such an environment, some wonder why many kids turn to disruptive or destructive behaviors. Frankly, I marvel at how many young people do not act out. My own town (and an adjacent town) have literally bulldozed skate parks in an effort to herd kids into more regimented recreation, even in their non-school hours, while systematically removing many forms of self-expression and exploration from the school day. Our local superintendent even considered eliminating social studies altogether, since it was not covered on standardized tests.

I hope that Diane Ravitch is heard, and that the pendulum will swing back from a movement that has been as bipartisan as it has been misguided and destructive.

Espresso Giant

Those who have seen the morning comics page will not be surprised to see that I was delighted with Adam @ Home today. It is the third stop on my morning routine: coffee, kenken, Adam. It is not always about coffee, nor is it always about middle-aged romance, but today it is about both. As such, I have given it a permanent home on my Coffee & Tea Romance page (in the "libido and potions" section), along with an excerpt from the new 50 Shames of Earl Grey (in the "frothy fiction" section).

Coffee for Chemists

By a cosmic coffee coincidence, Javatrekker and aspiring comic Dean Cycon released this video just as I was preparing to address the annual meeting of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers, which was hosted by our BSU chemists last week. I had not worked with this group before, but rightly surmised that this would be a good way to open my presentation. I post it here for the benefit of those NEACT participants who might wish to share it, along some of the other resources I presented that evening.

(Prior to the talk on coffee, I mentioned two other resources that might be of interest to anybody involved in education in New England, especially southern New England. These are the Spellman Museum of Stamps and Postal History, which can put together an educational program on any subject and our own EarthView outreach program.)

As Dean points out in the video itself, of course, the pesticides associated with "conventional coffee" are in reality no laughing matter. Many chemicals we have banned in the United States are routinely used on the coffee -- and other products we import from around the world. In real life, Dean sets an extraordinary example, and I was able to offer the teachers a choice of his No CO2 and Decaf Chiapas coffees. Each of these single-origin selections gave us a chance to discuss some environmental chemistry, related to carbon offsets and caffeine removal, respectively. The byproduct of decaf coffee, by the way, is now marketed as "green coffee extract" by Starbucks -- coffee without the coffee flavor. Gadzooks.

Never mind the debates about whether traces of these nasties make their way into our cups: there is no denying that the barrage of chemicals sprayed on the coffee, sugar, flowers, oranges, and countless other tropical crops have profound effects on the ecosystems and communities from which we extract these bounties. As much fun as I have with coffee as a beverage and teaching tool, I remember that life-and-death questions really do surround its production.

Because the theme of this year's NEACT meeting was green chemistry, I put together an eclectic talk entitled "Greening Coffee: From Red to Green to Brown." That is, I provided a sampling of environmental choices at various stages of coffee production, from the growth of the plant (red berries) through the in-country processing (green coffee) to its roasting and brewing (brown beans or beverage).

This required a very brief overview of the roughly 50 steps from field to cup, which I summarized with the names that are typically used to describe coffee in Nicaragua. On the tree, the fruit is a cherry. Once picked, it is a grape. When peeled, the slimy seed is honey. When dried, it is parchment. When green, it is gold (because it can earn money). When roasted, it is a bean. When brewed, it is coffee.

I also mentioned the parts of the cherry that are separated at various stages, and an online quiz that I created for those who wish to learn these parts. A more advanced quiz teaches the geography of processing -- the locations in which each part of the coffee is typically removed through processing.

I discussed the geographic parameters that determine where coffee can be effectively grown, and I mentioned Coffee & Conservation, a marvelous resource on the relationship between coffee ecology and the habitat of migratory birds. Then, as an antidote to Dean's Mad Scientist, I shared the best example I know of coffee being produced in harmony with its surrounding ecology -- the biodynamic production of my friend Byron, the Poet of Coffee.This video also provides a nice transition from the coffee grower to the importer and roaster, who also have the opportunity to make important decisions about the environmental impacts of the coffee.



An interesting development at the roasting stage is the growing interest in solar roasting, a growing field in which Solar Roast Coffee of Colorado seems to be a leader. As roasting coffee on our campus continues to be an elusive goal, we might actually have an opportunity to do some relevant roof-top research.

I talked about brewing not in terms of environmental impact so much as flavor impact. Flavor is important, however, as brewing coffee properly honors the work of those who have put tremendous care into producing it. Moreover, the more consumers learn to appreciate good coffee, the more likely are farmers to be fairly compensated for their work and talent. Rather than discuss my approach to brewing in detail, I mentioned one brewing method that is favored by industry experts and was invented by a chemist in Springfield, Massachuetts: the Chemex coffeemaker.

And even though most of the audience members were (I presume) going to be spending the night away from their romantic partners, I ended the presentation with Ella Fitzgerald's rendition of the sultry song Black Coffee and reference to the work of Lavazza and others on a different kind of coffee chemistry that is explored in some depth on my (PG-13) Coffee & Tea Romance page.

Vizualization Tools

Many thanks to my friend Gerard -- a librarian and a geographer -- for the article 9 Data Visualization Tools for Librarians and Educators (never mind that librarians are educators). Appearing on the blog of the Online Education Database (OEDb), this recent article is a gateway to nine web sites that provide a number of easy ways to create online visual representations of data. Speed and ease are two common threads, along with great variety and reasonably strong design qualities.

The word cloud above is an example of both speed and ease -- the result of lazily accepting the defaults on a tool called Tagxedo and applying it to this very blog. The result prioritizes some words that recur frequently but are not related to content -- such as my own name and the menu choices that appear on every post (blog, facebook, comments). Just as I wrote this paragraph, I tried the software again, with the intention of seeing whether I could suppress some of the common words. I did not find a way to do that, but the random variation within the algorithm did reduce some of them, generating this more pleasing cloud:

Both clouds do help the reader to learn -- at a glance -- something about this blog.

The "9 Tools" article is not just about word clouds, though. It points to nine different sites, including some tat allow users to create maps, so it will keep me busy for some while.

For expert guidance on envisioning information, I refer readers to Edward Tufte, who has written several beautiful books on the subject. For beginners, I recommend his essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,  available for $7 postpaid. Nobody should teach without having read this essay!