CoffeeLab: Stories about Coffee -- April 30, 5:30 pm

Project GreenLab Discussion Series

Wednesday, April 30, 5:30 pm, Conant 459
Pizza, soft drinks, cookies and Nicaraguan coffee!

"Without my morning coffee I'm just like a dried up piece of roast goat."   

-- Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)

The following is from an announcement posted by BSU chemistry professor Dr. Ed Brush, who is the organizer of the GreenLab Discussion Series.

Come to CoffeeLab event to find out the real identity of this mad scientist (hint: local coffee nerds may already know) and what he has to say about FrankenCoffee.

Our final GreenLab guest speaker for the semester will be Dr. James Hayes-Bohanan of the BSU Geography Department, coordinator of Project EarthView, and our campus and regional Coffee Maven. Dr. Hayes-Bohanan’s coffee obsession began when he started to understand how the fair-trade movement was helping to improve the lives of farm families who work very hard to produce fine coffees and who earn very little for their efforts. He has taken students to the coffee lands of Nicaragua, and has also visited coffee lands in Guatemala and Brazil. His coffee index page (below) is now the gateway to all of his coffee endeavors, from the romantic and the divine to the culinary and the commercial.

We will also be treated to samples of fresh-roasted Nicaraguan coffee!  Dr. Hayes-Bohanan’s presentation will lead to a future discussion on caffeine, where it’s found naturally, and why its appearing in foods that target kids.

Coffee Page: http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/coffee/index.html       

Nicaragua Study Tour Page:     http://webhost.bridgew.edu/jhayesboh/coffee/matagalpa.html

Following the GreenLab discussion participants are invited to visit the BSU Observatory for their weekly viewing of the night skies.

The Project GreenLab discussion series focuses on developing a better understanding of the role of chemicals in our daily lives. These discussions are open to the BSU campus community, and to the general public.

The mission of Project GreenLab is to bring the Principles of Green Chemistry into research, curriculum development and outreach education. Project GreenLab is an outreach initiative of the Bridgewater State University Center for the Advancement of STEM Education (CASE).

Meaningful Seal

My favorite librarian and I have been reading Unfamiliar Fishes, a surprising book by humorist and public-radio personality Sarah Vowell. The pleasant surprise of the book is Vowell's caliber as a scholar and historian of colonialism -- particularly colonialism as it relates to religion. The unpleasant surprise is the hubris and audacity described on just about every page of the book.

As Pam read a passage from the middle of the book today, I was actually startled by a level of audacity that was surprising, even in the context of this sordid tale of impure puritans abroad. Act 16:9, Vowell explains, was cited by the New Englander conquistadors of Hawaii as an excuse to Christianize the islands, just as their forebears had convinced themselves that Native Americans had invited them to the shores of Massachusetts.

As Vowell points out -- and as Pam already knew -- this delusion is immortalized in the seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which served as the first seal of our adopted state. In mid-conquest, the words "Come over and help us" were put in the mouth of the conquered. Nothing illustrates American exceptionalism better than this. If colonization was both ordained by God and desired by the colonized, it is very difficult to think critically about America as just another member of the community of nations.

Ruby Exposed

Image: George McLean

Ruby was a glorious red-tail hawk that was celebrated in the city of Cambridge, one of a nesting pair with many human admirers. A week ago, however, Ruby was found at the base of the nest she shared with Buzz, having succumbed to the effects of rat poison. A half century after Rachel Carson warned of the effects of pesticides -- particularly on top predators -- the use of poisons remains surprisingly unregulated.

The environmental concerns surrounding the management of pests in urban settings are as complex as they are in agriculture, but it is no less important to address them more seriously. Charismatic megafauna such as hawks and eagles draw attention to risks that are much broader, whether they relate to low-dose chronic exposures as detailed in Silent Spring or in high-dose acute exposures brought on by the careless use of rat traps by restaurants.



Ruby was found under the tree in which she had been nesting at the Fresh Pond Mall (which seems to be more "mall" than "fresh" or "pond") in Cambridge. It is perhaps surprising that although she was nesting in a built-up area, the poisoning seems to have occurred in the open space of the Mount Auburn Cemetery a half-mile to the south.

Nuts Have a Geography, Too

Some people assume that coffee is the only commodity that has my attention, and it is true that I have more than a passing interest in the beverage, and especially in the lands and peoples responsible for the bean that is the second-most traded commodity in the world (oil being the first).

I use geography to teach about coffee and coffee to teach about geography, though, and many of the lessons of this agricultural commodity are applicable to many others. I am very proud that my daughter recognized this recently, when she excitedly shared


The Luckiest Nut in the World from Emily James on Vimeo.

Just as a coffee bean is not a bean, a peanut is not a nut, nor is a ground nut. We learn from this film that at one time, ground nuts were the leading export of the country of Senegal. As Paloma rightly concluded, an economy dependent on a food staple that she had never heard of was probably not a very prosperous economy.

This brilliant and engaging little film deftly describes the ways in which dependence on commodities keeps some countries at the periphery of the world economy indefinitely, and how the manipulation of the rules that govern trade reinforce the core-periphery dichotomy.

The entire tale is told from the point of view of an all-American peanut, a self-reflective character that gradually comes to understand his position of privilege relative to the ground nuts, cashews, and Brazil nuts of Senegal, Mozambique, and Bolivia, respectively. (Most Brazil nuts grow in Bolivia! Who knew?)

In its very funny way, this film provides an education in political economy over the space of a typical sit-com episode. Emily James uses this jaunty peanut to explain the many ways in which the system that looks like a free-trade, even playing field is actually manipulated in important ways, each to the disadvantage of farmers in developing countries. Understanding the prevalence of distorted markets is the first step toward fairness in trade.

Elsewhere on this blog, I have mentioned three other important -- and generally entertaining resources for learning more. Most entertaining and relevant, perhaps, is King Corn, which describes the incredibly contrived market in corn. Policies that make corn profitable for U.S. farmers and cheap for U.S. consumers are not just bad for the federal budget; they make life difficult for farmers around the world.

In my Cups and Summits post, I describe the other two films -- Black Gold and The Girl in the Cafe -- that tell other aspects of the story. Though one is a documentary and the other a feature film, both provide behind-the-scenes looks into the process that makes "free trade" agreements anything but free.

Ideologies of Destruction

Which has killed more Texans: Muslim extremism or libertarianism?

Photo: LM Otero/AP

This week marked the one-year anniversary of two deadly bombings, both ultimately the result of deadly ideologies. The best-known of these was the cowardly detonation of two home-made devices at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three and grievously injuring many more. As with most people in my region, I was stunned and offended, have followed the case closely, and have contributed to the fund for victims.

Two days after the bombing in Boston, a much larger explosion took place in the town of West, Texas (located in central Texas). As with any story from Texas, Wade Goodwyn best tells the story of the explosion and of the rollercoaster year that followed. Nearly 20 years after Timothy McVeigh destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City with 500 pounds of ammonium nitrate, Don and Wanda Adair stored 100 times that amount of the bomb-making material in a wooden shed. As his report makes clear, ideology may prevent the prevention of future such disasters. Even residents of the town victimized by the explosion are loathe to blame the couple who put them at risk.

Back in Boston, the anniversary of the West explosion was recognized in a report on Here & Now that asked What's Being Done to Prevent Another Fertilizer Plant Explosion? Sadly, the answer is very little. Perhaps if the Adairs were from another religion, the response would have been more decisive, but free-market fetishism continues to thrive, and will continue to kill.

April, by the way, is a very tough month for ammonium nitrate explosions in Texas and Oklahoma:

April 16, 1947: Texas City, Texas -- 581 killed, including most of the fire department
April 19, 1985: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma -- 168 killed, including most of a preschool
April 17, 2013: West, Texas -- 15 killed, including 13 firefighters

Economic Baggage

For almost as long as I have been a geographer, I have asserted that the border between Mexico and the United States is the steepest in the world in economic terms. Mexico is figuratively far from the poorest country on earth, but it is literally very near one of the richest. As I've written in Human Sieve and elsewhere on this blog, the human cost of this disparity is enormous.

From my favorite librarian I learned that at least one border is steeper, and the reality of life at that border -- especially for women -- is difficult to believe. Spain meets Africa directly in two Moroccan port cities -- Ceuta and Melilla -- exclaves that are on the African continent but legally part of the European Union. It is, in fact, EU security rules that have created an unthinkable level of despair on the edges of the town of Melilla.



As detailed in Suzanne Daley's excellent reporting in the New York Times, Melilla is quite literally a Borderline Where Women Bear the Weight. Morocco is not the poorest country in Africa, nor is Spain the richest country in Europe, but the income disparity between the two is about twenty-fold -- a disparity about five times greater than the gap between Mexico and the United States.

Because a loophole in the customs rules provides for a tax exemption for any cargo than can plausibly be considered "luggage" and parcels up to 100 kilograms are considered to meet that criterion, carrying large parcels across the border, pretending it is luggage, is the only viable employment for many Melillans.

Because jurisdictions between private and official security forces in the two countries are muddled, no authorities are willing to protect the women who have been pursuing this trade from trampling by men who are turning to this difficult work in greater numbers.

The women of Melilla compete with each other and with men for the opportunity to be the world's most oppressed baggage handlers.

Love Canal Recap

The Mindset List produced each year by the librarians at Beloit College in Wisconsin is a reminder of the gradualness with which one generation fades into another ... and another. The librarians produce the list as a service to fellow academics; otherwise, we fail to notice bits of "common knowledge" that are no longer common. When I was a student, for example, even those who did not know any details about Love Canal knew that it was a very serious situation indeed -- an environmental disaster with serious political ramifications. Those two words could be invoked almost like a weapon, to indicate a very grave situation.

A few years ago, I realized that the phrase had no meaning at all for most students, and eventually realized that a whole host of powerful phrases has lost their power -- from "Iran hostage" to "Sandinista" to "Silent Spring" to "Population Bomb." As with so many things, we Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) are getting special attention in terms of lost cultural touchstones -- in the form of the Mindset List itself and in the form of a wonderful new video series from the New York Times. The Retro Report is a series of more than thirty (so far) short videos that revisit stories from the past -- many of them stories more likely to be remembered by Boomers than by our students or children.

The video about Love Canal is both a thorough introduction and a very interesting update of this pivotal story in the environmental history of the United States. My 2011 Ditching EPA post makes the case for the continued relevance of the Love Canal debacle.

Update: May 14, 2017

Complaints about the EPA are as old as the EPA itself, as some folks have found it expensive or inconvenient. As I write today, however, the possibility of it being disbanded is a real one for the first time.

It is worth remembering that before the EPA, it was perfectly legal to store this in a residential neighborhood.

Learn more from the Love Canal page at SUNY-Geneseo.

Tale of Two Slopes

USLE: A=R•K•LS•C•P

This handful of letters ruled my life during my last year of graduate school. I used them in thousands of calculations as I tried to understand what was causing high rates of reservoir sedimentation in recreational lakes north of Cincinnati.

As soil nerds will recall, the USLE is a model for estimating soil erosion from slopes. Specifically, it estimates sheet and rill erosion, a combination of what is removed by water flowing in thin layers over a surface and water concentrating into small channels, known as rills.

An explanation of the formula is at the end of this post, along with the answer to sedimentation question. First, however, I need to describe the two slopes of this tale, both of which I noticed on campuses in the past couple days.

The first is just across the street from my office, where the front of our campus center has recently been renovated (environmental side note -- all renovation work in our campus center takes a long time because it was build in the heyday of asbestos-based construction). The project is laudable for the considerable improvement in ADA accessibility, though this remains limited by an inferior elevator. All new construction on our campus is LEED certified, and though I have not checked I assume that major renovations are as well. If it is, the project reveals a couple of limitations of the certification, and certainly reveals how far our campus has to go in sustainability. At least two new televisions were installed in the renovated space, and seem always to be broadcasting to nobody in particular.

And then there is this slope:

It might be legal -- I see things like this all the time -- but it is certainly not appropriate. Exposed soil is subject to removal by falling rain and transportation by flowing water. In regions with sensitive waterways -- and southeastern Massachusetts is certainly such a region -- the protection of soil during and after construction is an easy way to protect water resources. Despite heavy investment in wetlands protection through hundreds of conservation commissions, Massachusetts does not require erosion protection that has become routine in places like Maryland, which values the Beautiful Swimmers of the Chesapeake Bay.

On Friday, I visited another area of new construction -- the Glover School in Marblehead -- and found much more appropriate treatment. Both a geotextile cover and a silt fence are in place.

Admittedly, this slope is steeper and needs more protection, but it is clear that the lesser slope at BSU is losing soil to local streams, and should really be armored in a similar way, even if such a step is not required by law.

Back to the Forumla

As promised, some details on the USLE formula itself:

A=R•K•LS•C•P

The Universal Soil-Loss Equation is a statistical model that originally was developed to help farmers make decisions about soil protection. It is based on copious amounts of data correlating soil loss with variations in five factors. Each of the factors is calculated and the results multiplied together to estimate "actual" erosion. This is then compared to the "tolerable" erosion, or the amount that a specific kind of soil can lose without diminishing soil fertility. Thousands of soil types have been identified in the United States alone -- they are known as soil series.

R -- Rainfall intensity is a measure of the erosive work that can be done by falling rain. It is calculated for an area on the basis of the most intense rainfall events of a typical year. A few episodes of intense rainfall can be much more significant than many days of gently falling rain. Climate change may result in increasing R values, resulting in greater soil erosion in some places.

K -- The erodibility constant for each soil series is based on its texture (that is, particle-size distribution) and structure (specific organization of particles). Some soils simply wash away more readily than others.

LS -- The length-slope factor was the most difficult for me to calculate for my thesis, because it reflects the tendency of water to accelerate as it flows downhill. This effect involves both the distance traveled and the angle of the slope, but the relationship between the two is not linear.

C - The crop factor accounts for the shape, size, spacing, and timing of plant structures. Data are extensive on common crops such as wheat and corn, but the protective effect of vegetation can also be estimated for any kind of plant cover, from golf-course grass to oak forests. A common misconception is that roots provide the main protective effects for soil; in reality the ability of leaves to intercept falling rain is much more important. Water dripping or even misting from below a leaf canopy is usually far less erosive than water drops that have reached a given size and velocity as free-falling rain.

P - The practices factor accounts for things that a farmer can do deliberately to slow down erosion, such as plowing parallel to contours, spreading straw on the ground after harvests, or building small berms to interrupt the flow of water. Many of these can be modified for construction contexts.

And back to the reservoirs

In the case of the reservoirs I was studying, it turned out that the watersheds were being managed properly to minimize erosion from the time of reservoir construction through the time of our study, and presumably to this day. Unfortunately, erosion rates were quite high anyway, because of previous generations of destructive agricultural practices. Put simply, pigs had been allowed to overgraze in the upper portions of the watershed, and had caused tremendous erosion in the early 20th century. Much of that soil was stored temporarily in lower portions of the watershed, and good forest management was actually causing it to be released during the period of our study. This was as ironic and unfair as it was inevitable, and we  were able to offer reservoir managers very few ideas for protecting their investments.

Crop Cash

"We are faced with two possible futures. One is a diversity of crops, of cultures, and of cuisines that can inhabit ecosystems sustainably and produce healthy food for urban centers. The other is long-distance food from nowhere, monocultural systems that aren't sustainable, and simplified diet, especially for the poor."

This quote from University of Toronto geographer Harriet Friedmann forms pivot point in a remarkable book by Frederick Kaufman. I found Bet the Farm while exploring the literature on models of trade in food with an advanced student of fair trade and other certifications.

Kaufman explores global food markets from the pizza box outward, first detailing the incredible scale and rapid growth of global pizza, particularly the pizza emerging from a small handful of transnational companies. The incredible efficiency of the industry justifies his choice of pizza as the major exemplar of his subtitle: How Food Stopped Being Food -- he uses the word "widget" far more than one would like in a food book!

One of the questions Kaufman explores is whether Friedmann is correct to assert that food choices are necessarily binary. If they are, the university at which I teach captures the dichotomy perfectly. What we teach in the classrooms and tout in our brochures is undermined in the hallways.

The need for a different path may be intellectually compelling, but the logic of simplistic food is difficult to resist in practice. Here a bank of high-fructose snackage sits available 24/7, directly behind a space built for a real-food cafe that was proposed, encouraged, and ultimately rejected. Although many students, faculty, and staff were behind a better path, Pepsi has been ready with cash and for now, that speaks louder.

Crash Landing

I am part of a national, online community that is pushing back against high-stakes testing and the rapid rollout of the Common Core. This morning a member from California shared the story I have copied below.

This is a sign of things to come. Computers crash because of the way Bill Gates approaches software, and he has now bought his way into the school reform movement.

My kindergarteners had their standardized computerized test today. 

There were over 100 questions. Answers were selected by drop and drag with a trackpad, no mouse is available. One class took five hours to finish. Kids crying in 4 of 5 classes. Multiple computer crashes ("okay, you just sit right there while we fix it! Don't talk to anyone!"). Kids sitting for half hour with volume off on headsets but not saying anything. Kids accidentally swapping tangled headsets and not even noticing what they heard had nothing to do with what they saw on the screen. Kids having to solve 8+6 when the answer choices are 0-9 and having to DRAG AND DROP first a 1 then a 4 to form a 14. Some questions where it was only necessary to click an answer but the objects were movable (for no reason). No verbal explanation that you must click the little speaker square to hear the instructions. To go to the next question, one clicks "next" in lower right-hand corner.....which is also where the pop-up menu comes up to take you to other programs or shut down, so about many shut-downs or kids winding up in a completely different program.

If this is not what you want for your kids and grandkids, you'd better start making some noise. Ten years ago we would've thought this would be literally impossible.

The movement demonizes teachers, and conveniently offers this alternative. It is not just about building wealth for Bill Gates (the J.D. Rockefeller of computing has plenty of other ways to extort money), but that is one of its outcomes.

Rocketship charter schools get kids cubicle-ready.