Scale: Coffee's Place in the Universe

Scale is an important concept in geography, as it is in other fields, from biology to physics to chemistry to architecture. We take the EarthView globe to schools primarily because it provides such an unusual "projection" -- a map of the entire planet seen without distortion and from the inside -- but being large enough to offer this perspective necessarily means that it is  also a globe of unusually large scale. Each unit of measure on EarthView represents about 20 times the the distance represented by the same length on a typical classroom globe. This means that any shape represents about 400 times the surface area that it would on a classroom globe, and that EarthView has about 8,000 times the volume of that typical globe. This is one of the subjects I cover in my Pi Day EarthView post.

These differences are impressive, but they are only one order of magnitude different (that is, in the range of one decimal place, more or less). In reality, we now know of objects dozens of orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest things we can see, and astronomical distances many orders of magnitude larger than our galaxy. Cary Huang has captured these vast differences in scale in a beautiful animation that is simply called The Scale of the Universe 2. I love that among the many objects selected for comparison is the coffee bean. Use the slide bar to change scale at will, and be sure to click on each and every item from the subquarks to the galaxies and beyond, to learn something about scale, scientific notation, science, and Huang's sense of humor!

Oh, and the animation plays nice music, too.

Mapping Satire

The risk of satire -- especially good satire -- is that people will take it seriously. I consider myself an avid and somewhat sophisticated fan of satire, but I have to admit I was taken in by the news that a Mississippi state legislator had introduced a bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

"A perfect example of xenophobia," I thought. But I was wrong; Rep. Stephen Holland -- with a name like that, he should be a geographer -- had created the perfect parody of xenophobia.

Rachel Carson Experience

Rachel Carson shares a birthday with my favorite librarian, and died just a few weeks before Pam was born. We are not able to prove that Pam is the reincarnation of this great naturalist and writer, but nobody can prove otherwise, either!

I must admit that I somehow got through many years of my geographic education without actually reading Silent Spring, but when I started teaching environmental geography at the college level, I went back to this classic. The textbook I use for my introductory course mentions its 1962 publication as a turning point in U.S. environmental history, so I decided I should read it for myself. Carson's remarkably clear writing is actually pleasant to read, despite its grim subject matter. It is also important to read, for the insights it provides into the hubris of modernism.

The documentary Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (also see IMDB listing), produced at WGBH in Boston, tells Carson's story of pesticides and the meta-story of her dedication to telling that story. This is a book that the chemical industry of her day did not want Carson to publish, and any less determined author would have failed to see it to completion. I have seen the film no fewer than thirty times, so that when I read certain passages of the book itself, the voice in my head is that of Meryl Streep. Almost as strongly associated is the booming voice of publisher Paul Brooks, an ardent defender of Carson and her work. I learned only recently that he was an accomplished environmental writer in his own right, with a special collection in the library of the Walden Woods Project at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

FWS Employee Photo

Carson helped to launch what many consider the "modern" environmental movement, though I would consider her the first a post-modern science writer. Her professional work began in an earlier, less radical phase of environmental activism, led by FDR's commitment to conservation programs that supported economic recovery. One of those programs was the establishment of the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge in suburban (then rural) Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. She was among the first employs when the Refuge opened in 1936, and continued as a Fish & Wildlife Service researcher until the financial success of her book The Sea Around Us enabled her to write full-time. Patuxent has grown from 2,670 acres (4 square miles) to 12,841 (23 square miles, about the size of my current home town) today. It remains the only FWS refuge devoted to research.

It is a sad irony that a woman who worked so hard to eliminate a cause of cancer in the world at large succumbed to cancer herself just two years after the book was published. Her legacy continues in the work of the Silent Spring Institute on Cape Cod. Unlike the vast majority of organizations devoted to cancer research, this institute pursues research on environmental causes, rather than genetics or treatment. All three are important, of course, but people seem to resist environmental explanations just as much today as they did in Carson's time. Because the Institute is committed to finding the causes of elevated cancer rates in certain places, a lot of its research involves geographers.

Rachel Carson continues to stir controversy, mainly among apologists for pesticides, who claim that her work is responsible for the persistence of malaria in the tropics.

Waste Not, Want Not

In the United States alone, we use close to ten trillion coffee beans each year. After extracting the caffeine and the flavor, we leave most of that organic matter behind. At Casa Hayes-Boh, we generate a few thousand of those beans ourselves, and we apply them as much as possible in our gardens, where the hydrangea in particular are very happy with this diet.

The Daily Shot of Coffee blog recently suggested this and three other uses for the grounds, some of which we will be trying. Coffee starts as a fruit, the skin, pulp, and two seed coverings of which are lost during processing. Ecological coffee production involves using each of those components for uses as varied as soil amendment (nutrients from some layers; structure from others) and cooking fuel.

Tucson Teach-In

My favorite librarian and I lived in Arizona from 1990 to 1994 and in many ways it was the best place we ever lived. We had terrific friends there, we were learning a lot in graduate school, the food was terrific, the weather was warm, the sky a pleasant shade of blue all the time, and it was cheap. We had no money because we were graduate students, but we paid little rent because the S & L crisis had ravaged the housing market and food was grown nearby. We also did not pay much for entertainment, because we were students and because entertainment meant either attending a lecture or taking a hike in the beautiful deserts and mountains that surround the city.

We were sad to leave and often longed to go back. This diminished as our Arizona friends moved elsewhere or passed away or both, but we still had a great fondness for the place with so many great memories. The past few years, however, have made it difficult to muster much nostalgia, as the politics of fear and hate seem to have made a mighty comeback. Before our time, in the 1980s, Arizona was consumed with needless racial strife, becoming, for example, the last holdout against the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. Arizona today, though, makes the Ev Mecham period seem downright genteel.

The latest indignity is a law passed last spring that bans ethnic studies in schools. The law went into effect yesterday, and one of its authors recently defended it by saying that it would reduce racial barriers. The ruling that ended Mexican Studies in Tucson schools asserts that "people are individuals, not exemplars of racial groups," as if the two categories were mutually exclusive. I am an individual, but I can be understood fully only in the context of many groups to which I belong. To insist that ethnic or racial perspectives do not exist is to reinforce the privilege enjoyed by whatever ethnic or racial perspectives have already dominated public discourse.

In preparation for the law going into effect yesterday, a number of books were removed from classrooms -- with students and teachers present. Teachers have been forbidden not only to teach certain ideas to their students, but also from discussing the entire matter with anybody else. The First Amendment, in other words, has been suspended.

Anderson Cooper examines the issue in an interview with one of the key proponents of the restrictions, Arizona Superintendent Tom Horne, and Georgetown sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson, who refutes some of Horne's more implausible claims. For good measure, Cooper includes a clip of one of my three favorite Republicans at the moment -- California Gov. Schwarzenegger -- openly mocking the string of race-driven laws in his neighboring state.



On the first day of the ban, I read several passages from one of the banned books, The House on Mango Street. I did so because the book illustrates many of the concepts that the future teachers in my class will need to teach as geographers. This was part of a campus-wide and nation-wide teach-in, as educators far from Arizona recognize the importance of this case.

The Change.org site is hosting a petition drive that asks the TUSD school board.to return the banned books to the classrooms. I also wrote individually to the TUSD Communications Officer, and received a copy of the district's press release in reply. The board's position is that no book banning has taken place, but it admits that books have been removed from classrooms and are available in school libraries. According to the American Library Association, this constitutes a book ban. No matches were involved, but the freedom to read has still been abridged, as has the ability for teachers to teach.

I subsequently wrote the following to Governor Brewer, though I doubt she will be much worried about my thoughts:

I enjoyed living in Arizona from 1990 to 1994, when I earned my doctorate in geography and Latin American Area Studies at the University of Arizona; I also worked as a substitute in the Amphitheater schools. I benefited greatly from learning, teaching, and living in a Tucson's rich, multicultural environment. I draw on that experience now in my own teaching and in my enjoyment of music, food, and other manifestations of Latino culture with which I became most familiar while living in Arizona.


I am shocked and saddened by the current turn of events, in which bigotry is now driving curriculum. As in Orwell's 1984, the official discourse is one in which words are divorced from their true meanings, so that the oppressed are characterized as oppressors, and vice-versa. But nobody is fooled, and Arizona continues to marginalize itself further from the mainstream.


I hope that you will take measures to help return Arizona to the kind of place that people -- other than the most narrow-minded -- would enjoy visiting or residing.

Arizona is the current battleground, but we should be clear that in the "Land of the Free" many consider themselves free to limit what other people read. This map of recent book challenges produced by the American Library Association is far from complete, but it does suggest that vigilance is warranted wherever we live and teach. Readers can learn more about how to exercise that vigilance from the Banned Books Week MaxGuide, produced by my very own favorite librarian, or from her annual BBW display.

A final word from Steven Colbert, who proves that imitation is the greatest form of mockery.

The Colbert Report
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Back to Nicaragua -- Bonus Post 3: Rochelle's Pictures

Church in Leon, near our hostel ©2012 Rochelle Walbridge

Many thanks to Geography of Coffee student Rochelle Walbridge for sharing her photos of our recent journey. This collection (when compared to my photo set from many of the same places) illustrates how people traveling together often see different things, or the same things differently. I very much enjoy this series, and Rochelle's vision as a photographer, and I appreciate her allowing me to share them here.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 8 La Corona

Note: This post is one in a series of daily posts about my January 2012 return to Nicaragua -- the sixth time I have offered my Geography of Coffee study tour, which becomes more interesting and enjoyable each year.


Everyone who participates in the Geography of Coffee study tour agrees that the home stays with families are the most important part of the journey. In fact, for the first program in 2006, it was only this part that I was certain of; the rest of the itinerary has been developed as a matter of trial-and-error as I have learned of other opportunities. And for five of the six years, those home stays have been in La Corona. In 2011 we were in La Pita -- another wonderful community in the San Ramon township -- but I was glad to be back with my friends in La Corona.

A few local dogs were attentive during a brief orientation meeting; one sits here at the feet of a student with notable footwear.

After some introductions at the home of the Rayo family, our true orientation to the community of La Corona began. We started with a visit -- led by my friend Alfredo -- to the large farm from which the community emerged in the process of land reform following the 1979 revolution. In the foreground are the wet-mill facilities of that farm, which was operating at least at partial capacity until recently. In the distance are the shade-grown coffee farms of the community. The coffee itself is not visible, as these are covered by two canopies. One is of bananas and other fruits, which add flavor, and nutrients through the soil while augmenting family food supplies and income. The higher canopy provides shade -- modifiable through pruning -- to regulate the development of the coffee cherry while supplying bird habitat and firewood.

Diversification is the key to reducing the downside risks of dependency of commodities. For coffee producers, education is key to that diversification. The population of La Corona has doubled to 2,000 people since it opened a high school – the first in Nicaragua in a rural community. My favorite librarian poses in front of La Corona’s community center, which includes a library (biblioteca), as well as a very successful program in art education.

After a delicious community lunch and the short tour, our group divided into small groups for the home stays. Because La Corona is a series of homesteads with no central village, our group members were farther apart from each other than we had been for a week of close-quarters learning. Whenever I visit La Corona, I stay at the home of Doña Elsa and Don Alfredo, whose son Alfredo is a teacher and a leader in local and global youth movements. These visits are an ideal way to learn what participation in coffee really is like for small producers. During this visit, for example, my host Don Alfredo explained aspects of both planting and pruning that I had not learned before.

Back to Nicaragua -- Bonus Post 2: Coffee Video

Just before our arrival at Los Piños (described on the Day 5 post), Sara Corrales sent me a link to this video, produced by Salt Spring Coffee in Canada, which is one of the roasters that features their family's coffee. (In the U.S., Thanksgiving Coffee also features Byron's Maracaturra.)



The video rightly begins where Byron does: the soil. He rejects the Green Revolution's emphasis on soil productivity and even more recent notions of sustainability. Rather, his approach to soil emphasizes evolution, conservation, and protection.

Watching the video as a group on our last night in Nicaragua was a bit of a thrill for the group. Not only did it illustrate how much we had learned about coffee in just a few days, but this farm-to-cup lesson also features several of the people and places we enjoyed along the way.

As this film makes clear, excellent coffee is a partnership between farmers and roasters: each of the 50 or so steps required to make a cup of coffee can either diminish or improve the final result.

Back to Nicaragua -- Day 7 El Cua-Bocay

The main reason we have begun including Peñas Blancas on the study tour is that it provides access to the hydroelectric projects of northern Jinotega that the American engineer Benjamin Linder was developing when he was assassinated in 1987. In El Cuá, we stopped only for gasoline and some snacks. The largest grocery store in this small town reminds me very much of the corner groceries found in the United States nearly a century ago, and featured in a book that is my leisure reading on this trip, Marc Levinson’s The Great A & P. Most of the stock is behind a counter, and is brought to the customer by the clerks.

From El Cuá, we headed to Bocay, where Ben Linder’s legacy is very much alive, both in memorials and in a number of development projects. Our guide Freddy brought a photo out of the project office, which depicts Linder at a campus in the United States, protesting the Contra War and riding his trademark unicycle.

The permanent memorial reads:

Cua-Bocay ProjectIn Memory of Engineer Benjamin Linder
Born July 7 in the Year 1959
With his joy and courage he moved all of these people.
He died on April 28 in the Year 1987
In the Blue Horizon, where Heaven kisses the Sea.
His small figure will never cease to shine.

As with the 2011 study group, we visited the hydroelectric plant for which Linder was making field measurements when he was killed. The turbine continues to power the entire town of Bocay, and its building is now decorated with a vibrant mural celebrating Linder.

~~~

I was most interested in visiting the reservoir that in turn powers the turbine. Our schedule had not allowed such a visit in 2011, so we allowed extra time this year. We were surprised to learn that although it is a short distance away, the journey was even more difficult than the waterfall hike of the previous day. A single turbine delivers a remarkable amount of power from a small reservoir connected by a single, eight-inch pipe. The reason it works so well is the great potential energy of water positioned a full 800 feet above the turbine. Connected by a wide but slippery path, it is today an arduous climb. 

When Linder was making his measurements, of course, the road was not yet provided. He and two Nicaraguan co-workers -- Sergio Hernández and Pablo Rosales -- were killed just 100 meters beyond the eventual site of the reservoir. His death – two weeks before Pam and I were married – helped to galvanize opposition to the covert support the United States was providing to the Contras, and contributed to the ending of that very destructive war. The story is told in the film American/Sandinista and in Joan Kruckewitt’s book The Death of Ben Linder, and I have included several tributes on my Ben Linder Cafe page. 

Although I found the journey to these historic sites rewarding, we agreed that the climb to the reservoir -- even for those who did make it -- was more than we need to include in future tours. Fortunately, our guide was able to find enough information about related facilities in El Cuá, which will allow us to learn about that ongoing work while expanding the portion of the trip we dedicate to the study of cacao.

Back to Nicaragua -- Bonus Post

I have not yet caught up to the portion of our trip when we visited the community of La Corona, but I have posted an item about our nacatamale culinary experience there on our Nueva Receta blog.