Subject: shade coffee
Date: Mar 23 23:27:27 1999
From: Ed Newbold - newboldwildlife at netscape.net
Dear Dave Eshbaugh-
Sounds like a really neat website and good luck with it. My advice is to have
a page on shade coffee with a link maybe to Seattle Audubon's shade coffee web
page.
Buying Shade coffee is probably the most important thing an American can do
for the environment generally, probably way ahead of recycling or voting
Democratic or anything else. The market in Latin America is itching to
reforest coffee plantations (inferior sun beans are drawing ever lower prices
and are susceptible to rust and disease) but as of yet there's no real buying
pulse from the people up here for shade coffee per se and we need to create
that. In fact, there probably will be more shade coffee coming on line soon
from down there and if bird lovers aren't doing their homework up here, the
price could actually sag, which is definitely not what we or the birds want to
see. (If you haven't seen pictures of shade coffee plantations, they are
instructive. At a distance a shade coffee plantation can look
indistinguishable from old-growth rain forest. No wonder wintering songbirds
and other wildlife love shade coffee!)
Thanks very much for letting me put in my two cents!
--Ed Newbold
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