“There’s a world in my cup.”

This essay was in an article I’m reading for my “Developing Sustainable Communities” class.  The article’s citation is: Carley, M and Spapens, P (1998) Sharing the World: Sustainable Living and Global Equity in the 21st Century. London. Earthscan.

The article:
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My name is Alan and I’m a compulsive drinker.  Coffee is my brew.  I used to drink it daily, sometimes hourly.  I drank it by the pot… cappuccinos, frappacinos, even Folger’s drip.  Now I’m on the wagon, drinking locally grown herbal tea.  You see, this terrible thing happened.  A dream straight out of Scrooge.  I saw where my coffee comes from.

It started one morning in the kitchen.  As I poured the beans into the grinder, I suddenly found myself in a clouded forest on a mountain above the Cauca River in Colombia.  The lush vegetation was disappearing all around me as a coffee plantation grew.  Farm workers were spraying the trees with pesticides made int he valley of the RIver Rhine in Europe.  I began to choke on the poisonous fumes when I was transported… to New Orleans.  Burlap sacks of coffee beans were being unloaded from a freighter burning oil from the Orinoco River Valley of Venezuela.  It was like a spin on the house that Jack built: the freighter was made in Japan out of steel forged in Korea from iron mined in the lands of Australian aborigines.  Workers were pouring the beans into a roaster, which was fuelled with natural gas piped in from Oklahoma.  Out the other end, my beans poured into bags of nylon, polyester, and polyethylene - plastics from New Jersey - and aluminum foil from a smelter in Oregon.  That smelter was powered by electricity from dams that have nearly wiped out wild salmon in the Columbia River.

Suddenly, I was in my kitchen again, but hovering by the ceiling, looking down.  My beans, now disintegrating in the grinder, had come to my home inside a brown paper bag made from pines in the northern Rockies.  On the trip from the supermarket, my car had burned a sixth of a gallon of gasoline, spewing carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organics into the air.  The gas had come from Alaska’s North Slope by way of Prince William Sound and a refinery in northern Washington.

Hovering above myself in the kitchen, I watched as I took the first sip of the day.  But from the cup came pesticides, oil, molten steel.  My ecological wake.  And it wasn’t just the coffee.  My T-shirt.  My newspaper.  My radio.  The wake of it all washed over me.  I buckled under its weight.  Then, my bathroom scale appeared, flashing 115 pounds.  My daily consumption of natural resources.  I fell to the floor, crushed and bloated.  I can’t shake this dream.  I’ve gotta get off this consumption kick.  And I’m starting with java.  I don’t know how to do it but I gotta find a way of using less.  Can we make things better?  Figure out better ways of getting around?  Get stuff from closer to home?  I don’t know, but I do know this, my name is Alan, I’m a compulsive coffee drinker, and there’s a world in my cup.

(Alan Durning is Executive Director of Northwest Environment Watch in Seattle.  This commentary was first heard on the radio show ‘Living on Earth’ on KPLU, adapted from Alan’s This Place on Earth (Sasquatch Books).)
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Now, I know that there are difficulties with this essay.  But as a conversation- and thought-starter, it’s pretty darn good.  I think so, at least.