The Where of Coffee

Over the past several years, World GIS Day has become my department's most successful annual event. As the local part of a global network of events highlighting the many uses of Geographic Information Systems, the BSU Geography celebration brings together real-world examples of GIS from our undergraduate and graduate students and from professionals in industry, non-profit organizations and local, state, and federal agencies. 

I have been proud to promote this event, but until this year I have played a very minimal role. This year, I am serving coffee to participants and using it as an opportunity to shed some light on the geography of coffee and to give a couple of examples of how GIS supports coffee growers. 

I brought coffee (see below) to serve to participants and shared a poster to highlight a few applications of GIS in coffee. The main purpose of this blog post is to allow visitors to view thos projects. 

Detail from
The Coffee Economy

One example is an infographic entitled Bean to Billion Dollar Business, which won a communication award at the 2025 ESRI user conference.

See The Coffee Economy on the ESRI Map Gallery for information about the team that produced this graphic, and to explore the details it provides about this important crop and beverage.

Also hosted on an ESRI site is Mapping the impact of global warming on suitable coffee-growing land in Costa Rica by Leslie Spencer, who was an undergraduate biology student at Tufts University when she created it in 2021. This is an excellent example of what GIS is good for -- allowing comparisons among different kinds of spatial information that operate at different scales. This kind of analysis is increasingly important in coffee studies, as farmers and others in the industry respond to very rapidly changing climatic conditions in the context of non-climatic factors. 

This single image draws on many thousands of pieces of information
of different kinds and at different scales.

(For more on Costa Rica and coffee, see my annotated collection of photos at Costa Rica 2020.)

The third example on my poster is a 2020 article in the International Journal of Geo-Information. This is an excellent, peer-reviewed journal that makes its articles fully available online.  Rolando Salas López led a team of researchers who wrote Land Suitability for Coffee (Coffea arabica) Growing in Amazonas, Peru: Integrated Use of AHP, GIS and RS.

Their study identifies the locations of existing farms and identifies appropriate locations for future coffee production. This is very important work for farmers whose are vulnerable to market fluctuations, uneven terms of trade, and multiple threats from climate change. The latter can affect both the timing and amount of precipitation and the prevalence of pests and crop diseases. Because coffee is a tree crop that does not produce until after four years of care and investment, this information is crucial to the economic viability fo farmers.

The coffee I am serving at the event is Pacha Glow from Sunrise Trading, which -- coincidentally -- is from the region of Peru studied by López and his team. I had bought 5 pounds of this coffee for my Spring 2025 Secret Life of Coffee course (an Honors Second-Year Seminar). 

Urusula Ortiz, Coffee Grower

I loved it so much that when I tried to buy it in August and found that it was only available in café-sized bags. This beautiful bag has been in our living room ever since -- though it is only about half-full at this point.

This coffee is from the Peruvian Amazon -- about 1,000 km by road from Cusco and about 3,000 km from my old stomping grounds in Porto Velho. I present this map, zoomed in on the site of the growing area. "Site" is a term geographers use to refer to the characteristics of a place -- in this case, the Oxapampa-Asháninka-Yánesha Biosphere Reserve (BIOAY) where the coffee is grown is a site of heavy rainfall, dense forest, and rugged topography. 

A good use of Google Maps is to start here and change scales and basemaps to explore the region in various contexts. The "directions" tool can help to illuminate its "situation" -- a term geographers use to describe relative location -- its distance and direction from other places.

Future Coffee

The story of the Ben Linder Café is very mixed. A BSC graduate helped to create the first fair-trade café in Nicaragua. The story of this café is told in the book Javatrekker by recently retired coffee importer Dean Cycon. This predated Bridgewater travel courses in the country, but students did later visit the café and the landmine-rehabilitation projects it supported. They were so inspired that they developed a proposal for a café in the DMF building. 

Over 1,000 people endorsed the proposal, along with almost every department on campus at the time. The architects of the DMF building even created the framework of a café -- from which good, ethical coffee is occasionally served. The status of the proposal is unresolved. The student who co-led the effort is now a leading organizer in the coffee industry (and the entire food sytsem, actually). We still hope to realize that vision on our campus. 

From Liquidation to Little Village

 

Sixto Rodriquez Mural, Vernor West, Detroit

I am pleased to have co-authored a presentation for the 2025 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers with my son Harvey. It builds on a paper he wrote as a college freshman and is entitled From Liquidation to Little Village: The Arts in Detroit. Anything in these slides that looks like a link IS a link. Our abstract is below.

Early in the twentieth century, Detroit was among the most prosperous and successful cities in the United States, in which a social compact between labor and industry had broad benefits. The later abandonment of Detroit by key industries combined with a political culture of austerity to bring about the city’s economic, demographic, and fiscal collapse. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the city declared bankruptcy and the state of Michigan reluctantly intervened. Among many proposals to resolve the crisis, the most radical envisioned selling much of the artwork that had become part of the city’s patrimony during more prosperous times. This approach was strongly contested and ultimately rejected, in part because of the inherent and abiding value of the arts. More recently, the Little Village project has vindicated those who defended the arts in Detroit. It serves as an example of arts-based community development that has so far avoided the common pitfalls of gentrification.

I took the photo above, which comprises the final slide in our presentation, while exploring the city during the conference. The building is featured in the 2012 film Searching for Sugarman.

ILV Coffee Talk

The Institute for Liberal Values (ILV) is a community of people committed to the free exchange of ideas. I have known it primarily through the involvement of my spouse, a librarian who is a champion of free expression and an expert on obstacles to it.

I am very pleased that ILV has asked me to participate in a few different activities this year. One of them is simply an opportunity for me to talk about the story of coffee and some of its implications. Our Coffee Talk session is streaming today -- Monday, October 21 -- at 7 pm Eastern Time on YouTube.

You can view the slides I used in this presentation in order to follow links that I referenced. You can watch the event recording (47m) on the ILV YouTube channel.

Lagniappe

During the presentation, I mentioned the 2006 film Black Gold: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee, and that it depicts a jarring contrast between the prosperous coffee industry and the growers who supply it. I mentioned that it also provides some insight into the workings of commodity markets, but the ILV audience may have been interested to know that the film goes a bit further -- it goes inside a meeting of the World Trade Organization to show how the imbalance between producers and consumers is maintained. I discuss this movie and the film The Girl in the Café in Cups and Summits, a 2012 post on my main blog. 

Cape Verde Climate Leadership: Unlocking Potential

I am honored to be part of this summer's leadership program for Cape Verdean young professionals, which is hosted by the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies. Participants are spending time at both branches of the Institute -- here at Bridgewater State University and also at the Universidade de Cabo Verde in Praia. 

Today's program will begin with a discussion of role of Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) in climate change. We will then visit a few sites in Brockton, originally part of Bridgewater and now our nearest gateway city. We will do this for two reasons: first to discuss some examples of environmental matters generally and second to give the visitors some experience in what many call the Eleventh Island of Cape Verde. Everybody in their archipelago knows somebody who has migrated to Brockton.

Instituto Pedro Pires para a Liderança 

In addition to the slides above, I prepared a short video about a family story we call the Christmas Miracle. It is about the connection between Cape Verde and Brockton. (Note: the CC button in YouTube works pretty well for those viewers who might not fully understand my speaking.)

Humacao to Amazônia

Humacao to Amazônia is a guest lecture I am giving for a combined session of my course on Latin America and my colleague Professor Harris' course on environmental regulations. The slides are offered here for students who wish to follow up on some of the links mentioned in the presentation.

Café no Fogo

NEW: All of my photos from this travel course in one annotated slide show!

After years of preparation and planning, I am leading a travel course on the island of Fogo, Cape Verde -- about 300 miles west of the westernmost point of mainland Africa. Among the island's many fascinating distinctions, it is the only place in the world -- as far as this Coffee Maven knows -- that produces coffee inside an active volcano. This does not mean that the beans are lava-roasted, but it does mean that the farms are in locations that might be displaced at any time by volcanic activity.

On this journey -- jointly sponsored by the Pedro Pires Institute for Cape Verdean Studies, the Department of Geography, and the Office of Study Abroad -- undergraduate and graduate students are doing what I most love to do: using geography to understand coffee and using coffee to understand geography. Our travel is also hosted and supported by the national government, the Universidad do Cabo Verde, and the three municipalities of the island: Mosteiros, São Felipe, and Santa Catarina. 

After a very warm welcome from the municipal authorities in São Felipe, we toured the entire island before revisiting each community. Our first in-depth visit is in Mosteiros, the producer of the island's famous coffee. There we are both learning about the local coffeelands and coffee producers and bringing some perspectives from the wider world of coffee. In fact, this post serves in part to provide a convenient link to some of the images we will be sharing during our visit to the Museu do Café.

(Note that the title of the course is represented on the town seal of Mosteiros!)

From the Coffee Maven's too-big trove of imagery, I have selected a few images to begin the discussion around two questions -- Café De Onde - Café Para Onde.

Finally, I include here a link to the amazing work of Carolyn King, a Cape Verde-American graduate student on this course who described her work on a fascinating museum installation on the connections between Cape Cod and Cape Verde. We can also view the exhibit itself at WHOI Seagrant.

A Christmas Carol Advent

My favorite librarian and I planned a bit of a literary pursuit for this December that we are now enjoying -- an Advent countdown based on some of the many versions of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. On most of the 25 days, we are watching a film or television adaptation, with a few special activities also included.

Edward Marin's 1938 Version

We have been planning this for over a year, but at the last minute I decided to write about the experience on our catch-all blog called Perry La Perra. From December 1 to 25 of 2023, I am adding to the same post every day. I include a link here so that we can refer friends to it more easily.