The history of a cup of coffee.

• Author: Durning, Alan Thein

Everything has its story.

1. THE CONVENTIONAL STORY

   On April 22, the local Sierra Club president, Paul Pizarro, began his day with cup of coffee on the balcony of his home overlooking San Francisco Bay. He relaxed for a few minutes, enjoying the warmth of the coffee against the chill of the morning mist while reviewing his notes for the Earth Day speech he was t give. Two hours later he joined a festive gathering at Altamont, where he outlined the main priorities for California's role in halting global environmental decline: protecting the Pacific rainforest and savannah ecosystem from continuing destruction by timber and development projects; halting degradation of the state's water resources by agricultural and industrial chemicals and the denuding of watersheds; and alleviation of the social inequities that create incentives to build new suburbs in pristine hillsides fa from the crime and blight of cities.

   That evening, Pizarro joined a few friends for dinner in Big Sur. They sat on a terrace high above the Pacific, drinking coffee and watching the sun set over the ocean. The air cooled quickly, and he had a chilling fantasy--of humanity falling off the edge of the world after all, as the detractors of Columbus had warned. Yet, he thought, if precipitous change has become a danger to our species, perhaps it could also be our salvation. In just three years, we've see signs of hope almost unimaginable a decade ago: the end of the Cold War, the en of South African apartheid, the global Climate Treaty, the Biodiversity Treaty, the Law of the Sea, the return of large tracts of land to the Yanomami and Inui peoples--even the election of a more environmentally conscious U.S. administration. He let go the tension in his face, watching the ocean grow dark and feeling the warmth of the coffee in his chest.

2. THE STORY NOT TOLD

   Pizarro's day neither began nor ended with a cup of coffee, because the coffee did not simply materialize at his lips. In fact, by the time he began brewing i in the morning, it had already been through a rather exhausting series of event and was not yet finished, as Pizarro would discover when he pulled off the road at a gas station on the way to Altamont. In the men's room there, thousands of cups of coffee before his had begun the final stages of their journeys.

   It could be said that the coffee's journey began with the picking of the beans, on a small mountain farm in a region of Colombia called Antioquia--an area not...