Commentary
My morning ritual starts with quietly tiptoeing downstairs, hoping not to wake my children or my husband. I turn on the espresso machine, pull two long shots, and settle into my porch chair—or the old rocker inside if it’s too cold. These hours between 4 and 6 a.m. are when I gather my thoughts and often write. This ritual is important to me. Which is why, this morning, when I opened my phone and found a clip someone had sent me with the message, “Is this true?” it hit me differently.
Transcript, World Economic Forum Panel:
Host: “Tell me about why coffee is so bad for us.”
Speaker: “The coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tons of CO₂ per ton of coffee… most coffee plantations are monoculture… the quality of these nature assets is deteriorating quite rapidly.”
That was the whole answer. The idea that coffee is bad because it “emits carbon” is absurd. And then to claim the reason it emits carbon is because it’s a monocrop? How much time has this speaker actually spent on a coffee farm?
I have. My husband is indigenous from the south of Oaxaca, and when we visit his family, we often go to the farmers’ market and buy coffee directly from growers. Sometimes we visit the farms themselves. Many of these farmers grow coffee intercropped with bananas, cacao, or within forested systems. The idea that coffee is always a monocrop is simply not true. In much of the world, coffee is still grown in a way that is integrated with other crops and trees—far closer to the kind of agriculture we should be encouraging.
Everything in nature “emits carbon.” Plants, animals, soil, and humans—we are all made of carbon. Carbon is the building block of life. Yet we’ve been manipulated into believing that the simple act of living—breathing, farming, sipping coffee—is inherently destructive. And although they don’t say it out loud, the underlying message of much environmental rhetoric is this: you are a plague on the planet. Every breath you take, every cup of coffee you sip, every time you drive your kids to soccer—you are made to feel guilty for existing.
This messaging steals joy. It creates despair. It weighs especially heavy on our youth, who are being taught a low-level self-hatred as if their very existence is destructive. But that is not God’s design. We are not meant to separate ourselves from nature or leave her “alone” while we live in sterile boxes, monitored by science and managed by experts. We are meant to integrate with nature, interact with her, care for her, and receive from her. Many coffee farmers around the world still live in ways that remember this truth.
And here’s the irony: while we’re constantly being told what’s wrong with farming, what we’re not being told is that regenerative agriculture has the capacity to draw massive amounts of carbon back down into the soil. Natural ecosystems, left as they are, already pull out around 60 percent of global emissions every year—and farming, if shifted even modestly toward regenerative practices, could easily take care of the rest.
That’s a narrative of hope, not despair. Because when we know that our farms and natural spaces hold the key, we don’t give our power away. We may collectively all start wanting to farm again, to roll up our sleeves, to restore the 170,000 farms we’ve lost in just the last eight years.
Like any crop, coffee farming has its challenges. But coffee is one of the globally traded crops still grounded in smallholder farming and cooperative models. Between 60 and 80 percent of the world’s coffee is produced by farmers working plots under 10 hectares. There are 12.5 million coffee farms globally, and 95 percent of them are small-scale, spread across more than 70 countries. Coffee sustains families in indigenous villages and rural communities, often through cooperative systems that preserve both tradition and livelihood. If monocropping is the concern, coffee shouldn’t even be near the top of the list. Soy, corn, palm oil—these are the crops dominated by massive agribusiness. But coffee? Coffee is still carried on the backs of small family farmers.
The actual crisis in coffee isn’t carbon—it’s economics. Farmers receive less than 10 percent of the retail value of their beans. The same is true across agriculture: wheat, cotton, orange juice—you name it. So yes, we should care about coffee. But we should care because the people who grow it deserve a fair deal, not because drinking it supposedly destroys the planet.
From a regenerative perspective, coffee has strengths that are never mentioned in the WEF narrative. Coffee is a perennial plant, staying rooted in the ground for decades, which means no annual tillage. Farmers often recycle the cascara, the coffee fruit skin, back into the soil as fertilizer.
Coffee is also a space where both organic and regenerative movements are advancing. Organic coffee is widely available because the crop does well with fewer chemicals. And even beyond organic, the regenerative movement is scaling in a real way. In just the past few years, many farms have been certified with Regenified and other regenerative programs. More acreage has been brought into regenerative farming in the last 10 years than into organic since the 1970s. Coffee is one of the crops where regenerative is scaling in a real way, offering a hopeful model for global agriculture. Much of the world’s coffee is also grown on steep hillsides or shaded under larger trees—land not suited to many other crops. If I were ranking the most environmentally damaging crops, coffee wouldn’t even crack the top 20.
Do I think we should care about our coffee? Yes. For our health, we should look for beans that are mold-free and freshly roasted. For the sake of farmers, we should choose organic, regenerative, fair-trade, or cooperative-grown options. And for our values, we can support brands that align with what we care about most.
But let’s not fall for the distraction. Coffee is not the villain. The real danger is the creeping belief that human life itself is the problem, that every joy and ritual should be accompanied by guilt. It’s time to wake up and remember who we are: we are not the problem. We are part of nature, designed to live in relationship with her. Our role is not to withdraw in shame, but to participate with gratitude and care.
