Free book, great coffee, delicious home made cakes, Harrison’s Coffee, 3 Spring Street, London

Grab a free book when you buy a great coffee from Harrison’s Coffee in the heart of Paddington. English, French, Spanish and Italian. Just right if you are heading towards Hyde Park and want to sit and relax and read. Leave a book if you want but please no collections as they are neither a bookshop or a charity. They’ll be Chilean food to try once they are fully open. Don’t forget to pick up your loyalty card.

Harrison’s Coffee, 3 Spring Street, Paddington, London, W2 3RA

Our links

Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton T-shirts and bags, https://junagarh-media.teemill.com/.

My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.

This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.

We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.

Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.

Coffee – just one example of the consumption and human population issues we need to fix

What’s happening to the planet in 2021 can be expressed in some large numbers but many individuals seem to have a problem with comparing numbers. The Earth is big right and in the little bubble that we live in everything passes day to day with little gripes but really we are OK especially if we have got our coffee. Yes there are people living in poverty, they were living in poverty yesterday and unfortunately they will be living in poverty tomorrow, next month, next year and maybe for the rest of their lives but it’s all a long way away from our little life bubble. So here’s the large number, 80,000,000. That’s the number of ADDITIONAL human primate babies born in just the 366 days of 2020. Many will be born into poverty, will live their lives in poverty and will die in poverty.

So where does that come in from the point of view of the person in a comfortable life bubble drinking coffee? Well many of those coffee drinkers will say that the reason that many of those 80,000,000 are in poverty is down to this or that reason without ever considering the environmental loading caused by their own little life bubble. They see no problem with so many additional births.

So for those able to afford coffee, for those able to regularly buy coffee from your corporate coffee shop (why?), drinking from PFAS tainted takeaway cups (why?) here’s the reason for those who think that human population numbers are not a problem. I have no idea where my coffee comes from apart from the country of origin. I don’t know how old the coffee plantation is. I don’t know how many animals and other creatures died when the native vegetation was cleared to plant the coffee bushes. I don’t know if any local species went extinct because of the planting of the coffee bushes. I don’t know what is happening to the soil in the plantation, what chemicals are being used to bring me my coffee and what environmental impact those chemicals are having locally and on plantation workers’ health. I don’t know what the environmental impact is of shipping that coffee a fair distance across the surface of the planet is. Let’s not mention noise pollution in the oceans because that’s a whole story in itself. Therefore the likelihood is that there will never be enough land to grow coffee for all those ADDITIONAL human primates when they become adults assuming that some might just like to share the experience that you are having in your little life bubble. So as I keep repeating, we are too many, we take too much.

The cost of convenience – paper toweling

Returning to normal after the pandemic passes for many people will mean buying sandwiches, takeaway coffees, visiting cafes and restaurants. Most customers will be given one or more pieces of soft bleached paper and few will think anything of it. Just take a minute to consider how many billions of them are given out and how many trees are cut down just because we can’t carry a cotton or hemp based alternative around with us. There’s not just the trees to consider and the disturbed environment from which they are extracted, but to get from a tree to a bleached soft piece of in many cases white piece of paper, involves transportation and large amounts of energy and chemicals. Basically it’s unsustainable and if we all carried a washable natural fibres product it would be so much better for the environment. So think about the future and about making this small change. If we can scale it up to the part of the 7.8 billion people on the planet who use them we will be doing nature a big favour. Perhaps as a way of changing our habits either they should be charged for or simply banned as is happening with plastic bags.

Cafetière

Everything we do is a loading on the environment. Every coffee bush is sitting in a monoculture where once there was a diverse ecosystem. Further to that there’s a huge amount of human exploitation in the growing of the coffee while certain large corporations employee some very clever people to make sure they don’t pay much tax, if any, on their huge sales. There’s a big disconnect between what well known brands make in profits and the wages earned by the coffee pickers. If you really do need to use a machine then make sure that your capsules are being recycled rather than ending in land fill as capsules add an extra dimension to the environmental loading of coffee. If you don’t need a machine then just use a kettle and a simple cafetière like this one from Bodum.

Convenience or sustainability part 2

Make taste not waste

On the second of my blogs about convenience or sustainability it is time to mention something that has only been around for 20 years and that I risk hearing howls of disapproval about. Yes, it’s the coffee pod/capsule. As this advertising poster from Bodum states, “Make taste not waste”.

Maybe the plastic and aluminium is recyclable but how likely is it that it does get recycled? We have had the same Bodum cafetiere for decades. Now that’s not a good modern business model but it happens to be hugely more environmentally than these pod/capsule machines. We have found an independent coffee supplier who grinds the coffee for us and there we have it, for us, a perfect cup of coffee every time.

Interestingly enough, John Sylvan, who invented the K-cup in 1995 in the US has stopped using them because although he made his fortune from them, he realises the damage they cause to the environment. You don’t have to live without coffee you just need to be a bit more sustainable when you make it.

John Sylvan gives up the coffee capsule