Why Shade-Grown Coffee?

There and more and more choices for coffee purchases out there these days.  How much we are willing to pay  for that steamy cup depends on how important good coffee is to us.  I love strong, muddy French Roast all day long.
But now there is one more thing to consider.   Some enlightened companies are offering shade-grown coffee.  This isn't just a special way to grow extra-tasty coffee beans, although that happens, too.  What it means is that the native people are NOT cutting down the jungle in order to make a living from planting coffee.  This is actually an old way to grow coffee.  Planters got away from it and started chopping down the jungle to make more room for coffee.  It actually prefers to grow in the shade.  Cutting jungle means loss of habitat for many birds and animals, and the coffee doesn't like it, really.
So now many growers - but not all- are going back to growing in the shade.    This means that the jungle stays and coffee bushes, which aren't really very tall, can thrive under the fifty-foot tall lush, living canopy of green. 
I've seen it ~ it works.  The collared trogon, to the right, is a denizen of  high forest canopies.  He looks like an elaborate holiday ornament.  He's about eleven inches long and will sit silently for hours, just like in that photo, always in the shade. 
The day we spent birding a shade-grown coffee plantation, the Mexican men and women were quietly harvesting the berries (beans) in large sacks.  They smiled and greeted us - they're used to birders in their co-op owned coffee fields.   The birds sang and darted high in the canopy.  It's quite an experience to see something like that really working, instead of having two competing interests.
Shade grown may cost a few pennies more, but consider it  an investment.   The coffee workers don't have to face a choice of cutting down ancient mountain forests or making a living.  When the choice involves survival, survival  trumps all, as it should.   This is a perfect example of creativity and compromise.
  Try some shade-grown, it's great.  And you can feel virtuous about your habit.