ABSTRACT
A narrative emerges from the sum total of all previous chapters intersecting with the real lives of coffee farmers. From the question of biodiversity conservation (Chapters 2 and 3) to the question of ecological details such as Turing patterns and trait-mediated cascades (Chapters 4 to 6) to the application of these concepts in the context of ecosystem services (Chapter 7), it all comes together in conceptualizing the whole narrative as a dialectical interaction between the needs, desires and actions of the farmers who produce the coffee and the ecological forces with which they must work. Most important is the fact that the nature within which they must work is located in the tropics, which is also where most of the world’s biodiversity is located. So the formal dialectical contradictions can be seen as the suite of “farmers’ issues” interpenetrating the suite of “biodiversity issues.” This conceptualization has taken on a variety of forms historically, perhaps driven too heavily by those whose focus is on the biodiversity rather than the livelihood of the farmer. Part of the intention of our research (and thus of this book) is to refocus the issue as one of the complex interconnections between the two parts of this dialectic. The proper way to look at the issue, we argue, is as a complex system involving the interpenetration of both farmers’ issues and biodiversity issues. 1
