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 33 Wharton power breakfast DHJanzen100043.jpg high resolution
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| But biodiversity prospecting has its major problems, actually not much different from many other wildland crops. What is this? The Wharton Power Breakfast. But it is also THE most widely known, widely used, and most valuable of all the rainforest drugs. Coffee is nothing more than a hot soup of roasted rainforest tree seeds (coffee is a bird- and small mammal-dispersed rainforest understory tree from Ethiopia), as a vehicle of delivery for caffeine. Well, we make more than a trillion cups of coffee per year. If there were a penny a cup tax on this rainforest drug, it would pay all conservation costs for all tropical conservation forever. The trick is not in doing the biodiversity prospecting to generate this drug crop. The trick is getting the one penny tax on the cup of coffee, and having that income stream actually go into rainforest conservation rather than be absorbed by all the middlemen and middlewomen along the way. Society is not set up to return a fraction of its income to the forest standing mutely in the rain. If the one cent tax had been built into the cup of coffee from the beginning, perhaps it could be directed at conservation, but the problem, again, with the newer drugs from the rainforest is that no one is in fact interested in seeing their royalties go towards conservation. People generally earn money for themselves, not for the rainforest. | ||
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