Poets Protecting the Planet

And at Whittier, where a coffee orchard thrives, growing everyone’s favorite bean is about more than just helping people rev up in the mornings: It’s about the environment, education, and community.

Stephanie Alcala ’15 was born in Whittier. “I always was a part of the Whittier community,” she says. “I was a cheerleader at the community center. My family lives in town, and then I ended up going to college here. Most recently, I found myself back living here.”

Alcala returned to Whittier because of coffee.

She works as a trader and sustainability liaison for a family-owned green coffee importer that acts as a matchmaker between coffee suppliers and roasters and retailers around the world. She has also taught as an adjunct professor at Whittier. She says what differentiates her company is that not only do they buy and sell green coffee, but they forge lasting relationships with coffee suppliers and use those ties to build a sustainable coffee supply chain.

“We reinvest into the resiliency of our supply chains to improve not only the quality of the coff ee, but also the quality of people's lives and their communities and the environment from which we're sourcing our products,” Alcala says.

If you could go back in time and tell the young Alcala, who showed up for the first week of classes at Whittier, what she would be doing today, she wouldn’t believe you. “I originally went to Whittier to become a physical therapist,” she recalls. “I really love sports. I was going to major in kinesiology. The beauty of Whittier College — and the beauty of college in general — is that it’s a way to explore your own interests.

Whittier College is special because it’s a liberal arts school. It’s integrated into the curriculum; you must take elective courses. And thank goodness for that!” Alcala chose Introduction to Environmental Science as an elective during her freshman year. By the end of the first week, she knew she wanted to major in the subject, and to study with the professor, Cinzia Fissore, Ph.D., as her advisor.

Fissore is the Roy E. and Marie G. Campbell Distinguished Chair in Biology, and the Program Coordinator for Whittier’s Environmental Science Department. Originally from Italy, she became rooted in soil science at Michigan Technological University, surrounded by the woods of the Upper Peninsula. “I did my Ph.D. looking at the cycling of carbon in forest soils and how that responds to changes in climate,” Fissore says.

She joined the Whittier College faculty in 2011. “My job is primarily teaching, like everyone else at the college, but we are free to conduct our research,” Fissore says. “So my first love — studying soils — never went away.”

Fissore is one of four faculty members in the Environmental Science program. Christina Bauer, Ph.D. builds on her early background in chemistry to study the impact of plastic nanoparticles on the environment and nanotech in sustainable energy. Ecologist David Mbora, Ph.D. has done pioneering work on the relationships among monkeys and dung beetles in Kenya and studies how habitat loss influences the biodiversity of insects in the Los Angeles area. Anna Bowen, Ph.D., plant ecologist, is currently studying the effect of goat grazing on wildfire fuel loads and plant diversity.

Make Your Own Job

When someone like Stephanie Alcala majors in Environmental Science, Fissore wants to make one thing clear: “We want them to understand that there's no such job as ‘environmental scientist.’ You need to specialize; you need to make it yours based on your aspirations, skills, and desires.”

For millions of years, there was a rough balance on Earth between the amount of carbon being locked up in the rocks and soil and the carbon emitted into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide and methane. But when humans discovered how to control fi re, they could harness energy and put it towards their own goals, first in making light, staying warm, and cooking food. Scientists who study climate change say these discoveries also came with a downside: We were upsetting the balance of the carbon cycle and increasing the amount of CO₂, as well as many other pollutants, in our air. This didn’t seem like much of a downside during the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. Steam engines were hungry for coal, and that meant digging carbon out of the ground, where it had been sequestered for eons, and burning it. When we discovered how to power transportation with oil, the process accelerated. Now experts warn we’re living in a world with a very unbalanced carbon cycle and the consequences are mounting.

In Alcala’s view, it’s not so much that there are no jobs as “environmental scientist”; it’s that in the age of climate change, every job requires this knowledge.

“We are living in a time of accelerated global warming, accelerated climate change, and human-induced changes to our weather patterns,” Alcala says. “This is the most pressing issue our world is facing today. It’s influencing every aspect of our lives, and in every industry, this is the number one priority on their agenda at the moment. It’s super relevant for any student studying any topic. This is our reality, and to have a working knowledge of the vocabulary and a baseline understanding of how our world works makes any person that much more competitive and gives them that much more confidence to have a voice at the table.”

Fissore says preparing students for a warming world is her top priority.

“This is their world. They’re entering it, and they inherited a pretty messy situation,” Fissore says. “It’s their opportunity to make effective changes, but also to understand that complex issues no longer get resolved with very small solutions. They need to be approached quite aggressively and holistically. We need to have an interdisciplinary approach. That’s why we encourage our students to explore other disciplines, and that’s why learning about environmental issues and solutions in a liberal arts college is really critical. Our students naturally are exposed to a number of different disciplines from environmental justice to policy and political science issues, but also arts and philosophy and history that really complement their education and their approach to life. It’s extremely important that they understand these complexities and they understand that there are solutions.”

Which brings us back to coffee.

Black Gold

Before the carbon from the fossil fuels we burn got into the air, it was at some point stored in the soil. That’s where Fissore comes in.

“If we can implement agricultural practices, or any growing practices that keep carbon into the soil, then we are contributing,” Fissore says. “We’re not solving the issue of climate change, but we’re certainly contributing in keeping carbon where it should be and not sending it back into the atmosphere. For the longest time, agricultural soils have been demonized as this land that doesn't do anything for ecological preservation or for sustainability. But now there's a new view that maybe that's not the case. It can be done. And also, having more carbon in the soil improves biodiversity and improves water retention, which is obviously important in California. So there are a lot of ecological benefits.”

The Department of Agriculture estimates that 51% of the U.S. landmass is devoted to agriculture, so even small changes in growing practices could potentially have huge downstream effects.

“I think still one of the best ways to [fight climate change is to] have very healthy soil systems, which goes a little bit against the traditional way of growing food in an intensive way,” Fissore says. “That’s why there’s such a surge in work and studies on regenerative agriculture, not just organic, but really more like regenerative practices, because it’s more attuned with how nature should work. It keeps nutrients more in the soil, so there’s less of a need to fertilize. It brings more carbon and stores more carbon into the soil. And also it seems to relate to greater yields, better plant health, so it provides multiple benefits.”

Alcala says she and her mentor Fissore “both got into coffee around the same time and reconnected over that. She was studying carbon sequestration and got invited to be a consultant and study how intercropping coffee and avocado trees actually improve soil health and can act as a carbon sink.”

She and Fissore “fell down the rabbit hole” together. “You can look at every single discipline through the lens of coffee,” Alcala said. “You can look at it through history, science, biology, finance. It touches everything, and that's why it's such a relevant topic to teach students from all the disciplines.”

Even outside campus, the coffee grove is generating, well, buzz. Alcala continued, “I’m focusing my research on understanding the coffee plant and soil relationship, with the broad ecological system in mind. Growers are interested. The community seems intrigued by it. It's a very relatable crop and so it's a bit easier also to communicate our science when you're talking about something so tangible.”

In December 2018, Fissore launched the Whittier Coffee Initative by clearing ground for the Whittier Research Coffee Orchard. Sixty-four coffee plants are flanked by 20 avocado trees, which protect the coffee from wind and sun while also producing an edible crop. In 2022, the orchard yielded its first crop, 40 pounds of fresh cherries ready for the roaster. Fissore and her students produced the first research results from the orchard in October 2022. Last March, the San Francisco Bay Coffee Company produced the first cup of Whittier-grown java.

After a design and marketing competition in the spring funded by a $300,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the newly branded Greenleaf Coffee has been revealed for the first publicly available batch of coffee. The research is still in the early stages. Alcala is part of the team exploring how to expand the Whittier Coffee Initiative with new industry and science partners. Fissore sees the project as an example to her students of how to integrate Environmental Science into their lives and careers.

“If we understand the problems and we understand the science behind it, it's possible to develop solutions,” Fissore says. “But solutions are not all developed by scientists. Scientists need to work with psychologists, social scientists, political scientists, and more. And that's because we're dealing with human beings at the end of the day.”