Coffee’s Powerful Nudge: Caffeine, Crisis, and the Regenerative Solution

About this episode

This episode explores the resilience of coffee as a plant and its journey through modern production challenges.

Guests: Etelle Higonnet (Director, Coffee Watch) • Sebastian Nielsen (CEO, Slow Forest) • Andrés Montenegro (Sustainability Director, Specialty Coffee Association) What if your daily cup of coffee is actually a masterclass in resilience? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal takes us deep into coffee's origin story — back to a plant that learned to survive through a brilliant strategy: the nudge. Coffee's caffeine was nature's quiet genius: a molecule that repels what harms, attracts what helps, and shapes an ecosystem through subtle influence. From the Congo Basin to the mountains of Yemen, from pirate seed heists to "penny universities," and from industrial monocrops to regenerative agroforestry, this is a sweeping story about biology, behavior, and the choices that shape the world beneath our rituals. Joined by three powerful voices — from human rights advocacy to regenerative supply chains to specialty coffee leadership — Jessica explores how the coffee industry got pulled into extractive, short-term systems… and how it can be nudged back toward resilience.

People in this episode

Host: Jessica Morgenthal

Guests: Etelle Higonnet, Sebastian Nielsen, Andrés Montenegro

Topics covered

• coffee
• resilience
• agroforestry
• sustainability
• ecosystem
• caffeine

Keywords

• caffeine
• coffee industry
• regenerative agriculture
• monoculture
• sustainability
• ecosystem services

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Coffee Watch, Slow Forest, Specialty Coffee Association

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