Making the relationship between coffee drinkers and coffee farmers as intimate as the one between coffee drinkers and their favorite baristas is what the UW’s lecture series “Coffee: From the Grounds Up” is all about.

“There’s a tremendous interest [in Seattle] in the interaction between people and coffee,” said Josh Tewksbury, a UW associate professor of biology.

Tewksbury is part of a group of campus organizations that worked together to host the series.

“Coffee: From the Grounds Up” complements the Burke Museum’s exhibit, Coffee: The World in Your Cup, and was conceived as a conversation to “engage an audience, reaching beyond the campus, on an issue that crosses disciplinary lines in a real and interesting way,” Tewksbury said.

There is no other crop, he adds, that so directly connects the richest and poorest segments of global society. For that reason, coffee represented the best opportunity to begin this conversation.

The series spans eight weeks and covers topics within the coffee trade that include cultural concerns, sustainable development, ecology, Fair Trade practices and more.

The first lecture, last Tuesday, was an overview of coffee’s impact on the world since its discovery. The speaker, Mark Pendergrast, explored the history of coffee through its environmental, social, business, medical and economic impacts.

The demand for the lecture was much higher than anticipated, so much so that the organizers had to arrange for a larger room for this week’s lecture.

It was delivered last night by David Robinson, operator of Sweet Unity Farms, a coffee cooperative in Tanzania, and the son of baseball star Jackie Robinson.

Tewksbury described Robinson as “probably the most charismatic figure in coffee today, period.”

Robinson dropped out of Stanford University and moved to Tanzania in 1984. He started the farming cooperative in 1995 with 47 farms. Last year, when Sweet Unity reincorporated, it was made up of 765 families with more than 2,000 acres of coffee-producing land.

Coffee farming, though, was not why Robinson went to Tanzania; it was simply a convenient means to a greater end.

“I wanted to be involved in bridging the gap between the consuming nation I was born in and the producing nation I had moved to,” Robinson said. “Coffee was an excellent avenue for doing that.”

Robinson’s approach to coffee farming was unique; he believed that throwing money at a problem wouldn’t help if no one on site knew how to effectively manage the money in order to truly benefit the community. Tewksbury said that Robinson felt that “in order to have real development take place, anywhere, you have to be there, on location, working hard with and alongside the people there.”

So he left his life in Connecticut, bound for Tanzania and an opportunity to make a difference.

Here in Seattle, Tewksbury said, we have beliefs about what people everywhere deserve, but we rarely think much about what goes into getting us our cup of coffee.

“Seattle prides itself on being forward thinking, environmentally savvy, culturally aware and globally minded,” he said, “but sometimes, we just don’t understand what that means. What, really, is this black brew we consume because we love to stay awake?”

Tewksbury stressed that the focus of this series is to have a conversation about what makes a good and ethical cup of coffee. Some people, he said, are more concerned with being organic and friendly to the environment: protecting lakes and rivers from production waste and keeping non-organic additives from being used on the plants. Others are more concerned with the social aspects: supporting the farmers, giving them fair opportunities and treating them well.

“No other commodity is as labeled, and these labels don’t have anything to do with the quality of the product,” he said. “When you buy coffee, do you really know what it means that it’s fair trade? Organic? Direct trade? These are just a couple of the labels we use, and this lecture series represents them all.”

Over the remaining six weeks of the series, there will be four more lectures, given by experts in fields ranging from business to anthropology to ecology. The final two weeks will be panel discussions with representatives of, first, some of the Northwest’s local coffee brewers, and then representatives of Starbucks describing how they see the future of the coffee trade and what practices they employ in the interests of organic, Free Trade and other origin-conscious coffee.

“It’s an interesting place for coffee sellers to be,” said Tewksbury. “People are willing to pay for the knowledge that what they’re buying is helping create a better life for people they’ll never meet, and that means that sellers can be more conscientious about what they buy because they know it can sell.”

In a way, he added, it’s like a global social experiment.

“It forces us to ask how we value the lives of people globally,” he said. “It expands the definition of the word ‘neighbor.’”

In the end, Tewksbury said, he just wants people to be aware of the effects their way of life has on a broader scale, to get them thinking about their choices.

“And,” he said, “coffee represents one of the best opportunities to reach those goals.”

Reach features editor Randy Ferreiro at features@dailyuw.com.