Five years ago, I was winding my way along verdant Colombian mountains spotted with rows of coffee trees to collect data for my dissertation research. Every so often, I would stop at a small village square to conduct interviews with farmers who’d descended from their small plots of land.

While my objective was to gather information about climate change impacts on coffee farmers’ lives, following these interviews, something else stuck with me. At times, each farmer seemed to speak of his or her land with a kind of poetic mysticism. As if it were more than composite pieces of dirt and trees and air and water, but rather something sacred. The tendency was subtle yet prevalent….