Tax incentives to utility companies to encourage them to use environmentally clean energy such as solar or wind power. Shift money from new highways and roads to buses and commuter railways. Carl Pope, writing in the Sierra Club magazine notes that while people and corporations have standing in court, trees, streams, valleys and wildlife don't. To this day, environmental groups go to court on behalf of their members, not the wild places they seek to save. The New England regional office of the American Friends Service Committee is selling fairly traded coffee after its religious meetings.
Coffee is the second most traded commodity on earth after oil.
Americans drink one third of all coffee produced worldwide. The farmers who grow the beans often subsist below poverty and in a perpetual cycle of debt. The AFSC is working with Equal Exchange, which deals directly with coffee growers. Farmers are paid a guaranteed minimum. Small farmers' coops sell directly to Equal Exchange, which in turn, distributes the coffee.