This story was originally published by Canary Media and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Canary Media’s ​“Eating the Earth” column explores the connections between the food we eat and the climate we live in.

Not so long ago, the Central Highlands of Vietnam were blanketed by forests so dense they blotted out the sun. The American soldiers who slogged through the area during the Vietnam War complained about leeches, mosquitoes, and snakes, but those triple-canopy jungles also teemed with tigers, elephants, and monkeys. The unrelenting darkness and tropical monsoons that made the highland woodlands so inhospitable to humans made them excellent habitat for wildlife.

But now they’re blanketed by coffee farms.

Sorry to be a buzzkill, but your morning buzz kills nature. Agriculture is by far the leading driver of deforestation, and coffee is the sixth-leading driver of agricultural deforestation; coffee farms are also parching the aquifers and ravaging the soils they’ll need to sustain future harvests. A new report by the nonprofit Coffee Watch documents that in Vietnam, which grows about one of every five coffee beans on Earth, about half a million acres of Central Highlands forest have been cleared for coffee since 1990, an area the size of Luxembourg. There are no longer any wild tigers in the region, and very few elephants; the saola, an adorable local antelope known as the ​“Asian unicorn,” is feared to be extinct.

Again, I apologize for being a Debbie Downer. But while it’s fairly common knowledge that carbon-belching coal plants and gas-guzzling SUVs are environmental menaces, people should know that our diets also degrade our planet, causing most global water shortages, nutrient pollution, and habitat destruction while generating a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture has overrun nearly half of our habitable land, and it replaces more forests, wetlands, and other wildlands every day. That’s why I wrote ​“We Are Eating the........

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