ABSTRACT
Biodiversity, agriculture, and social movements are the components of our argument, as discussed in previous chapters. With each of those issues, we peppered our discussion with particular examples. However, such peppering may have left the reader with a sense that the real world conforms to our perspective only in these anecdotal ways. In this and the next two chapters, we offer three extensive case studies. The first, the coffee agroecosystem, we discuss as an example of how an agroecosystem can be constructed in different ways and how that construction indeed does affect biodiversity. We choose this example partly because we have extensive experience doing research in the coffee agroecosystems of Central America, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, but mainly because, probably more than any other agroecosystem, a wealth of data are available on the consequences of management intensity for biodiversity.
