Beyond Recovery | 25, Issue 14
As we trundle into 2021, this second year of pandemic, the conversation has shifted from questions of management to those of recovery.
But is “recovery”—a return to the “old normal”—what we really want, or need? Recovery is rarely simple; it holds the potential to further bind us to what damaged us in the first place. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Spotlight, where Ray Mwareya and Nyasha Bhobo explore the complex history at the heart of Zimbabwe’s coffee collapse and current recovery efforts. And, as Jim Watson, Stacie Wan, Sudip Sinha, and Guilherme Morya explain in Insight, the pandemic only served to accelerate trends already in place: How can we hope to “return to normal” when “normal” has shifted so significantly?
What if, instead, we opted for “renewal”? We could start by asking whether we are using the right words to articulate our goals, as Erika Koss does in Viewpoint, and seeking to understand the rapidly changing landscape, as Katie von der Lieth outlines in Research. Unlike recovery, renewal makes room for building new approaches to solve the evolving challenges we face, like the profit sharing model Elizabeth Bennett and Janina Grabs introduce in Sustainability, while still leaving room for us to recommit to the things we hold dear.
How much do we stand to gain by moving beyond recovery?
JENN RUGOLO
Editor, 25
We hope you are as excited as we are about the release of 25, Issue 14. Both the print edition and the availability of these features across sca.coffee/news wouldn’t have been possible without our generous underwriting sponsors for this issue: Pacific Barista Series, BWT water+more, and Victoria Arduino. Thank you so much for your support! Learn more about our underwriters here.