Green Asia Ecocultures, Sustainable Lifestyles, and Ethical Consumption

“Relying on Heaven” 55

conceptualized as an alternative technological lineage to intensive, mechanized,
fertilizer- and pesticide-heavy styles of tea production that might otherwise prevail
(Chen and Lin 2001, pp. 64–5). “Natural” approaches to tea growing pare human
intrusion back to a bare minimum, allowing the tea field “ecosystem” ever-greater
influence over the eventual quality and yield of each season’s crop. It is for this
reason that teas produced in this fashion are commonly marketed as “eco-tea” (生
態茶 shengtai cha), an appellation that has come to define a kind of uber-organic
niche within Taiwan’s domestic tea market (Lin n.d.).
By attenuating their power over the tea’s development, tea farmers submit
more directly to the contingency and caprice of the natural world. Keeping a space
open in their fields for the play of non-human agencies admits not only the small
green leaf hoppers but an entire “ecosystem” of potential allies and adversaries,
some of which can critically impact the quality and yield of their harvests. Mr.
Lin summarizes succinctly the dilemma that tea farmers like him face, saying that,

If you want honey aroma, you must have insect damage. And if you want

insect damage you need to [follow] the old methods of cultivation; you can’t

use pesticides or fertilizers. [But] then you are going to have a lower yield.

Having relinquished more powerful means of control in the pursuit of zhuoyan,
tea farmers thus learn to live with the risk of their tea being wiped out. Zhang
emphasizes that

There’s nothing you can do to stop insect-damage, it’s up to them (隨便它

suibian ta)... In terms of the ecosystem, there are a lot of things happening

that I am not able to control. For example, there’s a bug called the “tea

mosquito bug” (盲椿蟓 mang chun xiang) [Helopeltis fasciaticollis Poppius],

they go through your fields like cars up a highway; within two or three days

they’ve eaten everything. And then there’s no tea left to pick.

To farm tea “naturally” is to do without the safety net of modern agro-science.
Instead, one must adopt a stance of relying on heaven. Zhang sketches what this
means to him:

[W]hen you are “relying on heaven”, heaven is going to give you what it does

and you have to accept that. You take it year by year... So I am a person

without goals... When you are “relying on heaven,” what’s the point of

having a goal? I don’t know what the “goal” could be. You can only dream:

if each year my tea fields could produce thirty or fifty jin of that really top

grade tea with a good degree of zhuoyan, wow, that would be really amazing!

To “rely on heaven” is, in this sense, to open tea production to the chance
interactions of the tea-field ecosystem, signaled by the distinction between
the goal-directed behavior of the mainstream tea farmer and the open-ended
“dreaming” of the natural farming practitioner.