The Intersection of Tea and Ecology
How Holistic Thinking and Sustainability
Relate to Tea Culture
Tea and ecology have rich and fascinating intersections.
What is Ecology?
I'd hope that we all know what tea is. Ecology, on the other hand, is something that most people have slightly less familiarity with. For many people, the word "ecology" conjures up thoughts of environmentalism, often a political sort of activism. But ecology is not a political movement or ideology--it is a field of science, notably, the branch of science that studies collections of biological organisms.
Ecology is informed by biology without being strictly a sub-field of biology. It is characterized by more systems thinking and holistic thinking. That is, instead of explaining every aspect of an ecosystem in terms of smaller components (the way biologists appeal to chemistry and chemists appeal to physics as the grounding of their subject), ecosystems are only fully understood when one looks at them as a coherent whole.
The Ecology of Tea Production
The very nature of tea is inherently ecological: tea is produced from the leaves of a plant, Camellia sinensis. Camellia sinensis has a fascinating ecology of its own, and the commercial production of tea also touches on many issues relating to environment and sustainability.
Commercial tea production often involves the use of synthetic pesticides, which can have negative impacts both on the environment and on human health. Fertilizers used to replenish the plants' nutrient stores can also run off into waterways, causing nutrient pollution downstream. Organic certification is a step in this direction, but some tea growers have gone further, incorporating biodynamic practices and practices of sustainable permaculture, to grow tea in a more environmentally friendly way that is both economically feasible and creates a top-quality product.
Holistic Thinking and Tea Culture, Business, and Industry
The holistic approach characteristic of ecology can be applied to tea culture in a variety of ways. A lot of tea drinkers buy their tea, drink it, and that's the end of the story.
A holistic approach to tea purchasing, on the other hand, looks at all the impacts that the purchase of tea has on society. This includes how the tea is produced, including both environmental and human rights issues associated with its production, as well as how the tea is packaged, shipped, and marketed. A holistic-thinking tea drinker will be concerned not only with the quality and price of the tea, but with the portion of the price that reaches the original producers, and with whether or not the tea has been produced in an environmentally-sound method.
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