This dissertation study is a controlled comparison between a Han Chinese farming community engaging in an energy crop cultivation project and an indigenous Amis community practicing organic farming in Taiwan. Through investigation of cultural traditions and historical studies of interactions with agricultural specialists, I examine how these two groups’ conceptualizations of the environment have been shaped.
My main argument is that Han Chinese and indigenous Amis farmers have developed different "environmental identities" based on differing historical memories, political economy, and cultural practices as they have responded to past events and contemporary state policies. Han Chinese farmers have engaged in large-scale collective farming which has equipped them with the ability to consider farming as a scientific operation driven primarily by market values. For Amis, difficulty of access to state resources and changing attitudes towards traditional farming knowledge has led to organic farming as a new path for their engagement with the environment. The key factors for understanding these environmental identities, I argue, are disparate exposure to technological treatments of the environment and the operational concepts of property (tangible or intellectual) and knowledge (situated or articulated). The new environmental identities are shaped by historical events and technological introductions as culturally specified trajectories. Further explorations through farming experiences and discourses reveal that the reception of new initiatives is critically related to farmers’ personal engagement and institutional empowerment as the consequences of scale-making process. In a practical sense, this project indicates why an understanding of historical memories and cultural meanings of technology are crucial to successful development efforts.