Greenhouses as Vital Landscapes: Sustainability, Relationality, and the Future of Food

Greenhouses play a crucial role in Europe, ensuring the production of affordable vegetables, but they are under great pressure to change.

The EU is encouraging consumers to move towards a plant-based diet, necessitating an increase in horticultural productivity. Simultaneously, the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals include reducing land degradation and biodiversity loss.

Such pressures – including requirements to reduce chemical use in the Netherlands and water use in Spain, and social unrest about the exploitation of migrant workers – challenge the industrial model of production.

Using ethnographic methods, VITALGREENHOUSE will examine how greenhouse growers, workers, scientists, and environmental community groups are experimenting with sustainability.

In Spain and the Netherlands, both leaders in intensive greenhouse use, our team will study how different versions of sustainability are performed in the various and often competing practices of growing food, handling multispecies relations, and addressing workers’ rights.

The work is divided into four subprojects: (1) studying the multispecies relations of growers, pickers, and other non-human laborers such as pollinator bees, (2) investigating how growers and workers are adapting to or resisting ‘climate-intelligent agriculture’, a recent iteration of sustainability, (3) examining how greenhouses spark and sustain labour mobilities, creating novel ways of belonging forged through working in the greenhouse, and (4) historicising and contextualising current sustainability practices in the European greenhouse complex.

VITALGREENHOUSE will develop an innovative analytical framework that conceives of sustainability as a relational practice and theorises greenhouses as a vital landscapes.

Combining political ecology, science and technology studies, and decolonial thought, VITALGREENHOUSE will produce a new understanding of sustainability for environmental anthropology.