In January, I joined a group of artists and researchers on a tour of industrial greenhouses in the Westland region of the Netherlands. The tour was organized by a Dutch foundation that aims to familiarize the public with the world of greenhouse horticulture. The Netherlands is a relatively small country, with a total area only about twice the size of the state of New Jersey. However, the country is now one the world’s largest produce exporters, thanks in part to climate-controlled greenhouse infrastructure, and in Westland, new greenhouse designs are being prototyped to retrofit rural spaces for intensive climate-proof agriculture.

Westland’s landscape is an eerie mix of the bucolic and the industrial. Its narrow roads are shared with cyclists; its landscape dotted with houses built along ditches and canals. These stand side by side with huge glass and steel greenhouse complexes. The terrain juxtaposes capitalist production facilities with well-kept domestic lawns.

Westland has long been an agricultural space, referred to as the “garden of Europe” in Dutch atlases and history books.¹ The region once produced grapes and other sundries for The Hague, Delft, and the English market. Greenhouses in Westland are not new. Glasshouses—the historical antecedent to the more controlled greenhouse—have brought vegetables into broader markets since the eighteenth century.² What is new here is an imaginary of Westland as a solution to the global food crisis through hyper-controlled indoor cultivation.

Thinking Through Tomatoes

The tomato is a year-round staple in Dutch supermarkets and beyond. Dutch consumption practices have come to depend upon the industrial stabilization of the tomato, unmooring it from seasonality and rendering it omnipresent in the supermarket.

On a cold day in February 2024, I visited a commercial tomato greenhouse facility of over twenty hectares (or about fifty acres). Tim was my host that day. An experienced manager of horticultural greenhouses, Tim is now retired, but he hasn’t been able to tear himself away from the world of greenhouses.

Visitors like me are potential carriers of disease and are rarely allowed inside tomato greenhouses. To protect the fragile ecology inside, we wash our hands with soap, dry them well, put on disposable overalls, cover our heads with disposable hats, disinfect the soles of our shoes, and cover them in plastic.

A walk inside the greenhouse makes the materiality of “climate” readily apparent. Greenhouse tomatoes grow not in soil but in a rockwool substrate, fed by nutrient-rich water solutions, and pollinated by bumblebee colonies sold by global biological control companies. Pink LED lights create a futuristic atmosphere while we move through rows and rows of tomato vines. Music plays loudly. The air is difficult to breathe. The greenhouse is sealed, with little ventilation, so that the heat stays trapped and stable inside. To stimulate plant growth, that same air is supplemented, via a pipeline from Rotterdam, with carbon dioxide—a by-product created by various petrochemical facilities.

“This heat is perfect for tomatoes, encouraging the fruit to ripen,” Tim explains. “We aim to mimic a mild subtropical climate, where the nights are a bit cold, around 15°C [59°F]. During the day, there’s lots of light,” hence the bright LEDs. During the day, “it’s good to reach 25–26°C [77–79°F]. That makes tomatoes very happy.” Growers carefully manage all these factors—light, air, humidity—to ensure optimal tomato growth. But even in these anthropogenic, monocropped ecologies, complexity abounds.

Take light. Tomatoes love light. Light serves as the energy source for photosynthesis, and its intensity and duration play a crucial role in plant growth and ripening. Under low-light conditions during the short days of the Dutch fall and winter, plant growth is hindered. Natural sunlight is not enough, so growers supplement it with artificial light. Up to eighteen hours a day of artificial light boosts tomato growth, but it also creates challenges for another vital greenhouse actor: the bumblebee. As Tim notes, “With the LED lighting, the bumblebees become confused and less active.” Fewer active bumblebees mean fewer pollinated flowers, and ultimately, less fruit. “The bumblebees weren’t flying well; they were getting disoriented and getting lost,” Tim explains.

Initially, the solution seemed simple: get more beehives. But as Tim pointed out, “Sure, we could bring in five times as many hives every week, but that’s not the goal.” Buying more commercial beehives would have been costly and wasteful. Instead, they discussed the problem with the biological control company that provided them with the hives. Together, they developed an automatic system to close the hives in the early afternoon, allowing the bumblebees to fly only in the morning. This protected them from the overstimulation and disorientation caused by the lights, which would otherwise lead to mass bumblebee death.

Tim and his colleagues also came up with a way to help the bumblebees navigate the huge greenhouse. Greenhouse workers hung yellow and black T-shirts on poles to guide the bumblebees back to their hives. On another of my visits, a representative from the biological control company explained how they had developed yet another solution for disorientation. They adorned new hives with a flower painted in the entrance which can only be seen with UV light—similar to the type of visual signal, invisible to humans, that bumblebees in the wild use to navigate. Now, the bumblebees can more easily locate the entrances to their hives and get some respite from the onslaught of the greenhouse environment.

Capitalist Ecologies

The biological and political intimacies of greenhouse infrastructure are evident in how care for different living organisms must be coordinated to maximize productivity. The Netherlands houses some of the world’s most powerful seed breeding and research companies, especially for tomatoes. This is no accident; it directly serves the needs of the massive indoor agriculture industry, to fight against the viral diseases, fungal infections, and pesticide resistance that imperil these fragile environments. This vulnerability drives the constant development of new seed varieties that can withstand pathogens—a race against financial and crop loss that threatens a highly profitable market for seed companies. Greenhouses are a capitalist frontier, but their very means of expansion—the carefully regulated indoor climate—produces new threats. Fungi and pests develop resistance to control measures. Bumblebees die. New pathogens emerge. But the business must go on.

Unlike more familiar climate-controlled interiors such as hospitals, office buildings, or shopping centers, greenhouses resist easy categorization. Situated in enclaves like Westland, they are detached from people’s everyday experiences, yet they remain vital to humans’ most essential everyday action: eating. Designed as a sealed “world interior,” the greenhouse simulates existing “natural” climates, but as capitalist and industrial goals intensify, that world becomes increasingly detached from any natural exterior. The techno-utopian vision of greenhouses is that climate-modulated interiors are the future of food production. While this may indeed be feasible, that doesn’t mean it’s unproblematic. The promise of limitless growth and replicability obscures labor demands, energy demands, and pesticide resistance. Such simplified ecologies are a new frontier in capitalism’s vision of endless expansion.

The fragility and complexity of the greenhouse highlight the ethical conundrums at the center of climate interiors. Which lives are worth supporting? Which vegetables are worth growing? The greenhouse reminds us not only of the financial and ecological stakes of climate engineering, but also of the limitations in thinking of climates as manageable interiors. The greenhouse is thus a paradigmatic space of interiorization—a zone where the ethical and practical complexities of a warming world are not erased, but rather thrown into stark relief. ⦿

1. Marcel IJsselstijn and Yvonne van Mil, Atlas van het Westland: 10.000 jaar ruimtelijke ontwikkeling (Uitgeverij Thoth, 2016); Jaap van Duijn, Geschiedenis van het Westland: van Romeinse nederzetting tot tuin van Europa (Amsterdam University Press, 2020). ↩︎
2. Luke Keogh, The Wardian Case: How a Simple Box Moved Plants and Changed the World (University of Chicago Press, 2022). ↩︎