Semi-closed greenhouses have been developed in which window ventilation is minimized due to active cooling, enabling enhanced CO2 concentrations at high irradiance. Cooled and dehumidified air is blown into the greenhouse from below or above the canopy. Cooling below the canopy may induce vertical temperature gradients along the length of the plants. Our first aim was to analyze the effect of the positioning of the inlet of cooled and dehumidified air on the magnitudes of vertical temperature and VPD gradients in the semi-closed greenhouses. The second aim was to investigate the effects of vertical temperature gradients on assimilate production, partitioning, and fruit growth. Tomato crops were grown year-round in four semiclosed greenhouses with cooled and dehumidified air blown into the greenhouses from below or above the crop. Cooling below the canopy induced vertical temperature and VPD gradients. The temperature at the top of the canopy was over 5°C higher than at the bottom, when outside solar radiation was high (solar radiation >250 J cm-2 h-1). Total dry matter production was not affected by the location of the cooling (4.64 and 4.80 kg m-2 with cooling from above and from below, respectively). Percentage dry matter partitioning to the fruits was 74% in both treatments. Average over the whole growing season the fresh fruit weight of the harvested fruits was not affected by the location of cooling (118 vs 112 g fruit-1). However, during summer period the average fresh fruit weight of the harvested fruits in the greenhouse with cooling from below was higher than in the greenhouse with cooling from above (124 vs 115 g fruit-1).
According to the critics of conventional sustainability models, particularly within the business context, it is questionable whether the objective of balancing the social, economic and environmental triad is feasible, and whether human equality and prosperity (as well as population growth) can be achieved with the present rate of natural degradation (Rees 2009). The current scale of human economic activity on Earth is already excessive; finding itself in a state of unsustainable ‘overshoot’ where consumption and dissipation of energy and material resources exceed the regenerative and assimilative capacity of supportive ecosystems (Rees 2012). Conceptualizing the current ‘politics of unsustainability’, reflected in mainstream sustainability debates, Blühdorn (2011) explores the paradox of wanting to ‘sustain the unsustainable, noting that the socio-cultural norms underpinning unsustainability support denial of the gravity of our planetary crises. This denial concerns anything from the imminence of mass extinctions to climate change. As Foster (2014) has phrased it: ‘There was a brief window of opportunity when the sustainability agenda might, at least in principle, have averted it’. That agenda, however, has failed. Not might fail, nor even is likely to fail – but has already failed. Yet, instead of acknowledging this failure and moving on from the realization of the catastrophe to the required radical measures, the optimists of sustainable development and ecological modernization continue to celebrate the purported ‘balance' between people, profit and planet. This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in "A Future Beyond Growth: Towards a Steady State Economy" on 4/14/16 ,available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315667515 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
MULTIFILE
Scientific research from within and beyond academia continues to provide the justification and the knowledge for policy developments directed toward migration and integration governance. A proliferation of scholarship aims to study, pilot, and investigate the ‘best practices’ for facilitating integration, which is then taken up in advice to policy makers. Many authors have written about this science-policy nexus (Boswell 2009; Penninx, Garcés-Mascareñas, and Scholten 2005; Scholten et al. 2015; Verbeek, Entzinger, and Scholten 2015) These works have also engaged in critical reflection, problematizing this nexus and demonstrating how funding structures draw researchers not only into addressing short-term policy goals, but also into reproducing some of the essentialist worldviews that come with methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) and the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Yet, the colonial legacies and dis/continuities of these logics in integrationism have not received much attention so far.The paper takes a critical lens on the implications of the science-policy complicity in reproducing colonial logics of ‘cultural distance’, based on perspectives and empirical research from different national (Netherlands and Switzerland) and supra-national (EU) contexts. We analyse texts which shape the civic integration programme in the Netherlands, the genealogy of the integration requirement to respect the values of the constitution in Switzerland, and the EU framework on migrant integration. This combined analysis brings forth the role scientists and knowledge producers play in (re)producing the colonial logics within integrationism, and their contributions to the regime of truth within which integration discourse operates. Throughout this article, we draw on examples from these different contexts to display that integration and its migranticized (Dahinden 2016) subjects are constructed through practices deemed as scientific or objective expertise, building on important work by Schinkel (2018) on integration research as “neocolonial knowledge production” and Favell’s (2022) critical reflections on integration indicator frameworks. As we demonstrate, the “idea of integration as an issue of cultural distance is rendered imaginable in and through colonial legacies and scientific practices from which policy draws legitimacy. We show how cultural distance is produced in the scientification of migrants’ assimilability in a ‘Western work ethic’, in measurement of migrants’ adherence to liberal values, and through constructions of integration drawing on social imaginaries of national and European identity. Importantly, we argue that by presenting this cultural distance as a product of objective, scientific processes of empirical observation, the notion of cultural distance is normalised and depoliticized, which ultimately legitimizes integrationism as a mode of governance.The present study builds on important contributions (by Schinkel 2017; Favell 2022; Korteweg 2017; Bonjour and Duyvendak 2017, and others) in attempting to destabilize the normalization of integrationism as the widely accepted mode of governance of ‘immigrant’ or ‘ethnic’ populations and their inherent and problematic ‘distance’. The content and structure of this summer school in post-colonial Amsterdam would allow us to continue our critical reflexive discussions to better understand the colonial logics at play and how they operate in multiple contexts and at multiple levels of governance, in and beyond integration
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