Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors
Abstract
Urban landscapes are created, in part, from living materials and are shaped by human use and care. Human actions of maintenance and stewardship produce and sustain designed environments over time. Like other care labor, this work is physical, ongoing, and requires specific local knowledge, yet it is often considered ‘unskilled’ labor. Recent discourse in landscape architecture and planning has highlighted the role of land care work in addressing the impacts of climate change and biodiversity loss, while creating ‘green jobs.’ This article aims to identify opportunities and particular approaches for creating meaningful social change through stewardship activities. The article begins by situating urban cultivation work in the political context of the United States. The narratives around land care labor and its perceived value are different depending on who is doing the work and how they are compensated. That is, recreational gardening on private land may be framed as self-care, while paid landscape maintenance is predominantly performed for low wages by immigrant workers and people of color. Another category, political gardening, frames the work of generous volunteers as a contribution to social change, though the political impact of this work requires additional efforts of advocacy. Building on this assessment, the article introduces three projects of political gardening. The author aims to illustrate sustained approaches to reimagining human relationships with the land, while advocating for policies that support our shared environment and the labor that cares for it.
Citation: Hansen,Maggie. “Green Thumbs: The Politics and Precarity of Land Care Labors” The Jugaad Project, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2023, www.thejugaadproject.pub/green-thumbs [date of access]
Image 1: The work of landscape maintenance is skilled and ongoing. image credit: author
Introduction
Urban landscapes are hard workers. As environmental infrastructure, parks, streetscapes, public and private gardens clean the air, filter water, offer shade, and absorb carbon dioxide. Landscapes are ecological and dynamic, offering habitat to living creatures (including humans). Landscapes are also cultural and political products, reflecting the values and priorities of those in positions to shape them, and in turn shaping the activities of everyday life. In the last decade, a discourse around the importance of landscape labor has emerged (Terremoto 2020) in landscape architecture. This is fueled by conversations about essential labor in other care industries, the mounting impacts of climate change on urban life, and the renewed interest in landscape-based strategies for mitigating it. Just as we value landscape space, we must value the labor and laborers who tend to their care. The process of professionalizing the field of landscape architecture created a separation between the (white collar) designers and the (blue collar) workers who construct and care for these spaces (Franco 2022). In addition to increasing the conditions for exploitation, this separation of labor created barriers to knowledge exchange.
Landscape architects create the vision for a public space and meet with funders and city officials to inform financial support and maintenance processes. Landscape architects have very little interaction with the landscapers who understand the nuances of a particular location, the plants that thrive under adverse conditions, and the problems that arise from certain design ideas. For landscape architecture, this disconnect prevents essential knowledge from improving design replicability and scalability. For designers and activists interested in contributing to social and environmental activism, elevating the value of land care labor offers an opportunity for political change and a reimagining of human relationships with their environments. This article builds on research in human geography, environmental humanities and feminist philosophy to understand landscape labor as care work and engages ideas from sociology to understand the efficacy of land care’s potential as political action—it concludes with three recent models of political gardening initiatives.
Imaging Landscape Labor (a note on this article’s images)
Landscape architects are trained to explore and communicate ideas through drawing and imagemaking. Drawings are used to understand existing conditions, to interpret other designer’s work, and to advocate to our clients. To understand a streetscape design proposal, a series of drawings might show how individual trees are expected to grow together into a unified canopy. The conventions of design drawings frame a designer’s attention. If it is important within the design, it is typically expected to appear in the drawing set. Landscape scholar Michelle Franco notes that landscape architecture images and drawings seldom illustrate human figures at work constructing or caring for a landscape. She proposes that landscape architects use visual representation as a means of “reaffirming the social connection between design and labor” (2022: 95). The images illustrating this article were developed as part of an ongoing project to take this charge seriously. Through collage and digital drawing tools, the author worked with a graduate research assistant to develop drawings that depict the ongoing actions of stewardship in community garden initiatives. Selections are included here to make visible, and celebrate, the social dimension of landscape labor.
Image 2: Landscape maintenance is social. Even a solo gardener is in conversation with the plants she tends. Image: author and Loren Almendarez
Landscape Labor as Care
For millennia, humans have shaped their environments to suit their needs and desires. Human agency is necessary to create safe, meaningful, and functional landscapes. This includes actions of construction: shaping the earth, removing undesired plants, adding desirable ones, carving out views, placing structures, etc.; landscapes are made partly of living things (plants, soil microbiology, creatures) and require consistent and skilled actions of maintenance, gardening, and cultivation (land care) to sustain them. Political scientist Joan Tronto describes care-work as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web” (1994: 19). Care ethics, defined by feminist philosophers, challenges the separation between public and private life, and calls for the recognition and revaluing of the skilled and essential labor of caretaking. Philosopher Virginia Held (2006) frames care as a social relation, in which an understanding of the self is not individual but constituted in relation to other beings. Caring is reciprocal: throughout our lives, we all need care and give care to others. Philosopher Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) extends the ethics of care to acknowledge that nonhuman species also perform actions of care, which benefit themselves and other beings.
Land care comprises the work of sustaining the health of the soil, plants, and creatures that inhabit a landscape. Like other carework, land care is shaped by its specific context, but the general concerns of each landscape are the same. Each plant needs healthy soil with the right amount of drainage, just enough and not too much sunlight, appropriate and consistent water, and the space below and above ground to grow. Plants live in close relation with their environment. Plant roots and nutrient cycles transform the soil and their growth shades surrounding areas. Through their lives, they change their surrounding habitat, and also must adapt to the changes caused by neighboring plants’ growth. A skilled caretaker notices signals of distress, tends to those needs, and checks back for the desired response—growth, blossoming, fruiting. (An even more skilled caretaker works in dialogue with the plants, as collaborators and co-designers.) Many tasks of caring for planted spaces are repetitive: pulling weeds, clearing debris, raking leaves, digging holes and filling them, adding compost, watering, checking for insects and treating them, pruning, watering again, placing mulch or winter coverings, collecting seeds, etc. Carework is iterative. That is, through repetition, the worker becomes more attuned to the particularities of this site and these plants, and knowledge and intuition are refined. The work is informed, continuously, by its social and ecological context. There is a benefit to having the same crew return to a site, bringing the knowledge they’ve gained from previous work there to bear.
The Invisibility of Landscape Labor
Like other care work, the labor is undervalued, invisible, and precarious. When paid, the work is subject to exploitation. Though it is skilled and essential, land care work is classified as a “janitorial” profession by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Geffel 2020). Often it is physically demanding, performed in a range of weather, and performed by a racialized workforce who may be subject to exploitation and unsafe working conditions. In Texas and California, roughly 70% of gardeners and groundskeepers are immigrants, many of whom are undocumented (Eckstein & Peri 2018, Franco 2022).
Funding for park maintenance and growth has stagnated or decreased, with significant shortfalls resulting in deferred maintenance with impacts on park quality that compound over time, according to a report by the Trust for Public Land. The National Recreation and Park Association estimates that deferred maintenance needs for US city parks totals $65 billion (Foderaro 2022, Klein 2022). Location and quality of public park space is an issue of equity. Landscapes take time to grow and care to maintain; the impact of disinvestment compounds over time. Patterns of inequity in the quality of urban landscapes parallel the US history of racially discriminatory housing practices. Tree canopy cover is significantly lower in formerly redlined neighborhoods; class D (hazardous) neighborhoods had 20.8% on average, compared to 40.1% coverage in neighborhoods that had been rated class A (Nowak et al 2022). The Trust for Public Land found that in 2021, people of color had 44% less park acreage in their neighborhood than white residents, with similar disparities measured across low-income and high-income populations. And while in many cities, the landscape maintenance workers are predominantly Latinx, their neighborhoods have the least access to green space. These disparities in investment may be intensified by the maintenance of the park spaces that do exist. From 2008-2011, the sociologists John Krinsky and Maud Simonet interviewed workers in New York City parks to understand the relationship between workforce changes and the city’s efforts to capitalize on public space. Among other findings, their study confirmed that parks in high-income neighborhoods were more likely to have some form of privatized landscape maintenance, such as a park conservancy or special designation of services such as a fixed post park worker. In addition to greater control over the work performed, this typically meant a consistent workforce would return to the same site, allowing the workers to build more specialized knowledge of the site’s needs over time and to build a relationship with the residents who used the space. Interviews revealed that the key difference was that high-income neighborhoods had the time and political clout to advocate for a fixed maintenance worker and to participate in activities of a park conservancy (Krinsky and Simonet 2017).
As a hobby or individual pursuit on private land, gardening in the United States is again experiencing a resurgence. The 2023 National Gardening Survey estimated that 80% of American households participated in lawn care and gardening activities in 2022. The survey noted a seven percent increase in first-time gardeners during the pandemic. Among the reasons for gardening, respondents listed mental health benefits, exercise, and time with family. While the study includes simple tasks of yard maintenance, articles in the New York Times and Curbed tout gardening as a form of self-care and an antidote to loneliness and climate grief (Foo 2021, Nosrat 2020). In the United States, urban garden programs have emerged at times of economic hardship and war, as ways for citizens to contribute. The response to the early 19th century tenement conditions included the children’s school garden movement and vacant lot cultivation associations. Civic garden campaigns, relief and subsistence gardens were promoted during the 1930s depression, and gardening was marketed as a contribution to the efforts of World War I and World War II (Lawson 2005). Gardening demonstrates belief in a future. Even though war, poverty and social strife are beyond the power of any individual, gardening offers the promise of tangible, local impacts (Hou et al. 2009).
Promoting volunteer stewardship can be a means of justifying decreased support for paid, skilled workers. The rise of park conservancy, job training programs, and volunteer stewardship initiatives further complicates our understanding of the investment in public land and its care. In New York City, park workers were among the first labor groups to sign a union contract with the city. Private park conservancies are able to hire landscape maintenance workers to do similar jobs, without the restrictions or benefits associated with union agreements. This can make conservancy positions less costly over time. Discount maintenance labor in the form of temporary job training workers and volunteer stewards often replicates existing social differences. Volunteers are primarily white and high-income and are given tasks of plant care, mulching—the interesting, aesthetic, and less physically demanding work to ensure their donated time is joyful. This means that job training workers and park maintenance personnel, who are predominantly lower-income people of color, take on the dirty, dangerous, or demeaning tasks of trash clean up, bathroom maintenance, and heavy machinery operation (Krinsky and Simonet 2017). While all these tasks are necessary labor, this division compounds existing inequalities and further erodes funding and consistency of park care.
Perceptions and Measures of Land Care’s Value
Public landscapes, as spaces of social and environmental infrastructure, require maintenance that considers the health and aesthetics of plantings, as well as issues of safety, public health and liability. Landscape space provides essential services and value to urban life. Access to landscape space improves human health, physically and psychologically (Heerwagen 2009). While particular benefits are present for large landscapes, such as Central Park, where we might feel immersed in nature, many benefits for mental health arise simply from a view to a tree or a terrace of potted plants (Kuo 2010). Urban landscapes are critical for mitigating the impacts of climate change and for slowing biodiversity loss. Tools like the US Green Building Council’s SITES Initiative create guidelines for sustainable designs that mitigate the urban heat island effect, absorb and slow flood waters, and hold space for biodiversity (SITES 2021).
Investment in landscape spaces brings economic benefits to a city, reflected in increased property values, but only if they are well-maintained (Crompton 2020). Landscape scholar Joan Nassauer’s (1997) surveys of midwestern residents illustrated the role of design for perceptions of beauty in more ecologically robust plantings. Respondents were more receptive to “messy ecosystem plantings” when framed by visual evidence of human intention or “cues to care,” such as a mown edge or a planter of flowers. Consistent maintenance is necessary for a landscape to provide the environmental functions they are designed for: to keep trash from clogging water filtration swales, to prevent invasive species from taking over planting beds, or to remove diseased plants.
Landscape theorist Elizabeth Meyer notes the importance of “experiences of certain kinds of beauty [as a] necessary component for fostering a sustainable community” (2008: 9). Aesthetic experiences are created and sustained through skilled care of designed landscapes. Attention to care may offer new (or recover old) aesthetic experiences. Landscape architect Michael Geffel (2020) has demonstrated how designing a process of mowing can create novel ecologies and dynamic aesthetics. His work builds on Julian Raxworthy’s (2018) analysis of landscapes created and shaped over long periods of time through actions of pruning, ongoing building, seasonal planting, and open-ended processes that are made visible through design.
Relational Values in Land Care
Care of the environment is typically framed in relation to three values: ecological health, economic return, and aesthetic beauty. These principles describe the relationship between human beings and the environment as instrumental and unidirectional. Considering landscape labor as care-work recognizes the two-directional relationship of interconnection within our environment and makes space for other worldviews and ways of living. Relational values are given a distinctive ethical slant as “relations that are constitutive of the good life, that is a life worthy of a human being, in which not merely surviving, but flourishing can be achieved” (Jax et al 2018: 23). The actions of caring for landscape may hold cultural or personal significance, not quantifiable as a utilitarian means to an end. For example, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), who is of Potawatomi ancestry, describes kin-based relationships with plant relatives and a recognition that plants have their own agency. Within these interconnected relationships, the sustenance and support humans receive from the environment are gifts, and human practices of reciprocating those gifts to the nonhuman world are important. Biologist Kurt Jax (et al. 2018) argue(s) that recognizing the relational value of caring for the environment allows the consideration of a wider range of practices, and a focus on the quality of interactions between humans and the environment. “From a relational perspective, a caring relationship between humans and nature is intrinsically valuable and therefore desirable” (Jax et al. 2018: 25).
The Potential of Political Gardening
Landscapes shape our everyday lives. As expressions of culture, they reflect the values of those with access to the power to shape them; landscapes are political and cultural products (Cosgrove 1984). While not all land care initiatives serve political ends, they hold a potential for modeling collectivity as a form of sociality. Political gardening describes land care initiatives with mission framed around issues of social justice and policy activism (Kato et al 2013). Through political garden programs, residents can reimagine and reclaim underutilized urban spaces, as sites of cultivation, leisure, beauty, and civic participation. As urban greening, these efforts can bring increased property values, ecological benefits, and satisfaction in a visible transformation. However, the impacts for neighborhood residents tend to replicate existing social hierarchies, building social and ecological resources in communities that have not suffered disinvestment and social fragmentation.
Sociologist Yuki Kato’s survey of garden initiatives in New Orleans explored which initiatives were able to sustain a political agenda and engagement with local communities across a decade of work (Kato et al. 2013). Those that sustained the political aspect of their work had clear and ongoing processes for engaging the social aspects of the initiative with attentive stewardship. The care-work of political gardening must actively take on efforts of community organizing, self-reflexive processes to engage marginalized residents, and an ongoing awareness of the political climate within which they operate. Attending to the political conversations surrounding landscape space and its care can take multiple forms: built work that aims to shift our imagination of what is possible, social practices that bring together diverse stakeholders, or constituencies that might be formed by sharing administrative resources. The following examples aim to illustrate how these approaches have been used in three projects of political gardening.
Image 3: Test Plot celebrates a shared, open, and reciprocal land care ethic. Image: Loren Almendarez and author
Modeling Alternative Aesthetics and their Ecological Performance
Landscape architecture has often used prototypes or built models to call attention to issues by creating a heightened aesthetic experience. These built models can be monitored and the resulting data helps to advocate for the alternative approaches. Test Plot is an initiative designed to demonstrate the potential for re-establishing native plant ecology in public space while celebrating the role of human labor in stewarding our environment. Public parks in Los Angeles are among the public spaces that have suffered from decades of disinvestment and deferred maintenance. As a result, invasive grasses and ornamental exotics have taken over and choke out ecologically beneficial species. Test Plot is an initiative designed to demonstrate the potential for re-establishing native plant ecology in public space while celebrating the role of human labor in stewarding our environment. After learning that city arborists planned to plant exotic species on public land in anticipation of increased drought conditions, landscape architects at the design studio Terremoto set out to demonstrate an alternative. They teamed up with landscape architect Jen Toy to develop a replicable method for claiming and tending native garden experiments across the city (and in degraded public spaces in other cities). Partnering with local nonprofits, they secured permission to install “temporary gardens,” in public spaces. Each experiment is documented with field notes on inputs (labor, water, seeds or live plants, mulch) and outputs (soil health, pollinator species, plant growth). The sites are tended by community volunteers, students, and designers who form rituals around the installation and care, while learning from observations at each site. Test Plot offers new insight into best practices for designers and policymakers. The work is social and brings together residents passionate about contributing to the care of the city. As volunteer labor, their work is focused on providing viable alternative planting regimes to expand the public imagination of future landscape design in parks. Paired with data on the intensity of care required, the test plots are living, physical examples of ecological benefits.
Image 4: The Gowanus Canal Conservancy demonstrates that an industrial neighborhood is an environment worthy of sustained care. Image: author and Loren Almendarez
Social Equity through Land Care Practices
One example of how land stewardship practice can support advocacy on issues of equity is in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood. The Gowanus watershed provided essential resources for building the city of New York. The salt marsh lowlands once supported farming and oyster harvests, then a tidal mill, commercial shipping, and industrial production. The neighborhood suffers from the legacy of industrial pollution and ongoing contamination through combined sewage overflows and street flooding. The Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC) was formed in 2006 to advocate for the health of the watershed. This nonprofit’s work includes the care and maintenance of the neighborhood’s public realm through city maintenance contracts, volunteer workdays, and neighborhood greening events. These activities allow the GCC employees to monitor the success of different design and planting strategies, environmental conditions, and to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to the neighborhood and its residents. Their place-based environmental stewardship builds connections across local constituencies of residents and allows the organization to contribute to the intersecting social justice issues of the neighborhood. Paid positions on the GCC Green Team employ local high school students in leading education and stewardship events, while building connections to local families. The GCC works in coordination with Gowanus Neighborhood Coalition for Justice as opportunities to bring the many communities associated with a site into dialogue about its future. A native plant nursery offers a chance to engage institutional partners in building out the local native ecology, while regular sales of native plants bring neighborhood gardeners to the site. Tours, grade school curricula, and citizen science events expand knowledge of the GCC’s work and create opportunities to call multigenerational participants to action around local environmental justice work. Like other conservancies, the GCC’s work is done by paid employees and volunteers, who elevate the level of care provided. While most conservancies focus on a discrete park or garden, the GCC invites us to imagine an industrial neighborhood’s public realm as worthy of attention, advocacy, and skilled stewardship.
Stewarding Economic Resilience
The GCC can sustain the work of maintaining the landscapes in their care and effectively advocate for appropriate clean up and equitable investment in the neighborhood because they have a full-time staff. The staff ensures consistency of training for the Green Team, maintains relationships with local city offices, and supports positive relationships of trust with residents, donors, and volunteers. It is difficult for an entirely volunteer organization to sustain this attention and not all initiatives have the momentum to operate a scale that necessitates a staff. Navigating applications for nonprofit status, applying for even a small amount of funding, organizing political campaigns—the bureaucratic office tasks of political organizing are also an invisible and skilled labor. The leaders of Sprout NOLA in New Orleans recognized a need for this specialized work among the many urban garden programs in the city. Sprout’s mission is to support New Orleans area farmers and to encourage participation in a community food system. The organization’s work includes their own community garden site for garden hobbyists as well as workshops and technical assistance for Louisiana farmers. Part of this technical assistance includes support for farmers and community garden leaders who are applying funding for their work. Sprout serves as the fiscal agent for these funds and often assists individuals in navigating the application process. Sprout’s support with the office work allows growers to focus on the work of growing food, rather than developing an additional expertise. There is the added benefit from an organizing and advocacy standpoint: Sprout remains in dialogue with growers across the region and learns the resources needed to better support a community food system. This on-the-ground knowledge has informed Sprout’s participation in advocacy for a New Orleans based USDA officer, and the formation of coalitions across groups working on issues of land stewardship. Sprout’s model demonstrates how established organizations can subvert the competition embedded in nonprofit funding by offering opportunities to fill the administrative gaps for smaller community initiatives. This approach builds a coalition poised to advocate for the social and political changes necessary to support sustainable and productive landscapes long term, while attending to the immediate needs of growers who create and sustain diverse models of land care locally. The immediate needs of growers and landscape laborers are centered, while the coalition advocates for the social and political changes necessary for economic sustainability and thoughtful care.
Image 5: Land care can be in service to social and ecological change if we accept political work as an essential task. Image: Loren Almendarez and author
Conclusions: A Call for Political Gardeners
The three political gardening initiatives profiled above point to models of cross-disciplinary work, guided by clear agendas of social and ecological change. The initiatives reimagine human relationships with land and demonstrate the benefit of designers and non-designers working across practices of landscape architecture, social work, community organizing, art, philanthropy, or gardening. The leaders of these projects attend to the immediate and ongoing needs of the landscapes in their care, while supporting a broader conversation about the policy changes needed to replicate their land care models. Approaches that bridge social transformation and environmental stewardship have new resonance for addressing the intersecting challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequity. The ongoing work of caring for our shared environment is at the front line of these challenges. Recognizing the value of this skilled labor requires changes to social practice and economic policy. Like gardening, the labor of political base building is iterative, context specific, the work of many hands, and deeply essential labor. Political gardening is a means for stewarding the capacity for these social changes.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their comments and insights that greatly improved this article.
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Further Resources
To learn more about the nonprofit urban garden programs discussed, please visit their websites:
