Contribution short abstract:

The projects 'Sustainable Beauty For Algarvean Gardens' and 'AQUA' highlight sustainable practices of the past that can contribute to cope with current environmental challenges. This 'Back to the Garden' claim stems from local histories.

Contribution long abstract:

The two of the projects I have coordinated from 2015 to 2022, have highlighted sustainable practices of the past that can contribute to cope with current environmental problems.

The 'Sustainable Beauty For Algarvean Gardens project: Old Knowledge for A Better Future' (2015-2019, https://susbeauty.ciuhct.org) demonstrated how the import of gardens design model with lawn and palm trees to a region with water stress such as the Algarve, southern Portugal, is completely unsuitable for a region. The tourism industry exhausts the water resources of the region. From the nurseries disappeared the ornamental native plants and the exotic ones predominate.

Unfortunately, this is also happening with productive plants. Of the more than one hundred varieties of vineyards in the Algarve region revealed by the documentation, none is in the landscape, which is now dominated by the varieties of Cabernet Sauvignon and Touriga Nacional. The varieties of the region are no more than a collection of an Agrarian Post. On the other hand, it demonstrated that the 'the Algarve Orange' is an invention of the twentieth century, as the landscape that dominated by figs. However, oranges became the fruit subsidized by the European Union, despite citrus needs of water being much higher.

These local stories highlight the global destruction of Mediterranean landscape. Stemming from the Industrial Revolution, capitalism and its global patterns, tourism industry and European agricultural politics, these two projects funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology are a kind of claim as Jack McGregor did in 'Back to the Garden.'