Since the 1990s, the racial landscape of Spain has dramatically shifted as a result of migration via the entrance of immigrants and the exodus of Spaniards as a result of the global economic crisis. The influx of racialized migrants (and subsequently, citizens) over the last 30 years has led to the development of racist metaphors that reference natural disasters such as floods, avalanches, and seismic phenomena, all of which are events that are becoming more common owing to climate change. In addition, in the media, politics, and cultural production, immigrants of color have been referred to as scum or pollution that restricts the air (i.e., the lives) of good (to be read as white) Spanish citizens. These metaphors refer both materially and symbolically to events associated over the years with threat and destruction in order to promote xenophobic and racist ideologies within the national imaginary. Such discourses have led to violence as in the famous race riots in El Ejido in 2000. These metaphors thereby demonstrate the existence of a necropolitical structure, in which the Spanish State and Spanish society more largely have facilitated a system in which racialized migrants live in constant precarity. These people live, and in many cases, die to sustain Spain’s agricultural and oenological industries, thereby stimulating the national economy. I propose that the narrative of toxicity that is used against immigrants (particularly Black and Arab ones) is actually a projection not only of the Spanish nation state’s fragility as a result of its ecocide domestically, but also of the toxicity it spews abroad by operating as a Fortress Europe nation guided by capitalism. This projection necessitates a dependence on migrants to sustain the national ecosystem in both literal and figurative terms. Thus, given the use of these environmental metaphors and their real-life implications for racialized people, there is a real need for racial justice and environmental justice to go hand in hand.

Various scholars have explored how rampant consumerism in the Global North has subjugated those who live in the Global South. As Srnicek and Williams note:

Film and the Environment: A Tense Relationship

The relationship between film and the environment is tense and contradictory. On the one hand, film is a highly globalized industry that relies on costly technology; uses enormous amounts of energy; emits vast quantities of waste, pollution and greenhouse gases; and has been, throughout its history, a major promoter of consumerism and an agent of global capitalism’s obsession with growth and profits at any cost. On the other hand, film may be a powerful vehicle of environmental awareness, a promoter of intercultural dialogues, a tool for activism, and generally a force for social and environmental transformation. For the same reasons, film may be a useful educational resource and an effective instrument of eco-pedagogy.

Historically, the environmental destruction carried out by the film and audiovisual media industry has outweighed its benefits as a vehicle for environmental education and activism. All the phases of film production, distribution, and consumption have a heavy environmental impact: in the shooting phase, large amounts of electricity are required for the lighting, cameras, and other equipment; tons of materials and resources are used for the building of the stage sets; vast quantities of fuel are burnt for transportation, catering, and water supply; film productions take a severe toll on the locations where the films are shot, with hundreds of people and vehicles disturbing and eroding the landscapes for weeks at a time. Productions are eminently wasteful, with an average of 95 percent of the materials not being reused or recycled. Likewise, film distribution and consumption use an inordinate amount of energy and produce enormous quantities of greenhouse gases, pollution, and waste. Digital film and video have a particularly deep environmental impact, as viewing films online is much more damaging than watching them in movie theaters. By 2025, digital technologies will be responsible for 8 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, with 80 percent of data traffic corresponding to digital video. To put that into perspective, the CO2 emissions of streaming video worldwide reached 300 million tons in 2018, roughly equal to the total national output of Spain.

“Green” Initiatives in the Spanish Film Industry

Only in recent years have the film and video industries started to acknowledge their responsibility and to propose measures to limit their environmental impact.

Was there ecofeminism before Françoise d’Eaubonne coined the term in 1974? If ecofeminism makes visible the intimate connection and mutual reinforcement of the “domination of women and the domination of nature,” can we apply this term retroactively to cultural production by women who denounced this intertwined patriarchal control of women and nature? This chapter asserts the existence of an early form of ecofeminist cultural practice in two texts from before the Spanish Civil War: El metal de los muertos (1920) by Concha Espina, and Mineros (1932– 1937; published 2018) co-authored by Carmen Conde and María Cegarra. A well-known social novel and a recently recovered play, these two texts pioneered environmental and social outlooks on the predatory extractive activities unleashed by the liberal regimes of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in the southern peripheries of Huelva and Cartagena. These two areas of Southern Spain were two of the largest terrestrial repositories of copper and silver-rich lead respectively, and have been mined over thousands of years. In these two regions, industrial activity has generated environmental and social wastelands that could be fittingly described as “sacrifice zones,” a term first developed to “designate areas dangerously contaminated as a result of … mining.” Both texts seek to represent the entangled suffering of humans and the earth in the mining sites of Río Tinto and the Sierra Minera and tackle the long histories of resistance to social and ecocidal depredations with literary responses that seek to expose these struggles. I argue that the denunciation of patriarchal abuses over the bodies of other humans and of the environment, the outlining of capitalist extractivism as a gendered form of violence, and the emergence of feminist outlooks on the interrelated issues of environmental and social injustice are some of the elements that allow us to think of an early form of ecofeminism from the Southern trenches that predates its Northern academic definitions in the 1970s in France and the US.

These two texts not only broadcast the active role of women as leading characters within their fictional figurations; their female authors also demonstrate the agency of women writers in Spain in the first half of the twentieth century and their consciously ecofeminist ideological analyses of capitalistic patriarchy as a destructive force that needed to be opposed.

Though numerous academic fields – from anthropology and archaeology to history, economics, and political science – have long been interested in the cultures of food, “food cultural studies” is a recent phenomenon. It was not until the 2004 volume Food and Cultural Studies that the intersections of the cultural studies research on culture-as-power and power-as-culture, on the one hand, and the food studies exploration of foodstuffs and foodways, on the other, started to receive the theoretical attention that they deserve. Going beyond the examination of the food systems themselves, food cultural studies uses the knowledge of these systems to glean insights into the gender, mobility, and power dynamics behind the production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and representation of food and its sources. With the current growing awareness of the mutual impact of food and nature in the Anthropocene, opening food cultural studies to environmental concerns is a logical next step.

Such an analysis would begin by tracing the environmental consequences of the food/power setup to provide a new language for questioning the impact of food on land use, the allocation of resources, and climate change. Yet, as a part of cultural studies, this questioning would also focus on the interdependence between environmentalism, power, and the cultures of food. Drawing on the work on the environmental economy of capitalism – a system of production that changes the nature of agricultural labor and applies extractivist practices to promote the foodscapes where capital can freely flow – environmental food cultural studies incorporates the idea of the Capitalocene, a distinct epoch during which nature becomes not just a source of sustenance but also the raw material, the byproduct, and the residue of the capitalist production cycle. Environmental food cultural studies traces the processes through which premodern practices and discourses related to food begin to change in order to reflect the interests of economic growth, thus showing not only the modernization of food cultures themselves but also the ways in which these cultures reveal the social effects of capitalism. Ultimately, environmentally-informed food cultural studies views the continuum of actions and representations concerning what foods are made of all the way to how they are thought of as a force that both shapes and reflects the environment.

Trash is a complex reality that constantly shifts from the abstraction of philosophy to the concreteness of everyday life and back (Amago; Bennett; Douglas; Ferrell; Hawkins; Humes; Pardo; Prádanos; Strasser; Thill; Zubiaurre). The concept of the “discarded” is deeply subjective. More than anything, it is in the eye of the beholder. And it is the eye and modes of perception of Basurama – a longstanding Spanish collective devoted to the study of contemporary waste production and the implementation of collaborative artistic practices around the reuse and recycling of urban refuse – that will direct the thoughts of the pages that follow. Here is how Basurama describes itself and its mission:

In the eighteenth century, churches were an environmental hazard site. A principal culprit was the tradition of burying the dead inside churches, under their floors, and in adjacent graveyards. Sepulchral fumes turned the sacred interior humid and putrid, and the lack of ventilation stagnated the foul air, creating a serious health crisis for the clergy and their congregations. The situation was no better outside. The narrow streets and the density of eighteenth-century urban centers were hardly conducive to a ventilated cemetery within city walls. Moreover, graveyards were not enclosed spaces but rather accessible and mixed-use areas. Alongside the dead, the living reunited, celebrated assemblies, danced, put on theatrical representations, and organized open-air markets. At other times the cemetery was turned into a workshop to thresh wheat. The spiritual and popular defense of this cohabitation produced a massive accumulation of putrefied cadavers that contaminated the air with toxic discharge. By the eighteenth century, the smell of the decaying corpses was a constant reminder of a persistent problem that everyone, both laypeople and clergy, caught a whiff of but easily avoided.

Odors form part of daily life. We know little about what commoners thought of the foul odors in general and in churches, but Spain was not a clean country, and visitors quickly detected the stench and recorded it in their writing. In 1735, the Prussian traveler Charles Louis von Pöllnitz experienced first-hand “the unpleasantness of walking about the streets of Madrid:”

No sooner had the Italian writer Joseph Baretti, en route from London to Genoa in 1747, entered the Spanish capital than he was overwhelmed by the “horrible stink” and “fetid vapours exhaling from numberless heaps of filth lying all about.

A key scene in the film El verdugo (The Executioner) by Luis García Berlanga shows the main characters in the Drach Caves of Mallorca – a time-honored site for the tourist usage of the island’s natural heritage – just when a member of the Spanish Civil Guard (Guardia Civil) instructs the main character, an executioner, to do his job and execute a prisoner. From the camera’s perspective, the magnificent site of the cave serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, it is an allure that conveys the island’s beauty, beckoning a peaceful visit; on the other, it is the stage of a moral conflict. Hence, the site is a framework for both tourism promotion and the critique of the dictatorial regime that governs such promotion. Cultural presentations of nature at tourism sites are never gratuitous or unambiguous. They generate a point of view that affects not only the tourist gaze, but also the reproduction of the manner in which the space is perceived and socially used by the local residents.

In this chapter, we analyze the intersection between tourism, culture, and the natural environment in Spain from a perspective that takes in the historical processes, as well as the diverse cultural practices and products involved. Beyond confirming the difficulty of defining the connoted limits among the three categories under study (for example, the difference between a tourist and a traveler, between culture and tourism consumption, between environment and natural setting), this study explores the manner in which their intersection generates a complex conceptual network that also determines the definition of other key terms such as landscape, heritage and even progress. Moreover, it fosters the normalization of terms of habitual use in this field – natural monument, rural tourism, green tourism, ecotourism – that can sometimes be conceptually antithetical. For this reason, we are not only interested in analyzing the cultural products of tourism and their imbrication in the natural environment, but also the semantic shifts among the places where the three categories are conceptualized. We postulate that in Spain, those shifts have materialized throughout history in at least three directions that are linked to the ideological planning of the land, the commercialization of the natural setting, and the overlapping between cultural and tourism practices.

This chapter reflects on the actualities and possibilities of understanding modern and contemporary Iberian history at the culture-environment interface. This perspective seeks to transcend the divisions between two sets of historical study fields: on one hand, the fields that traditionally have focused on the production, circulation, and consumption of texts, images, and ideas, and on the development of symbolic or discursive practices (cultural and intellectual history); on the other, and across the historiographical aisle, those fields centered on environmental transformations and practices with a profound impact on the environment and socio-environmental relations (environmental history and history of science and technology). I think this integration is demanded by both material and intellectual developments that are taking place in the twenty-first century: first, the widespread recognition that fossil-based processes of regional modernization and capitalist globalization have given rise to a new geological era (the Anthropocene or Capitalocene) that includes global processes of severe biodiversity loss and mass extinction of species; and second, the recent materialist and ecological turn that is transforming the ways the humanities and social sciences understand historical change (seen not as the consequence of either human action or environmental factors but as the result of evolving socio-environmental entanglements).

The first part of this chapter traces the basic contours of historical work at the culture-environment interface, work which, in my view, should integrate the study of material/environmental processes and practices with semiotic/cultural ones. In order to do that, I will review and discuss well-known theoretical proposals made by leading Anglo-American cultural and environmental historians. The second part of the chapter comments on some interdisciplinary historical works (such as Casado de Otaola’s Naturaleza Patria and Erik Swyngedouw’s Liquid Power) which, in my view, have succeeded in studying modern Iberian history at the culture-environment interface. The third part of the chapter will be a reflective summary of my own ongoing contributions to Iberian cultural environmental history. This work is based on the idea that “nature” and the “environment” in modern Spain is something ontologically unstable and epistemologically heterogeneous and, as such, must be historically understood as an evolving and conflict-ridden ecology of cultures of nature. That is, the distinct modes in which particular human groups (connected by their class, profession, productive, and reproductive practices, etc.

On 8 March 2018, approximately five million – or one in five – working women in Spain struck for a full day, withholding their paid and unpaid labor across all sectors, with the most notable impacts felt in education, healthcare, as well as in the mostly unrecognized provision of care for children and the elderly. 8M marches have seen large-scale participation across the Iberian Peninsula since 1975, the year in which both Spain began its transition to democracy following thirty-six years of fascist dictatorship and, coincidentally, in which the United Nations formally recognized March 8th as International Women’s Day. However, the Huelga Feminista of 2018 took on new meaning as ecofeminist concerns more formally qualified the calls to action, making front and center the long-standing and inextricable links between the capitalist and heteropatriarchal energy models that have historically subjugated women (and invisibilized their labor) and that are responsible for the decimation of our biosphere. Across the country, women and allies mobilized to make clear that femicide and ecocide have a direct correlation: women are those who reproduce life (yet, their reproductive rights are continually managed and legislated within patriarchal systems of oppression); most of the world’s agricultural production is carried out by women (yet, capitalist agroindustrial systems continue to overtake local, traditional farming, leading to extraordinary rates of soil nutrient depletion and of starvation); and women’s provision of care is that which sustains life (yet women’s labor is devalued within the neoliberal myth of perpetual economic growth and the monetization of wealth, which prioritize the coffers of a few over the collective health of the planet and its vegetal and animal inhabitants).

Ecofeminism in Spain, therefore, is a crucial and growing field of thought and of political activism that in recent years has been gaining momentum for its extraordinary potential to inform and inspire transformative social and economic change that will improve global and local ecological health. As with the rebirth of democracy in Spain, ecofeminism began to develop in the 1970s following the coining of the term by French feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne, for whom the disenfranchisement of women, people of color, and the poor is correlative to the degradation of the natural world as a result of patriarchal dominance.

As the non-human turn gathered speed over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, critics of Iberian cultural production increasingly granted higher consideration to non-human species and inanimate objects as variously deserving of agency, rights, and analytical attention. Carrying out an eco-critical or post-humanist analysis can be more straightforward in cultural texts from the recent past, as contemporary authors and directors of novels, film, and other media are ensconced in the throes of myriad ecological crises and thus often create ample stages in their works for critique of the anthropocentric biases at the heart of concepts such as nature, culture, and conservation. However, the non-human turn also illuminates, retroactively, overlooked aspects of foundational texts and films from earlier in the Anthropocene, before it was referred to as such, to which scholars in Iberian Studies already have provided ample insight. In this chapter, I will focus specifically on the presence of the animal in texts produced during the Francoist dictatorship, as these works emphasize how modern systems of philosophical, cultural, and scientific understanding articulated the place of the human in relation to the lives of other species and inanimate objects. I will focus especially on the figure of the pigeon-dove in Mercè Rodoreda’s 1962 novel La plaça del diamant (The Time of the Doves). Animal life, even when relegated to symbolic practice, is central to the story of Iberian cultural production in the twentieth century.

The cultural status of animals and their symbolic weight in cultural production are of critical importance to some of the most celebrated novelists, poets, playwrights, and film directors of twentieth-century Spain. In numerous cases, animal life was mobilized during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco between 1939 and 1975 as part of intricate symbolic systems that attempted to critique Spanish society and politics while evading the Regime’s repressive crosshairs. The bull, perhaps the symbolic animal par excellence in Spain from the moment the Ancient Greek writer Strabo describes the Iberian peninsula as a stretched-out bull’s hide, was a frequent target. Luis Martín-Santos and Juan Goytisolo, prominent novelists who navigated the authoritarian structures of the Francoist Regime while nevertheless expanding the representational possibilities and thematic depths of the Spanish novel, criticized bullfighting in their literature and public writings as conceptually tied to masculinity, political violence, and anti-liberalism.

Across an array of disciplines – history, language and cultural studies, politics, anthropology – scholars have devoted attention to explaining how the growth and consolidation of consumer capitalism has become the dominant political and economic mode governing modern human life. Scholarly consensus has converged around the idea that, in order to understand how modern democracies work, the governing modes of economic culture that underpin them must be part of the picture. As university courses on “The History of Capitalism” proliferate throughout the Anglophone academy, there has emerged a corresponding interest in understanding the legacy of industrial modernity in terms of the things it leaves behind: its detritus. Books by Gay Hawkins, Susan Strasser, John Scanlan, and Maite Zubiaurre have analyzed rubbish from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, while feature films and documentaries have sought, through a progressive lens, to make visible what Gay Hawkins has called the “shit end of capitalism.” The Spanish documentary filmmaker Víctor Moreno has produced two films – Edificio España (2012) and La ciudad oculta (2018) – which investigate, through a critical lens, the metabolism of Spanish urban modernity and its mainly hidden spatial contours. In a similar key, Mercedes Álvarez’s documentaries El cielo gira (2004) and Mercado de futuros (2011) explore the spatial and temporal logics of a Spanish modernity that has been all too eager to relegate the past to the national wastebin.

As an unstable, relational category, “waste has impacts across multiple scales, linking diverse actors and processes.” In the field of Marxian cultural geography there is an ample and extremely useful bibliography on how urban and exurban space has been shaped by the forces of market capitalism to reproduce itself. In Spanish Studies, Compitello, Fraser, Vilaseca and others have outlined the various ways in which Spanish urban space has been progressively colonized by capital. Henri Lefebvre points to the shift occurring mainly during nineteenth-century industrialization wherein the metropolis was progressively transformed into use value, which meant that urban space was absorbed and incorporated into the market economy. Benjamin Fraser puts it succinctly when he notes that, since the nineteenth century, the Spanish city has become yet another product to sell as urban landscapes have been transformed into vehicles for financial speculation (p. 263).