This Introduction engages with the following questions: What is meant by “environmental cultural studies”? How are cultural practices related to inequality as well as processes of extinction, energy, toxicity, and climate disruption? How is Spanish cultural studies responding to rapidly changing biophysical and social conditions? How do Spanish environmental cultural scholars contribute to make sense of the ecological crisis? What current dilemmas face the field and what are some promising possibilities moving forward? How can Spanish cultural studies and political ecology enrich each other and make sense of our past, present, and future socioecological entanglements? How can Spanish environmental cultural studies promote alternative cultural paradigms that encourage appropriate and regenerative socioecological relationships?

Environmental Cultural Studies in Context

During the last few years, a number of scientific reports make clear that the expansion and intensification of the growth-oriented global economy is destroying, at break-neck speed, the web of life on which human survival depends. For example, the 2018 WWF Living Planet Report revealed “that population sizes of wildlife decreased by 60% globally between 1970 and 2014.” Similar disturbing results were published in 2019 by the IPBES in their Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. If terrestrial wildlife is declining dramatically during the last decades, marine life is dying off even faster, as aquatic life is highly sensitive to rising temperatures and ocean acidification. In December of 2020, an article in Nature found that human-made things now outweigh all biomass on Earth. Put otherwise, the globalization of the dominant economic culture is rapidly transforming planetary life into commodities and infrastructure. In January of 2021, a group of sustainability scholars claimed – based on a broad review of scientific literature – that societies are grossly underestimating the gravity and danger of the environmental situation and that “the scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life-forms – including humanity – is so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts” (Bradshaw et al 1). All these studies should lead to a clear conclusion: the dominant economic culture – growth-oriented, petroleum-based, techno-industrial, consumer-driven – promotes an ideology of death because the more it globalizes and becomes ubiquitous, the more rapidly it depletes and impoverishes the planetary web of life.