Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T21:49:50.692Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction: Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

Luis I. Prádanos
Affiliation:
Miami University
Get access

Summary

“The creature that wins against its environment destroys itself”

(Gregory Bateson)

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×