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).

This was the question asked in 1980 by the editors of El Ecologista Comix, a special edition of the magazine El Ecologista, in a fictional interview with an imagined comics scholar opening the single issue of the comics collaboration, featuring well-known Spanish comics artists of the period, including Max and Xaquín Marín. Such a question hints not only at the medium’s fight for cultural legitimization but also at the innumerable possibilities afforded by the medium for initiating social change. Only some thirty years later would the question of comics’ capacity to engage with questions of environmental health, justice, and ethics receive sustained scholarly attention, despite the fact that the employment of comics for the purposes of environmental activism and literacy has a significant history. Within Spain, comics illustrate the concerns and proposals of early environmentalisms, often in ways that reflect the democratizing aesthetics of counterculture movements, as well as mobilizing resistance to neoliberal urbanization. Comics also reflect the mainstreaming of environmental concern and the exacerbation of environmental crises wrought by the globalization of consumer capitalism, and they employ graphic journalism and nonfiction to explore the destructive metabolism of Spanish cities or social justice concerns exacerbated by urban waste and development.

The ability of comics to develop an environmental politics and/or ecocritical approach to contemporary issues can be mapped onto two underlying concerns: first, the capacity of comics to influence and represent the subject’s “ethical orientation to the natural world,” which is not only developed through the graphic representation of ideas and icons but also through the simultaneous representation of subjects as objects, enmeshed within wider environments and ecologies of relation. This may also include the artist’s own self-representation within the comic, an ethical and stylistic choice that strengthens the reliability and sense of intimacy between artists and readers while emphasizing the constructed, contingent, and positional nature of narrative.

A second concern regards the ways in which comics artists present deeper ecocritical reflection and engage “ecological thought,” i.e., forms of inquiry, representation, and storytelling that emphasize the complex interrelations and interdependencies of multiple species and systems that make up planetary life.

This text begins with a landscape. With the image of a landscape (Figure 6.1): the old Mount Neme tungsten mine. Since World War I, the shortage in Europe of this mineral, key to the manufacture of projectiles and armor, endowed the Peninsular northwest with crucial strategic importance. Hitler secured the exploitation of the Iberian reserves in payment for German aid to General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Later, the Korean War made Galician mining attractive again, sealing North American interest for the country’s incorporation into the capitalist bloc. Finally, after a short period of time, when all operations ceased, the presence of the mine was consigned to local community memory, and to the wounded memory of the landscape. Extraction had also damaged archaeological heritage: both lesser-known local sites and more well-known ones. With the metal extracted, stories about underground mythical dwellers, pagan cults, priestesses, and witches evaporated. The mine dug a crater also into the imaginary. This immense pit tells us about the death caused by the mineral that was extracted from it. And in its emptiness, a turquoise blue lake slowly formed – one of poisonous waters.

This lake was pictured at the center of the image mentioned above, and in the summer 2019 featured as part of the annual tourism campaign by the Galician State Government. As an immediate effect, a legion of instagrammers and like-hunters flocked to the scene in search of the ultimate selfie, even at the cost of getting intoxicated by the lake, as they later commented on in their own social media. The anecdote captures the aesthetic-political tension explored in this article, the one that occurs between memory and form, by involving our political relationships with the environment. Today, the digital circulation of images dissociates forms from the history that shaped them, and which explains their inscription in a given territory. History establishes the specific way in which a particular form still relates to the physical space where it has been conceived for a function. No matter how much digital replicas are offered as a transparent object for consumption, what we see in Monte Neme is still the residue of an extractive process. The burns on the influencers' bodies just confirm it.

As the Tajo and Tiétar Rivers flow toward the Portuguese border from mountain ranges in mid-eastern Spain, they approach one another and run parallel for almost 125 kilometers, without actually touching, prior to their confluence in what is today Monfragüe National Park in western Spain. In 1959, this particularity was attractive to engineers enrolled in the project of redistributing Spain’s waterways, a signature policy of the Franco dictatorship. The two rivers running alongside one another allowed for the construction of twin hydroelectric dams, with a tunnel serving as a spillway connecting the two reservoirs.

The morning of 22 October 1965, approximately 4,000 workers neared completion of the Torrejón-Tajo Dam project, moving at breakneck speed in the emptied out basin of the Tajo. Since many workers migrated from southern Spain, among other agrarian areas, their families traveled with them, living in makeshift tents above the river basin. As their families finished breakfast, Hidroeléctrica Española (now Ibérdrola) decided to test the maximum level of the reservoir located on the northern Torrejón-Tiétar. At this moment, a breach in the tunnel caused water to pour into the Tajo, killing (officially) 54 workers. While the number is likely to have been double, the event already constitutes the worst labor accident in Spain’s history (Monforte). Yet the disaster barely made the news. It appears the fascist regime learned from the Ribadelago disaster coverage in 1959, when at least 144 local people drowned after the Vega de Tera reservoir failed. If it were not for a monolith dedicated to the victims in 2016, the Monfragüe reservoirs would completely obscure what happened under their surface.

This history offers insight into the Francoist political ecology that dramatically re-shaped Iberian waterways through a rapid buildup of hydraulic infrastructure, or waterworks. Infrastructure itself is the subconscious of modernity: the below-structure that goes unnoticed when everything is fine, which Christopher Bollas calls an “unthought known” (Rubenstein, p. 576). Monfragüe suggests that investigating Francoist waterworks exposes infrastructure not as a public good but rather as a form of necropolitics, a political order arbitrarily deciding who lives and who dies. Yet this submergence zone remains largely unthought of, until a drought exposes what lies beneath. Even then, it is difficult to decipher such a sight without understanding the history of Francoist waterworks.