Environmental violence is a cycle that preserves global power through the unequal distribution of pollutants while affecting society's most vulnerable ecosystems and populations. This concept poses a series of associations and interdependencies between our economic systems, our power structures, and our relation to nature. However, culture could interact with environmental violence beyond the supplementary role it has assigned in the model of environmental violence following Galtung's typology. Culture has autonomy from the economic practices that pollute the environment and its inhabitants. Under certain conditions, specific praxis and beliefs could dismantle the binary between the classical Marxist concepts of base and superstructure on which the relation between cultural violence and environmental violence, as defined, seems to depend. Therefore, there is a need to reconsider how culture, and our ways of understanding it, are part of the cycle in which our ways of production and consumption are incompatible with the stability of the environment and society. This chapter traces how far culture can, in its autonomy, reproduce the practices associated with environmental violence by analyzing a canonical Latin American poetic discourse: the poem Alturas de Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda.

‘Lord Byron is altogether in my affection again’, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett a few weeks before their elopement in 1846. During their courtship, Browning revised the more critical opinion of Byron which had followed his youthful discipleship, and was eager to show that he shared Elizabeth’s enthusiasm.