The forums of 20^th- and 21^st-Century Spanish and Iberian Literatures and Galician Studies have selected for a collaborative session four presentations that deal with the contemporary consciousness of the accelerating environmental transformations experienced globally during the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries (environmental migrations, global warning, exponential increase of industrial and agro-industrial metabolic waste, soil depletion, biodiversity loss and species extinction). This consciousness prompts us to reassess concepts such as “culture”, “nature”, “the environment”, “modernity”, “economy”, “capitalism” and “human(ism).” Indeed, this new consciousness is making more and more unfeasible to think about present and past cultural, social, political, ethical and economic concerns as domains separated from environmental ones.

This panel recognizes the importance of looking at the culture-environment interface of modern and contemporary societies as a contribution to envision and create more sustainable and resilient communities for the Anthropocene. At the same time, it recognizes the importance of paying attention to regional or national configurations of global entanglements among cultural actors, objects and processes and environmental ones. It recognizes the importance of looking at Iberian cultures and environments within local traditions of thought and practice (i.e. productivist forestry and agriculture, landscape writing, rural-urban tensions and unequal exchanges) and, at the same time, within broader material and semiotic exchanges associated with the term “globalization” (international trade, global flows of fossil fuels and waste, neo-colonial extractivist endeavors).

Joanna Allen in “From the Sirocco to the Irifi: Wind and Solidarity in Saharawi Poetry” explores ideas of cross-border solidarity between Spain, Western Sahara and Algeria. In February 2021, European media outlets reported on the sirocco wind blowing in from North Africa carrying sand and dust. The latter provoked motorway speed restrictions, pollution warnings and concerns over radioactive particles as far north as France. Mainstream European media meanings attached to Saharan winds are anxiety-driven and hostile. But Saharawi refugees living in Spain use the mobile possibilities of wind to imagine a more positive encounter between Europe and the Sahara. Allen argues that Saharawi writers use wind as a metaphor for solidarity, the common legacies of Spanish and Saharawi peoples, and Spain’s ‘debt’ with its Saharawi brothers and sisters.

In “Posthuman Voices in Forestry Conflict: What Trees Tell Us in Laxe’s O que arde (2019),” Santiago Gesteira will show how multispecies studies allow us to look differently at our environment through the multifaceted perspectives of the many lives entangled in our ecosystems. In the film O que arde (2019), Óliver Laxe portrays an intimate story of rural Galician life in the context of wildfires and rural decay in the Iberian Peninsula. This presentation questions binaries like native/invasive, rural/urban by proposing a methodological approach that, through plant-thinking, sees trees as central characters of the film. This approach also reads landscapes as texts, including fires, and understands the main characters of the film as outcasts narrators whose perspectives are usually ignored and forgotten. In an ecosystem drastically affected by lack of opportunities and neo-extractivist visions, O que arde calls for a grounded connection to our environment when it comes to facing capitalist driven conflicts.

Xavier Dapena also focuses on Galicia in “Asoballar, asoballaron abondo en nós”: Ecological Imagination in As Encrobas (1977) by analyzing the linkages and the absences of the ecological imagination and the civic-popular process of emancipation in the region of As Encrobas in Galicia during 1977. He draws on a diverse archive that includes documentaries, literature, and a series of photographs by the graphic journalist Xosé Castro to trace the intervention of direct action in the process of popular mobilization in this region of A Coruña against the forced expropriation of lands. He proposes a dissident and feminist take on these materials against the backdrop of the narrative of “political consensus” underpinning Spanish democracy.

Sarah Sierra closes the panel with “Toxic Spaces and Social Deserts: A Legacy of Progress in Spanish Eco-Fiction”. She considers the legacy inherited from 19^th Century authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós – who had recognized and struggled with the idea of nation and its construction of history requiring internal exiles confined in social deserts – in the portrayal of social deserts and toxic people from the perspective of dystopian contemporary works. Writers such as Rosa Montero in Lágrimas en la lluvia (2011) and José Serrano’s Hajira (2018) stress the naiveté inherited in the concept of bounded communities separating inhabitants from “uninhabitants” as containment of toxic spaces and people become a planetary issue. They problematize ideological belief that walled fortifications can isolate and protect populations from the contaminated.