Eco-thinking has been a central but unexplored topic in 20^th-century Spanish culture and the politics of gender and national construction, a subject that this session by a diverse set of scholars seeks to explore. From the late 19^th century educational reformers who took their students to the mountains to philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s extensive writings about landscape, eco-thinking has been the unacknowledged linchpin in much of the thinking about 20^th-century Spain and the interpretation (and possible solutions) to its political, economic, cultural, and social problems. This special session complements the LLC 20^th and 21^st century Spanish and Iberian Forum’s sessions by exploring eco-thinking with four papers, each strictly limited to 12-minutes, that will cover both Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and the transition to democracy, spanning the diversity of national cultures and territories of Spain. But before we describe the papers, let us explain our understanding of eco-thinking.

We use the term “eco-thinking” because the session is dedicated to exploring the cultural implications of the interaction between environment and humans. To be clear, we are not focused on the human influence on the environment, a topic addressed by environmental studies, but rather on how everyday citizens, authors, artists, and philosophers have imagined their personal lives and those of their communities through the prism of nature. While environmental studies and science focus on how humans can manage and sustainably use natural resources, as well as the consequences of human intervention on the environment, eco-thinking calls attention to the interdependence and relational systems that connect human culture to the natural environment.

Eco-thinking is a way of understanding humans’ perception of themselves as part of nature and, as scholars such as Capra, Naess, and Morton have conceptualized, the way in which the natural environment has affected culture. We find the concept of eco-thinking useful for the productive heterogeneous relationality inherent in the ideas promoted by theories such as “assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus, 1972) and “Actor Network Theory” (Latour, Callon, and Law). In sum, we find eco-thinking the best way to uncover and describe the new organizations, behaviors, experiences, actors, creative works, and realities that emerge in Spain during the 20^th century with nature and humans at their center.

While much scholarship on the period has focused on Franco’s repression or the struggle to end the dictatorship, this session reveals how nature provided much-needed motivation to craft alternative identities, to sustain cultural and national imaginaries, and to launch new ecological political projects that sought to bypass the binary structures of the political right and left.

For that reason, the panel moves chronologically. It begins with Francisco Fernández de Alba’s new discoveries about the alternative identities and outdoor experiences that alpine and hiking clubs provided to women during Franco’s dictatorship in “Getting Out: Women and Mountain Recreation in 1940s Spain.” Stephanie Gates follows with “The Island as Mental Prison: Individuation and the Uncanny in Ana María Matute’s Primera Memoria” for an exploration of the main character’s nature-based identity construction in this 1960 novel. Local food production and preparation as Catalan national difference in detective novels is the focus of Rafael Andúgar in “Catalan Gastronomy and the Ecological Thought in Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Los Mares del Sur.” Finally, Elia Romera-Figueroa explores in “Seguidillas ecológicas: Interconnected struggles in Iberian music during the Transition” how pluri-national and multilingual female songwriters brought attention to environmental and anti-nuclear politics during the transition to democracy.

When read together, these papers show how nature plays a central role in the development of culture, gender, and nation in 20^th-century Spain in ways that have not yet been explored. The struggle to have experiences alternative to those offered by the dictatorial regime, the development of personal identity through nature, pluri-national political (and gastronomic) constitution, the growth of Basque, Catalan or Galician language, and new forms framing political ideas are topics that cannot be fully explained without considering their interaction with ideas emerging out of the natural environment. Given our panel’s focus, San Francisco, the location of the Sierra Club’s foundation in 1892, is the ideal setting for this special session.