2 - Modern Iberian History at the Culture-Environment Interface: Cultures of Nature, Modernization, and the Anthropocene

Summary

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.