(Un)natural Prejudices

But you’re an environmentalist, right? This is a question that many people have asked me in a reproachful tone after reading my latest book, Delta. As if writing about a natural space implied expressing a specific ideology. The surprising thing is that, on several occasions, the question was asked by people linked to the culture business, some of them so-called “intellectuals.” People who, upon hearing the term “literature,” instead of thinking of Moby Dick, Jack London, Helen Macdonald or Miguel Delibes, perhaps think of Henry David Thoreau and Rachel Carson, but, above all, associate the word with a lot of modern environmentalist essays that were militant and written in a tone of denunciation or redemption. As if moral bias or the imparting of doctrine were indispensable ingredients of the genre, thus underestimating its breadth and literary force.

I am a writer, that is my answer. An ambitious writer, which is why I try to reflect the voice of the chorus that surrounds us in the most coherent way, in which the urgency of understanding non-human natures (nanohum) is stressed to help our species can survive. Which is why I try to capture any ethical angle, including those that I like the least, in search for narrative solutions capable of encompassing the immensity that surrounds us, trying as best as I can to let the world speak for itself, although obviously its “spokesperson” is me. My position can usually be deduced, but the idea is that this does not matter or it is received as just the position of another actor, one more from the ecosystem, and that the space and the facts and the beings revealed are genuine, different and magnetic enough to transmit their essence and that of the place they inhabit. The idea is that, when reading my work, you perceive that natural tensions are like this, indifferent to whether the author votes left, right or abstains.

Nonetheless, in 2025, in a first-world country that possesses the fourth-most widely spoken language in the world, an astonishing majority of people continue to associate nature literature with anti-technological nonsense spewed forth by a species of neo-rurals or wealthy progressives whom, due to their prejudice, generally prefer not to read. On the other hand, there are those who dare to open a book seeking to broaden their green knowledge with the complicity of a voice that will undoubtedly reaffirm their environmental values. So any work that breaks with the political idea that people expect of it still provokes, in 2025, the question, “But, you’re an environmentalist, right?”, regardless of the purely literary value.

I grew up reading without labels, and although I now use one to draw attention to a series of issues and emergencies (in fact, thanks to it I am writing this article right now) I venerate the idea of ​​literature that gives the word to the environment and to you so that you can make your own conclusions. Covering the “environment” requires thinking in an eco-systemic way, and one consequence is certain narrative solutions that embrace the whole.

For example? If until now we associated the choral novel exclusively with humans, the time has come to open our focus to include a biodiverse chorus. Flamingos, sand, rivers, spiders, eels, mosquitos, wind, bulls and rice all have a force that is worth narrating. Does talking about the tensions and violence between these beings and elements, and the people who share their space, make me an ecologist, a writer or an inhabitant of the planet?

An eel might not allow the same narrative development as Madame Bovary, but if it is treated as Patrik Svensson does, it can move and encourage reflections, like those provoked by a snail in Elizabeth Tova or a giant aquatic bug and other insects, some of them cannibalistic, in Annie Dillard. The Mexican writer Jorge Comensal has understood this. Comensal is a fan of the Californian condor and a writer who has also written about sargassum, fires and the Chapultepec forest, who has just published the wonderful Materia viva (Living Matter) that will unsettle the usual prejudiced ones because, being literature, it uses irony as has rarely been seen when writing about turtles, ferns or vultures: “The world stinks, but without vultures it would stink much more.”

Comensal has also faced surprising questions about his more or less naturalistic leanings and, since he was appointed director of the UNAM magazine a few months ago, he has begun a section there that consists of several pages dedicated to a specific animal. Not to a species, but to a specific animal, to an exclusive life, whose history is analyzed with the penetrating interest of any human story.

Comensal is, in short, another of those who seek ways to show that literature is not only universal, but that it goes further, both conceptually and terminologically, than the majority of recent books because it proposes a biodiverse chorus as well as neologisms, such as Aridamerica, or the amazing catalogue presented by Santiago Beruete, father of jardinosophy, verdolatry, the sapiovores. The fact is that few authors adapt as well to the new changing reality as those who write about nature, the latest avant-garde.

In order to highlight this pioneering quality as the spearhead or the crest of the wave, the Barcelona magazine Convit/e published a special issue in the autumn entitled Vanguardia Liternatura, illustrated with images by Xavi Bou, an artist who has found a technique to photograph birds in a novel way. “I realized that I left home with the photo already taken, and I wanted to try something different,” said Bou, whose work makes one wonder how many ways can we still talk about all the nature that, displaced by technology, continues to be invisible to a good part of a (supposed) intellectuality that has renounced its classic anti-system role to embrace the market and the mainstream (because they sympathize a lot with the English language, of course, and prefer to continue saying nature writing rather than liternature).

The marginal feeds the alternative, dissidence and invention, and that is why the books by Daniela Catrileo, a Mapuche Champurria writer who makes Chilco a capital where life regenerates while empires built by speculation crumble, or by the Peruvian Joseph Zárate, the descendant of an Amazonian lineage who has written Guerras del interior (Interior Wars), one of the most shocking books of literary journalism about the abuses committed with gold, wood and oil, and is now writing about the Amazon, feel so original. The native perspective rooted to the land has something extra, as has also been confirmed by Virginia Mendoza, who knew thirst so closely that she has written a wonderful book about it, or Vanesa Freixa from Lleida, who after leaving her village and studying in Barcelona ​​asked herself what she was doing and returned to the mountains, settled in a hut with her partner and seven goats, and has not only written about what it means to live in and from the countryside, but also promotes cultural initiatives to promote rural history and food sovereignty.

A notable novelty is how plants have found someone to write about them in Spanish. Diana Obando, the aforementioned Beruete, Efrén Giraldo (don’t miss his Sumario de plantas officious, A Summary of Working Plants) or Paco Calvo, the philosopher and director of the Laboratorio de Inteligencia Mínima (Minimal Intelligence Laboratory) which promotes the intelligence of plants (a proposal as disruptive as Giraldo’s title), join the works of, for example, Joaquín Araújo and the Colombian Tomás González. Spain is filled with extraordinary verses by Alejandro López Andrada and Jorge Riechmann, as well as María Sánchez and Ángela Segovia, whose works are read in the latest reading clubs, literary residencies and festivals that are now held literally all over the world. And, something that many of the people who have read not one but several of these books have in common, is not asking questions like: You’re an environmentalist, right?

Young Mya-Rose Craig, Birdgirl, at Liternatura Festival. Photo: Gabi Martínez

(Cover image: Photograph of an illustration from a Colombian travel book. Photo: Gabi Martínez).