Paper short abstract:

This paper tells the story of La Janda wetland in Cádiz, Spain to think how humanism and ecology come together, as part of a constellation of alternative resources collected under the sign of planetarity.

Paper long abstract:

La Janda is a 7,000 hectare wetland held in the basin that connects the settlements of Facinas, Vejer and Benalup. North of the Gibraltar straight, where Tarifa reaches towards Ceuta, it is filled by the Celemín, Almodóvar and Barbate rivers. Its extensive fresh and shallow waters made it a site of unique residence, rest and passage for millions of birds migrating between African and Europe, since at least the neolithic era.

In the 1950s and 60s that landscape changed dramatically. The lake was drained by Franco's government and became wet farmland devoted to rice growing. Its waters were funnelled to the sea through canals and metal pipes. This machinic feat, later over-strung with power lines and fringed with wind turbines, caused the demise of the bustards, cranes, orioles, bee-eaters and rollers that had stopped on their journey, and now passed over high or were impaled on high voltage cables.

In the autumn of 2021, I visited La Janda and although many birds were gone, cranes, black wings kites, black winged stilts, green sandpipers, among others still populated the area. The ground is still wet and, for now, the rivers still flow. This paper tells the story of La Janda to make a theoretical intervention on planetary humanism. Developing the concepts of depth, sediment, and the oceanic from critical theory and postcolonial studies, it engages La Janda to think how humanism and ecology come together, as part of a constellation of alternative resources collected under the sign of planetarity.