Co-edited by Azucena Castro, Gianfranco Selgas, and Ken Benson. This volume explores Latin American cultural works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that reflect environmental changes brought on by colonization, capitalism, and resource exploitation. Contributors examine films, novels, photographs, and videos from the Caribbean, the Southern Cone, the Andes, and the Amazon, showcasing how artists, writers, and activists depict the scale and impact of ecological crises. Drawing from environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and Indigenous scholarship, it examines how relationships with the nonhuman reshape human understandings of ecological collapse and resilience. Contributors discuss movies on toxic waste in Chile and Bolivia, gothic elements in horror, art and mineral extraction in Venezuela, dystopian novels set in the Río de la Plata, Mapuche poetry and dance in protest of terricidio, and utopias in Brazilian Afrofuturistic novels. They show how speculative fiction, testimonial narratives, experimental films, and site-specific installations address environmental disasters, climate breakdown, and extractivism, revealing the colonial histories and economic structures that underpin climate change. The chapters in this book examine artistic forms that amplify the voices of affected communities and envision more ethical futures rooted in regional cultures, geographies, and practices. Highlighting the significance of perspectives from the Global South, this volume broadens understandings of environmental justice and ways of rethinking planetary survival.

“Places Latin American and Caribbean contexts—and the writers, artists, creatives, and communities within them—at the heart of the environmental humanities. In doing so, it makes a powerful and nuanced contribution to conversations about what it means to imagine, think, and create in the face of large-scale, human-caused environmental change.”—Laura Barbas-Rhoden, author of Ecological Imaginations in Latin American Fiction.

“Represents an important contribution both to the growing field of Latin American environmental humanities and to the urgent, global project of rethinking our relationships with our environments in ways that foster collective life over short-term and unequal economic gain.”—Mark D. Anderson, author of Disaster Writing: The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe in Latin America.