Description
Located in the Southeast of Spain, the Mar Menor is the biggest coastal saltwater lagoon of Europe. Since at least 2015, due to a mix of various anthropogenic causes, it has faced a big ecological crisis, with two mass deaths of fauna in 2019 and 2021 due to the eutrophication of its waters. This intervention analyzes the musical responses to the Mar Menor ecological crisis. Focusing on different collective actions, such as the song “Sol y sal” or the background music of different awareness campaigns, it will be analyzed how music is instrumentalized in the struggle for the hegemony of the climate imaginaries defined by Levy and Spicer. Specifically, it will highlight how the techno-market and sustainable lifestyles imaginaries display contrasting musical strategies in order to win the public opinion. Despite the mainstream support of the later, it is undoubtable that it deploys a difficult and contradictory balance between a focus on the impact of agricultural nitrate discharges (the main cause of the crisis) and a call for action rooted on the evocation of an emotional attachment to the lagoon created by uncontrolled and unsustainable tourism. This is paralleled in the way that much of the music under study presents, following Timothy Morton, a sentimental approach complicit with the consumerist appropriation of nature under capitalism, that contradicts the aims for solutions that question the Anthropocene, such as granting the lagoon the status of “legal person”. Implicit to this research it is a wider discussion about the relationship established by music and environmental protest in Spain, with changing ecological-generic alliances that talk about the way in which both fields transformed over time.
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