Master Thesis by Guillermo Collado Wilkins

To what extent is sustainable development truly sustainable? In which ways is it different from previous ecological regimes, such as the extractivist practices of XXth century authoritarianisms? How do plans, and models, mediate between different temporalities? What can we learn about our social metabolism by studying climate scenarios as political techniques of government?

“The Nature of Total Planning” tries to answer these question by doing a close reading of the environmental history of La Bizkaia, a godforsaken valley in northern Spain. After centuries of traditional farming and structural poverty, La Bizkaia was radically transformed in the 1940s and ’60s; the Francoist government bought the valley as part of a national plan to industrialise a war-stricken country by building up its hydroelectric power. The creeks and paddocks in La Bizkaia witnessed the establishment of a monoculture of pine trees which forced the last inhabitants to leave. Seventy-five years later, the valley is still owned by the regional government, which runs two programmes of sustainable development which are financed by the European Union. The pine tree monoculture stands, most villages don’t.

Historicising La Bizkaia’s social metabolism is the first step for a political and epistemological critique of green capitalism. A broader investigation of Francoist hydropolitics contextualises the pine monoculture as part of a national programme to enrol nature into Franco’s political project. The ‘total planning’ of the Ebro river basin is analysed in detail, abstracting its technocratic and extractives qualities into a model of landscape management. Building on this historical foundation, the last section of this thesis compares that model with how La Bizkaia is managed today, under the sustainable development paradigm. While, discursively, sustainable development distances itself from the extractivist practices of fascist autarky, The Nature of Total Planning reveals striking continuities in the material practices of La Bizkaia’s forestry management.