Climate change as landscape ruination: Exposed dams, empty reservoirs, and ecological anxiety in Catalonia

By the end of 2023, Catalonia entered its fourth year of drought, leading to a water crisis characterized by depleted dams and widespread water restrictions. Dams, as quintessential modern infrastructures, shape landscapes and territories. This article explores their historical contribution to Western modernization and examines how their role is changing in an era overshadowed by the certainty of climate change. This shift is influenced by emerging narratives stemming from the dwindling functionality of dams due to water scarcity. Revealed by receding waters, the ruins of drowned villages seem to echo the past while empty reservoirs reshape dams into contemporary ruins. We scrutinize evolving discourses that once hailed dams as the epitome of modernity and now frame them as tangible manifestations of climate change. This narrative shift unfolds amidst sustained environmental crises, casting dams as harbingers of ecological anxiety and signifiers of the decay of modernity under the pressure of climate change. By challenging conventional associations of ruins with the past and infrastructures with the future, we offer a holistic perspective on dams and ruins as landscape markers of modernity and climate change. Through the intertwined temporalities of dams and ruins, we navigate the nexus between past, present, and future landscape transformations.