Climate Rage: Extractivism and Dispossession in The Olive Tree Free

In my video essay “Climate Rage: Extractivism and Dispossession in The Olive Tree,” I explore the emotion of anger toward ecological degradation through the film El Olivo (The Olive Tree, 2016), directed by Iciar Bollain, one of the most acclaimed Spanish filmmakers working today. The protagonist of the movie, Alma, is a young woman filled with rage and pain due to the sale, years ago, of the olive tree that once belonged to her grandfather. This act of dispossession—in Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s terms—occurs within the larger context of the Spanish housing bubble that culminated in the financial crisis in 2008, spurred by the ongoing, multidimensional crisis (economic, social, ecological, and so on) that had been unfolding for decades.¹

My argument here is twofold. Firstly, I examine how the film intertwines the concepts of earth and body, portraying the physical act of extraction as both the uprooting of the tree and Alma’s repetitive hair-plucking as a self-harm mechanism through which she manages her unceasing pain. Building on the principles of material ecocriticism, I foreground the inseparable connection between human beings and biospheric systems.² The act of extraction, both from earth and body, is visually linked in my video essay, thus exemplifying the ideas Helen Houser raises in her book, Ecosickness, which focuses on stories that strategically use sickness and pain to narratively connect environment and soma.³ By intertwining images of violence and rage from Alma with the extraction of the tree, I aim to represent that the violence inflicted on the earth has a direct impact on human bodies and lives, particularly those of women and other subaltern groups, resulting in a range of consequences, including physical diseases, mutations, mental illnesses, or emotional disorders. In this case, the environmental violence that Alma endured as a child when she witnessed the extraction of the olive tree negatively impact the environment, her grandfather, and herself, allowing me to bring The Olive Tree into conversation with eco-trauma cinema, a term that encompasses films that depict the aftermath of ecological catastrophes.⁴ I chose to accompany the images with the sound of a beating heart gradually increasing in speed, both to mirror and intensify the emotional sensations of the protagonist and to express the urgency of the ecological crisis. Moreover, the use of a corporeal tempo further emphasizes the embedded connection between body and earth.

In this framework, the environment, or the so-called Nature, cannot be separated as an external entity that needs to be kept pure and protected; instead, it irrevocably becomes part of ourselves, a version of what Timothy Morton calls “ecology without Nature.”⁵ This ontological re-position counters the humanist philosophical stance that places mankind in a position of mastery and detachment over the rest, shedding light over the manufactured boundaries between self and other, human and more-than-human.

Secondly, I delve into the emotional dimensions of climate change and the Anthropocene which, borrowing Timotheus Vermeulen’s term, I call ecopathy.⁶ Ecopathy, from Ancient Greek πάθος (páthos, “suffering”) and οîκος (oîkos, “house”), expresses both the awareness of being mentally and physically embedded in the environment and the more-than-human, and the range of emotions stemming from that awareness amid environmental degradation. In other words, ecopathy encompasses the distinctive affective modes generated by the transformations arising in the Anthropocene. My work explores affects and sensibilities that are associated with environmental works of art, particularly in the audiovisual form, and how different media elicit affective appeals. While the “affective, aesthetic, and moralist” conventions that dominate ecocritical work typically limit the range of emotions to “guilt, shame, didacticism, prescriptiveness, sentimentality, reverence, seriousness, sincerity, earnestness, sanctimony, self-righteousness, and wonder,” my work engages a wider variety of affects.⁷

This video essay focuses specifically on rage and anger, emotions that—unlike grief or wonder—are disregarded and ignored by ecocritical scholars. This neglect may stem in part from the association of these emotions with destruction and with irrational behavior. But in her foundational work on the “uses of anger,” Audre Lorde reflects on the transformative power of this emotion as a response to racism against Black women, centering anger as a key “methodology” in Black feminist studies.⁸ “Anger,” as Bettina Judd states following Lorde, “is anger’s response to its own abjection.”⁹ What Lorde and Judd powerfully articulate is the importance of recuperating Black women’s anger as something other than a stigma or a stereotype. Anger, instead, is fuel. It is energy. And it has the potential to serve as a means of survival when survival itself is attacked, which is at the core of the climate crisis in which we are immersed.

My video essay reflects on the political potential of rage to inspire collective responses that challenge the status quo. Alma’s anger is a powerful emotion that inspires her to take action in order to repair the damage inflicted on the earth and her family by trying to recuperate the olive tree. At the end of the video essay, the images show how her quest ultimately gathers support from a large group of people, demonstrating what Black feminists and queer writers had already revealed: rage can serve as a powerful catalyst for mobilizing communities and forming collective alliances, in this case to confront environmental crises.

By intertwining somatic and environmental entities, as well as by exploring rage as a transformative force, my video essay sheds light on the profound impact of climate change on our lives. Also, by exploring rage as a transformative force, I emphasize an emotion often overlooked in environmental studies. This is crucial as a means of examining how anger opens possibilities of engaging with collective action. Through focusing on the stories of marginalized groups, particularly women, I reflect on the unequal impact of climate change on vulnerable collectives and the potential power of their responses to climate change.