This paper focuses on the environmental dimensions of a subgenre of Moroccan literature and photography that has emerged in the past twenty years and that takes as its principal subject clandestine crossings of the Mediterranean Sea undertaken by undocumented migrants who attempt to breach the heavily policed borders of the European Union in hopes of remaking their lives within Europe’s internally borderless spaces. This subgenre is at once narrowly local in its referential range and world-historically global in its thematic and geo-political thrust. It is intensely local insofar as it typically represents the day-to-day lives of characters who are located on the margins of their respective social formations and who spend much of their time stuck in or moving through various marginal spaces within those formations. Conversely, the subgenre is global in its thematic and geo-political thrust insofar as the texts that comprise it implicitly or explicitly engage such questions of world-historical import as the nature of national identity, of sovereignty, and of borders, among others. With an eye to elucidating how the subgenre represents environmental realities, I examine the ways in which both large-scale geographies (e.g., cities, border zones, nation-states) and small-scale sites (e.g., remote villages, seedy cafes, deserted beaches) are imbricated with two of this subgenre’s principal themes: alienation from the Moroccan body politic and the concomitant urge to seek a new life in Europe, whose southernmost edges can be espied from all along the country’s northwestern-most shores. I will explain how in the texts that comprise this corpus inherited environments are experienced as a curse while the close yet far-off geography of Spain/Europe is represented as the site of an individually construed and illusory emancipation. Furthermore, I will argue that insofar as they render visible and central the circumstances, life-histories, and aspirations of people who are typically confined to the marginalized peripheries of the contemporary world system and who when referred to in establishment discourse are frequently figured as threatening specters or as expendable ciphers such texts as Youssef Elalamy’s novel Les clandestins (translated as Sea-drinkers) and Yto Barrada’s photo essay The Straits Project: A Life Full of Holes contain a positive dimension that partly belies their bleakness of tone and their profound political pessimism.