LOS ANGELES – Growing up, Teresa Vicente spent long days in the Mar Menor in Spain, swimming in clear waters, holding seahorses in her hands and feasting under the moonlit sky. Outside, she recalled, time stood still.
But over the decades, chronic contamination from mining, development and agricultural runoff has turned the once-pristine waters of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon into a cemetery. Mass fish deaths in 2019 prompted the University of Murcia’s professor of legal philosophy to take action.
Over the next few years, Vicente, now 61, led a grassroots campaign to save the region’s ecological jewel from collapse. His efforts helped lead to a new law passed in 2022, giving the lagoon the legal right to conservation, protection and repair.
Vicente is one of this year’s seven winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the “Green Nobel,” which honors activists and grassroots leaders from around the world for their achievements in protecting the natural world.
“(This award) means international recognition that we are facing a new stage of humanity”, said Vicente in Spanish. It is a stage where “human beings understand that they are part of nature. national, but rather European and international achievement.”
“They call Mar Menor the lagoon of magic,” she added, “and all of us on this journey have seen a lot of magic.”
The other winners are:
— Marcel Gomes, executive secretary of the nonprofit media organization Repórter Brasil, which organized a campaign that alleged connections between beef from the world’s largest meatpacking company, JBS, and illegal deforestation in Brazil and helped pressure retailers across the world to stop selling meat.
– Indigenous Murrawah activist Maroochy Johnson, who helped stop the development of a coal mine in the Australian state of Queensland that would have devastated almost 20,000 acres (8,000 hectares) of a nature reserve, expelled almost 1.6 billion tonnes of planet-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere throughout its lifetime and has endangered the rights and culture of indigenous peoples.
— Alok Shukla, who led a community movement that saved nearly half a million acres (200,000 hectares) of forests from 21 proposed coal mines in Chhattisgarh, a state in central India.
—Andrea Vidaurre, who helped convince California’s state air quality agency to establish two transportation regulations that limit emissions from trains and trucks. The rules include the country’s first emissions limit for trains.
— Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukulu, indigenous activists who stopped seismic testing of coal and gas in a coastal area off the Eastern Cape of South Africa.
Michael Sutton, executive director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, called the winners “an incredible group of individuals working, sometimes in obscurity, against all odds to prevail against governments, against industry.”
Vicente was born and raised in the city of Murcia, in southeast Spain, where the Mar Menor is located. When she learned about the fish kill in 2019, she was at the University of Reading in England, studying how other countries had successfully granted legal rights to natural resources to protect them.
To save the lagoon, Vicente helped draft the first bill granting legal protection to the Mar Menor in 2020 and submitted it to the Spanish Parliament, which allows citizens to propose laws directly. But the process required her to gather 500,000 signatures during COVID-19 lockdowns.
By November 2021, with the help of thousands of volunteers across Spain, Vicente had accumulated almost 640,000 signatures — and the law was approved in 2022.
She never doubted that she would succeed. “People understood that they were part of this ecosystem and were excited about the idea of being able to defend their rights,” she said. “When people forget their political differences, their religious differences or their economic differences, and give themselves over to a new idea of justice, that is a sure success.”
The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded in 1989 by philanthropists Richard and Rhoda H. Goldman to recognize everyday people who work in their communities to protect and improve their environment.
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AP video journalist Haven Daley contributed to this report from San Francisco.
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