October 23, 2022

Spain’s polluted Mar Menor Lagoon gains legal personhood

topic:	Climate action
located:	Spain
editor:	Abby Klinkenberg

In a pathbreaking first for the European continent, Spain officially recognised the legal personhood of the Mar Menor saltwater lagoon ecosystem. As of 3 October 3, the rights of the 1,600 square-kilometers of the lagoon and adjacent Mediterranean coastline, located in the southeast Spanish region of Murcia, can be defended in court in the same manner as an individual or business. Spain’s decision to grant Mar Menor the right ‘to exist as an ecosystem and to evolve naturally’ amounts to what is known as ‘environmental personhood’ - affording ecological entities the rights and protections of legal entities. Informed by Indigenous knowledge systems that understand the relationship between humanity and natural forms as inherently intimate and existentially equal, this seminal decision destabilises the rigid human-nature binary that has long underpinned both the Western legal framework and the contemporary climate crisis.

Between 2016 and 2021, a series of ecological disasters precipitated by detrimental algae blooms and killer eutrophication turned Mar Menor’s formerly clear waters a sickly shade of toxic green. Asphyxiated by depleted oxygen levels, millions of dead fish and crustaceans washed ashore. These gruesome instances of ecocide predominately resulted from excessive nitrate runoff from local agri-businesses, compounded by poor sewage systems and discharge from mining activities. As the same tragedy recurred over the years, it became painfully clear that existing legal protections for the lagoon were insufficient.

In May 2020, Teresa Vicente Giménez, a local philosophy of law professor at University of Murcia, proposed granting Mar Menor legal environmental personhood - and galvanised a citizen-led campaign to take matters into their own hands in the process. Following a robust outreach program that engaged Spaniards on the topic of Mar Menor’s environmental degradation, activists collected and submitted well over the half-million signatures required to advance the popular legislative initiative to parliament in October 2021. The grassroots proposal was approved by Spain’s Congress of Deputies the following July and ratified by the Senate in late September 2022.

Now, Mar Menor will be represented by a set of legal guardians composed of government representatives and local citizens. A scientific committee will keep tabs on the ecosystem’s health and advise on restoration processes. Any citizen is now able to sue to protect the lagoon from pollution. These new legal levers, in tandem with the nearly €500 million committed by the Spanish government to address pollution in Mar Menor over the next five years, will help ensure that Europe’s largest salt-water lagoon remains vital and clear.

Beyond the tremendous ecological benefit of Mar Menor’s legal personhood, this decision suggests that European legal systems can shift to accommodate the progressive and radical understanding of ecosystems as existentially equal to human beings. While the West has long built its hyper-individualistic societies on the basis that human beings are above the natural world and are free to ruthlessly exploit it without consequence, the tide may be turning towards a more virtuous and reciprocal relationship. The climate crisis is the result not only of the Western penchant for pollutive, extractive activities, but also stems from the problematic notion that humans can somehow be untethered from the ecological landscapes that support us. In this context, the Spanish decision to afford Mar Menor the status of legal personhood represents a seismic shift in modern European legal and socio-cultural norms.

While this is a first on the continent, it is critical to recall that non-European countries that benefit from less rigid ontological separations between human and nature - inducing Bangladesh, Colombia, Ecuador, India and New Zealand (via the Māori people) - pioneered legal environmental personhood. It is only by stepping outside of the rigid systems with which Europe and the West have boxed themselves in that real climate justice can occur. The legal personhood of Mar Menor will go down as a critical battle won in the fight for Mother Earth.

Photo by Matt Howard

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