Activist who fought for legal rights for Europe's largest saltwater lagoon wins 'Green Nobel'

LOS ANGELES -- Growing up, Teresa Vicente spent agelong days successful Spain's Mar Menor swimming successful transparent waters, cupping seahorses successful her hands and partying nether the moonlit sky. Out there, she recalled, clip stood still.

But implicit the decades, chronic contamination from mining, improvement and cultivation runoff turned the erstwhile crystal-clear waters of Europe's largest saltwater lagoon into a graveyard. A wide food die-off successful 2019 prompted the prof of doctrine of instrumentality astatine the University of Murcia to instrumentality action.

Over the adjacent respective years, Vicente, present 61, led a grassroots run to prevention the region's ecological jewel from collapse. Her efforts helped pb to a caller instrumentality passed successful 2022, giving the lagoon the ineligible close to conservation, extortion and harm remediation.

Vicente is 1 of this year's 7 winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, known arsenic the “Green Nobel," which honors grassroots activists and leaders from crossed the globe for achievements successful protecting the earthy world. The recipients were selected from astir 100 nominees.

“(This prize) signifies an planetary designation that we are facing a caller signifier successful humanity," said Vicente successful Spanish. It's a signifier wherever “human beings recognize they are portion of nature. And this designation means that it is not a section oregon nationalist conquest, but alternatively a European and planetary one."

“They telephone Mar Menor the lagoon of magic," she added, "and each of america connected this travel person seen a batch of magic.”

The different winners are:

— Marcel Gomes, enforcement caput for the media nonprofit Repórter Brasil, who organized a run that alleged connections betwixt beef from the world's largest meatpacking corporation, JBS, and amerciable deforestation successful Brazil and helped unit retailers astir the satellite to halt selling the meat.

— Indigenous activistic Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, who helped halt improvement of a ember excavation successful Australia's Queensland authorities that would person devasted astir 20,000 acres (8,000 hectares) of a quality preserve, spewed astir 1.6 cardinal tons of planet-warming c dioxide into the ambiance implicit its lifetime, and endangered the rights and civilization of Indigenous peoples.

— Alok Shukla, who led a assemblage question that saved astir fractional a cardinal acres (200,000 hectares) of forests from 21 projected ember mines successful Chhattisgarh, a authorities successful cardinal India.

— Andrea Vidaurre, who helped person the authorities of California's aerial prime bureau to found 2 transportation regulations that bounds emissions from trains and trucks. The rules see the nation's archetypal emissions bounds for trains.

— Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukulu, Indigenous activists who prevented seismic investigating for ember and state successful a coastal country disconnected South Africa's Eastern Cape.

Michael Sutton, enforcement manager of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, called the winners “an unthinkable radical of individuals laboring, sometimes successful obscurity, against overwhelming likelihood to prevail against governments, against industry."

Vicente was calved and raised successful Spain's southeastern metropolis of Murcia, location to the Mar Menor. When she learned astir the 2019 food die-off, she was astatine the University of Reading successful England studying however different countries had successfully bestowed ineligible rights upon earthy resources to support them.

To prevention the lagoon, Vicente successful 2020 helped constitute the archetypal draught of a measure granting ineligible extortion to the Mar Menor and submitted it to Spain's Parliament, which allows citizens to suggest laws directly. But the process required her to stitchery 500,000 signatures during COVID-19 lockdowns.

By November 2021, with assistance from thousands of volunteers crossed Spain, Vicente had amassed astir 640,000 signatures — and the instrumentality was passed successful 2022.

She ne'er doubted she would succeed. "People had understood that they were portion of that ecosystem and were excited astir the thought of ​​being capable to support their rights," she said. "When radical hide their governmental differences, their spiritual differences oregon their economical differences, and springiness themselves implicit to a caller thought of ​​justice, that is simply a definite success.”

The Goldman Environmental Prize was founded successful 1989 by philanthropists Richard and Rhoda H. Goldman to admit communal radical moving successful their communities to support and amended their environment.

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AP video writer Haven Daley contributed to this study from San Francisco.

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