"Ecosystems are not objects, as they have been treated until now, they have their own life and human beings are part of them. Without them we cannot live," begins Teresa Vicente Giménez, Professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Murcia, during an interview with La Voz.
Vicente Giménez was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the Nobel of the Environment, thanks to her fight to achieve a milestone on the continent, giving legal personality to a European natural space. Specifically, she managed to make the Mar Menor become a subject of rights and obligations and be able to defend itself in court. An initiative that opens the door for groups and the population of Lanzarote to defend the natural spaces of the island as holders of their own rights.
"This declaration implies that the Mar Menor is the bearer of a series of rights that are in the law and that it is capable of defending them by itself through any person," she points out during her visit to Lanzarote, on the occasion of a presentation at the César Manrique Foundation. "Giving it legal personality means, in short, recognizing it sufficient value to be able to defend its right to life, protection and recovery," she adds.
From anthropocentrism to ecocentrism
This battle to achieve more protection for the largest saltwater lagoon in Europe is part of a new thinking, which advances together with ecological science and which states that there is no right to act in an unlimited way on the environment.
"The law has achieved a paradigm shift, from anthropocentrism, with the human being at the center, to ecocentrism, which is the ecosystem at the center," she explains. In this way, the human being is only a part and companies "can develop their activity, but within the limits" of the environment.
"We have exceeded the limits of natural law itself and this is what is causing to question whether planet Earth survives and humanity with it," highlights the also director of the UNESCO Chair in Human Rights and Rights of Nature of the University of Murcia, who defends that economic growth has been prioritized over the survival of the planet.
Law 19/2022 gave legal responsibility to the Mar Menor, after being approved in Congress and the Senate. The only party that opposed was Vox, which went to the Constitutional Court, pursuing without success that it collapsed. The judicial body endorsed this measure at the end of 2024. Since then, the population can defend all parts of the Mar Menor in court.
Teresa Vicente Giménez explains that before this law, if the Prosecutor's Office did not consider that it had sufficient evidence to accuse a company that was damaging the Mar Menor, the case was dismissed. However, now the Court calls the Mar Menor to defend itself because it has legal responsibility.
This university professor, who has been studying the right to nature since the eighties, defends that the human being normalized slavery centuries ago and decades ago women did not have the same rights as men. "Women did not have full legal personality and, therefore, we could not defend our rights," she adds. Now, she states that "nature has been the last exploited" and that she understood that the only solution was "to give the exploited the same rights" so that they could defend themselves.
Despite the fact that there are different laws and regulations that protect natural spaces and ecosystems, for example the Mar Menor is safeguarded by European and national protections, its ecosystem has continued to be destroyed. "Environmental law is not enough, although it has been valuable and is in some aspects, but it is not enough for this unlimited environmental destruction," she adds.
Within the great milestones of environmental law, Ecuador was the first country in the world to recognize the right to nature, also known as Pacha Mama (Mother Earth) in Quechua. The Latin American country approved a law in 2008 that recognized the right of nature to exist, maintain itself and regenerate. In addition to them, among others, the Atrato River in Colombia or the Whanganui River in New Zealand managed to obtain their own legal personality in 2016 and 2017, respectively.
In this fight to achieve more rights for the Mar Menor, Teresa Vicente has met people who said that it was not possible to give rights to a natural space. "Part of the academy, as they did with women and social justice, may say that it does not exist, that it is impossible, but the law is a technique," she says.
In this sense, she points out that "if there is an architect who knows how to make a type of architecture that does not negatively affect the environment, then let him do it, if there are others who do not know how to do it, let them not say that it is impossible, simply let others come," in relation to Manrique's work on the island. In this case, the Goldman winner as a lawyer firmly believed that this can be done and that ecosystems can be given legal personality so that they can defend themselves.