23 April 2025

Photo: Nils Richterich

What does it mean when nature becomes a legal entity? Following a series of global cases, in 2022 the Spanish saltwater lagoon Mar Menor became the first ecosystem in Europe to be granted rights of nature. The idea? The lagoon will have its own political representation, and all people will be allowed to file lawsuits on behalf of this ‘little sea’: a movement from legal anthropocentrism to moderate ecocentrism, as the Spanish Constitutional Court puts it. However, this ‘paradigm shift’ was preceded by decades of environmental pollution from agriculture, mining, and tourism, which, accompanied by massive fish deaths, have profoundly altered this ecosystem. The lecture picks up on these traces and follows the history of the Mar Menor's problems, its actors, and conflicts in order to understand how this unique law came about in the region of Murcia, the ‘orchard of Europe,’ of all places. This ethnographic search is accompanied by the question of what it means in practical terms to represent a changing ecosystem and why the seahorse in particular has become the symbol of this socio-ecological struggle.            

6:15 p.m. – 7:45 p.m., Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, West Wing, Room 221

Lecture series: Von Schönheit und Schrecken

Coordination
Prof. Dr. Ruzana Liburkina / Prof. Dr. Norbert Fischer, both from the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History, University of Hamburg