GROWING up, Teresa Vicente spent long days in Spain’s Mar Menor swimming in transparent waters, cupping seahorses in her hands and partying under the moonlit sky. Out there, she recalled, time stood still. But over the decades, chronic contamination from mining, development and agricultural runoff turned the once crystal-clear waters of Europe’s largest saltwater lagoon into a graveyard. A mass fish die-off in 2019 prompted the professor of philosophy of law at the University of Murcia to take action. Over the next several years, Vicente, now 61, led a grassroots campaign to save the region’s ecological jewel from collapse. Her efforts helped lead to a new law passed in 2022, giving the lagoon the legal right to conservation, protection and damage remediation. Vicente is one of this year’s seven winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, known as the “Green Nobel”, which honours grassroots activists and leaders from across the globe for achievements in protecting the natural world.

 

The recipients were selected from about 100 nominees. The other winners are: — Alok Shukla, who led a community movement that saved nearly half a million acres (2,00,000 hectares) of forests from 21 proposed coal mines in Chhattisgarh, a State in Central India. — Marcel Gomes, executive secretary for the media nonprofit Repórter Brasil, who organized a campaign that alleged connections between beef from the world’s largest meatpacking corporation, JBS, and illegal deforestation in Brazil and helped pressure retailers around the world to stop selling the meat. — Indigenous activist Murrawah Maroochy Johnson, who helped stop development of a coal mine in Australia’s Queensland state that would have devasted nearly 20,000 acres (8,000 hectares) of a nature preserve, spewed nearly 1.6 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its lifetime, and endangered the rights and culture of Indigenous peoples. — Andrea Vidaurre, who helped convince the state of California’s air quality agency to establish two transportation regulations that limit emissions from trains and trucks. The rules include the nation’s first emissions limit for trains. — Nonhle Mbuthuma and Sinegugu Zukulu, Indigenous activists who prevented seismic testing for coal and gas in a coastal area off South Africa’s Eastern Cape. Michael Sutton, executive director of the Goldman Environmental Foundation, called the winners “an incredible group of individuals labouring, sometimes in obscurity, against overwhelming odds to prevail against Governments, against industry.”