Parte y no dueña: Ethics of Care and the Struggle to mitigate the Mar Menor ecological collapse
Rebeca Ibáñez Martín
In this presentation, I focus on how feelings of pain and loss experienced firsthand by our interlocutors — as they witnessed the Mar Menor slowly suffocating after an anoxic event— served as a driving force behind the social movement that culminated in the salty lagoon’s recognition of legal personhood in 2022. This social movement, activated in part by grief, gave rise to a distinctive ethics of care in which activists, gesturing toward multispecies kinship with the lagoon, developed a lexicon of material relationality. As Teresa Vicente, the scholar credited with drafting the legal proposal, once said: ‘A major ontological shift occurred among the residents living along the Mar Menor coastline, who went from feeling like masters to feeling part of the Mar Menor (parte y no dueña).’ I argue that the ethics of care activists mobilise to relate to the Mar Menor is deeply material in its relationality. To develop this argument, I focus on three material objects or materialities: (1) water, (2) sand, and (3) food. Dramatic yet deeply transformative, this catastrophic anoxic event turned the Mar Menor into a nodal point between life and death — a site of countless multispecies encounters, some tragic, others joyful.