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Date Published: 13/10/2021
ARCHIVED - Activists mark 2-year anniversary of first load of dead fish in Mar Menor
The memorial service was staged to raise awareness of problems in the Mar Menor that have been dragging on for over two years now
It has been two years since the first images emerged of tens of thousands of fish gasping and dying on the shores of the Mar Menor due to anoxia, and things have hardly progressed. Since that fateful day on October 12 2019, there has been constant bickering between political groups without any really effective measures put in place to help the Mar Menor lagoon, as shown by the most recent mass die-off of fish this August.
While the rest of the country celebrated (or not) the national holiday Spain Day yesterday, eight environmental organisations from the Murcia region, among them Extinction Rebellion held a memorial on Villananitos beach in San Pedro del Pinatar. The symbolic wake included candles, a coffin, banners and crosses, and was also an opportunity to collect signatures for a petition in favour of the Popular Legislative Initiative to give legal personhood to the lagoon to ensure it is properly protected. There are just over 80,000 signatures left in order to get the 500,000 necessary to bring the proposal to the Congress of Deputies.
Back in 2019, residents and visitors to beaches like Villananitos de Lo Pagán, La Mota and La Puntica looked on in horror as hundreds of fish washed up on the shore trying to breathe. A spokesperson for the ecogroup ‘Pacto por el Mar Menor’ said at the time that “the entire basin of the Mar Menor was in anoxia, and if it ends up dying the repercussions could be very serious”, words that sadly ring just as true today.
While back then Antonio Luengo, Environment Councillor for Murcia, pointed mistakenly to 2019’s catastrophic DANA storms as the culprit, Murcia residents came out and spoke in defence of the Mar Menor just like they did at last week’s demonstration. It seems little real progress has been made over the last two years, though it is promising that citizen support for raising awareness about saving the Mar Menor has never been higher.
Image: Ecologistas en Acción
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