14 The Nation. April 6, 2020
ARIS MESSINIS / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES“We spent
50 euros and
organized
the biggest
demonstra-
tion in the
history of the
island.”
— Juan Turing people on the islands.
Spanish law allows for a
brief window of public con-
sultation before a project is
evaluated by the Ministry of
Environment, and the alli-
ance used this opportunity
to flood the authorities with
complaints; the Cairn Ener-
gy project received around
128,000 petitions—almost as
many complaints are there
are inhabitants of Ibiza.
In the Balearic Islands,
all efforts were focused on
stopping exploration before
the initial phase of mapping
the seafloor through acous-
tic surveys even began. “We
didn’t want the surveys because maybe they would have
found oil and that would have forced us to change our
economic model,” says Marí Torres. “Hopefully, now
that the nightmare is over, we will focus on the dream of
making Ibiza sustainable.”
For years, environmental activists had been at logger-
heads with tourism developers over the 13 million annual
visitors who flood the Balearic Islands, straining the local
ecosystem. But this fight was different. “It is incredible
how everyone got together,” says Juan Tur, an engineer
who started the social movement Eivissa Diu No (Ibiza
Says No), on a bright winter day at Salinas beach, while
volunteers trawl the sand behind him, collecting the tiniest
scraps of plastic. “We spent 50 euros and organized the
biggest demonstration in the history of the island. Every-
thing we asked for was donated for free. We only had to
say, ‘It’s about the oil exploration.’ I was literally crying.”
Even the local billionaire, Abel Matures, came out against
oil drilling—a sign that it might not be necessary to bring
down capitalism in order to end the oil era; dividing the
capitalists could be enough.
The outpouring of resistance, peaking with the record-
setting demonstration in 2014, had a profound impact on
the local branch of the conservative Partido Popular de
las Islas Baleares, forcing its leaders to take a stand against
their party’s policies in Madrid. “At first, the party tried to
say that there’s nothing we can do, since the permits had
already been granted,” says Cristina Martín-Vega, the
chief editor of the newspaper Diario de Ibiza. But as sup-
porters expressed their outrage, the PP Baleares changed
course to oppose drilling.
In 2015, Cairn Energy did not follow up with paper-
work on the four permits in the Gulf of Valencia and
closed down its Spain office, signaling victory for the local
movement. Absent any relevant company statement, it’s
impossible to say whether the project’s demise was due
to the expectation that the company would fail to secure
drilling rights, rather than, say, tanking global oil prices.
But we do know a lot more about how crucial grassroots
pressure was in informing the next decision, the one that
permanently banned oil and gas companies not just from
that original concession area but from a much larger one.
As Madrid kept issuing more permits for exploration
in the Mediterranean, the anti-drilling movement decided
its tactics had to change. Rather than fight off the projects
one by one, why not push for the protection of an entire
area? The one that most urgently needed safeguarding
was a deepwater corridor running parallel to the eastern
coast of Spain, home to dolphins and whales that feed
there or pass through on their annual migration from the
Atlantic to the waters off Corsica. Known as the Corredor
de Migración de Cetáceos (Cetacean Migration Corri-
dor), it was under threat from acoustic surveys, so activists
collected meticulous data on the harm the sound blasts
cause and presented it to the authorities at the same time
that public pressure was mounting.
The pressure worked. With unanimous decisions in
2016 and 2018, the parliament of the Balearic Islands
asked for 46,385 square kilometers (almost 18,000 square
miles) to be declared a marine protected area, even
though there were more than a dozen active explora-
tion permits inside it. Then, in June 2018, then–Prime
Minister Mariano Rajoy’s conservative government col-
lapsed. Sánchez came to power with support from theGreat divide:
The areas off Spain,
France, Italy, and
Croatia are now
all but barred to
drilling, while the
waters of the Eastern
Mediterranean are still
open to hydrocarbon
exploration.Best-laid plans: Clockwise from top left: Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades, Greek Prime Minister
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz,
Greek Environment and Energy Minister Kostis Hatzidakis, and Cypriot Energy, Commerce, Industry
and Tourism Minister Yiorgos Lakkotrypis signing the EastMed pipeline agreement, January 2, 2020.