Trees are People
On Rights for Nature and renovating our worldviews
It’s been over a month since I wrote anything for substack - in large part because I have been preparing and then teaching a winter university intensive for architecture students in Melbourne, Australia. No, I am not an architect. But I do run my company with one, and together we teach worldbuilding and storytelling to students interested in other ways they can operate in the world as designers.
So I’ve been doing that.
Did you know that trees are people?
Weird segue, I know. But in the course I was teaching, a recurring theme was emerging rights for nature and how they could be utilised to safeguard the wellbeing of non-human landscapes. Now, I am very excited about this idea. And I had some mixed success in passing that excitement onto my students.
“Yes! Your project should absolutely be a speculative court case arguing for the legal personhood of a mountain ash forest! Why would you want to do anything else?”
(they did something else).
In the mid-course review (this is a design education thing when students present their work to a panel of critics to get feedback) the invited guests and fellow tutors immediately latched onto the few students who spoke about the recent history of legal rights being granted to various ecosystems around the world.
I realized, then, that maybe not everyone knows that this is a thing actually happening in the world.
Seeing as the theme of this substack is all about who (and what) gets to be a person, it feels an appropriate topic for a post - albeit one with plenty of links as there has been a flurry of really good writing on this topic in recent years including one of the most comprehensive wikipedia articles I have encountered in recent research endeavors.
So here we go! (and if you read to the end…there’s the reward of a very, very cute picture!)
Explain to me quite quickly - what are rights for nature?
Rights of Nature is a legal framework that recognises the intrinsic right of nature to exist and to thrive, independent of what such existing and thriving can do for humans.
It is a lens that looks out onto the world and says;
“you know how in 1948, the political leaders of the world, gathered at the United Nations, decided that every human being on this earth should have certain inalienable rights by the sole fact of their being human? We should do that for the natural world as well.”
As a legal theory, rights of nature became well known in the western world in 1972, when USC law professor Christopher Stone published an essay titled ‘Should Trees Have Standing’? This essay (which is now a much-reprinted book) was published shortly after a court case (well known publicly at the time) where a US environmental organisation called the Sierra Club sued the federal government to block the development of a ski resort in a rugged alpine area called Mineral King.
The Sierra Club lost the court case, officially speaking, because they couldn’t prove that building a massive highway through a mountain and deforesting a suburb’s worth of land would cause any harm to any person’s interest.
The way the court saw it; people - the type walking around as human beings - like skiing. The legal person of the Walt Disney Corporation (yes, they were the ones wanting to develop the resort) liked the idea of all the money it would make. The legal person of the various government institutions involved liked all the revenue the resort would bring in and all the political donations the Walt Disney company had made.
The mountains and rivers and forests and animals of Mineral King probably would not like the new ski resort. But they didn’t count.
This is the crux of Rights for Nature. And it’s actually a good news story because despite the loss in the courts, the ski resort was ultimately never built as it turned out to be very expensive and wildly unpopular, and along the legal way, a judge named William Douglas wrote a dissenting opinion asserting that “inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded by roads and bulldozers” should have the standing to “sue for their own preservation”.
So Professor Stone, in writing ‘Should Trees Have Standing’, was expanding on what it would take for nature to participate in human legal systems.
It was not as simple as just equating nature with other non-human legal persons, like ships or companies.
Wait, what?
Legal personhood is the state of being a person as defined by law. All human beings are legal persons and come into their personhood ‘naturally’ - ie, they are born. Companies on the other hand are juridical or ‘artificial’ persons because some non-natural legal process gives them the rights to do things that human beings can do; own property, sue, be sued, enter into agreements. Ships are also juridical persons.
Reader, it seems this post is now a tour of legal concepts I find absolutely thrilling. I’m not being sarcastic, this is exciting stuff because it shows the power of language to define reality.
Being born is a biological process. Biology is equated with nature so human beings are ‘natural persons’. Laws are artificial, so things made into persons through laws are artificial persons…but is not the very concept of a person also an artificial thing, made up once more by laws and religions and how fickle both laws and religions can be?
A person who is naturally a person today has not always a person been and could be un-personed if the persons who spun the power of language thought that certain others should not persons be.
Yes. The world you and I live in is bounded by language. It is a technology of utmost power. But why were you telling me about how ships are legal persons?
Because the personhood of a tree would not be quite the same thing.
Explain (briefly, no rhyming please).
Stone’s essay explained that the legal personhood of companies and ships is a tool that advances the interests of their human owners. It limits legal liability.
“Please sue my company, oh you unfortunate citizens living along an oil-spoiled beach. I can not be held responsible. Also, my company is conveniently bankrupt.”
This framework is still dependent on the supremacy of human interests.
The legal personhood of ‘natural objects’ (here we go again, the fascinating juxtaposition of deadening and objectifying language in an argument for enlivening personification) would be different because, in many cases, the exercise of those rights could be contrary to what the humans owners want to do with them, like chop them down, or turn them into mines, or fill them with raw sewage and industrial waste.
Enshrining inalienable rights for nature would challenge post-enlightenment western capitalist anthropocentrism that frames nature as a set of discrete resources to be used for human benefit.
So where does that leave us?
Well, in some parts of the world, trees are, in fact, people.
The first rights of nature law was passed by Ecuador in 2008 with constitutional amendments that recognised “ Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution”.
When I googled Ecuador rights of nature law 2008, I found this article written in 2011 arguing that enforcement of these rights was unlikely essentially due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms. However, I also found, almost just as quickly, news of the 2022 Ecuadorian Supreme Court’s decision to prevent mining in the Los Cedros Protected Forest on the grounds that it would violate the rights of nature by disrupting water flows, disrupt ecologies, and potentially drive quite a few endangered species extinct.
Essentially, it is working.
In 2010 and 2012, Bolivia passed laws recognising rights of nature.
In 2014, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Te Urewera forest, and to the Whanganui River.
There are rights of nature laws of some kind in India, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico City, Uganda, some states of the US, and in Ireland there is momentum behind granting personhood to the River Shannon.
This momentum is likely not fast enough, nor capitalist-greed-proof enough. But it is there.
The successful implementation of right of nature laws has been testimony to the efforts of Indigenous groups. In Ecuador and Bolivia, Indigenous tribes long championed the legislation and continue to invoke it to oppose ecologically destructive mining projects. In New Zealand, the Māori iwi are the recognised guardians of the Whanganui River, legislated to represent its right to regenerate freely. The Whanganui River is not owned by the Māori iwi, nor by the state. The river owns itself. That is encoded in law.
I stress this because it represents a shift in the hegemonic paradigm of ‘nature as resource’. It is significant that societies bounded by ideas of human exceptionalism and capitalist extractivism are renovating their supporting structures to make space for other perspectives.
Indigenous ontologies were essential in these changes as they put concepts and argument and energy behind a different way of seeing the world, giving voice to an alternative way of relating to the world.
What are you trying to say here?
I see a few directions for the wrap up to this essay. And wrap-up I will because I’m aware that this is getting quite long.
On the day of their final project presentation, another one of the student groups from the visiting school (not the group who declined to do my project about the rights of nature) asked me what they should say if any of the critics asked what was the point of studying a real-life forest and then creating a fiction about it.
I gave them my lighthouse analogy.
Put succinctly, I see speculative fiction as a lighthouse on a distant shore of potential realities. It is there to cast light on dangers to avoid, and places you may wish to row your world-tossed boat towards.
Fiction has zero problem with trees as people. Just ask Tolkein, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Richard Powers, even blinkin Disney, with Pocahontas and its expensive blue remake.
I am not going to get waylaid here at the irony of a capitalist conglomerate (and prospective developers of the Mineral King ski resort) making mega capitalist bucks out of IP critiquing capitalism.
Instead I’m going to keep championing the power of alternative worldviews, including those encapsulated in fiction, to shed light on a future shore where persons of all forms grow together.
Thanks for reading! There’s so much more I could say on this topic but for now this is where I’m going to leave it. If you have insights to add, I’d love to hear them.
To conclude, here’s a picture of a leadbeater’s possum. It makes me happy to look at this photo because it is so darn cute.
These possums are critically endangered and depend for their survival on hollows in eucalyptus trees that only develop when the trees are able to reach maturity - that’s about 120 years old. So far, there are no rights of nature laws in Australia but other environmental legislation has been leveraged to stop some cases of logging and give these creatures another shot at thriving.
So glad to have found this! I also teach architecture students! And in my ecological design course, we talk about the Rights of Nature movement. Well met! Thanks for this.
Sometimes I wonder if humans are worth saving, but if they are it will only happen if democratic rights are extended to all beings. And we might say if we do expand rights to all life we are worth it, and if we don't, we're not. It would be the most meaningful paradigm shift since christian-capitalism, which is a piss poor obsolete way to live in this world.