This guest blog by Markie Miller and Crystal Jankowski was posted on the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund’s website on December 10th, 2019.
A few weeks ago, the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) was profiled in an article in The Guardian. The article, titled “Should this tree have the same rights as you?” was written by Robert Macfarlane. Two key organizers behind LEBOR responded to the article, in a letter to the editor, which was published in the newspaper in November.
You can read the original article here and the published letter to the editor here.
However, the organizers, Markie Miller and Crystal Jankowski, have a few more thoughts to share. Below is their guest blog for the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.
Stay tuned: Oral arguments in the corporate lawsuit against LEBOR are scheduled for January 28, 2020 (in Toledo, Ohio).
In our letter to The Guardian, we wrote that “we agree with the ‘lawyers and philosophers’ cited by Macfarlane, who think ‘assigning of legal personhood to a more than human entity is a profound category error.’” This might seem counterintuitive coming from LEBOR organizers.
“In fact,” we continued, when drafting LEBOR, “we were careful to distinguish between human rights (‘personhood’) and ecosystem rights. For humans, LEBOR recognises rights ‘to a clean and healthy environment’ and to a system of government that protects ‘human, civil, and collective rights.’ But for the lake, it recognises different rights: to ‘exist, flourish and naturally evolve’ – it does not establish ‘personhood.’”
(To read the rest of this guest blog at its original source please click HERE.)