This article by Michele Nijhuis appeared in Yes! Magazine on July 6, 2021.
Arguing for the legal standing of nature was greeted as ridiculous in the 1970s. But now the idea is catching on.
In October 1971, a few months after international officials gathered in Iran to sign the Ramsar wetlands treaty, Christopher Stone was standing in front of his introductory property law class at the University of Southern California’s law school, trying to hold the attention of his restive students. Observing that the definition of property had changed radically over human history, transforming not only the distribution of power within society but society’s view of itself, he wondered aloud about the effects of a similarly radical redefinition of “rights.” What if legal rights were extended to, say, rivers? Or animals? Or trees? “This little thought experiment,” Stone recalled decades later, “was greeted, quite sincerely, with uproar.”
Class was soon dismissed—to the relief of the students and their professor—but Stone did not abandon his thought experiment. Instead, he called the law library’s reference desk and asked if there were any pending cases where the “rights” of a natural object might affect the outcome. Within half an hour, a librarian called back to suggest Sierra Club v. Hickel.
The case involved a proposed Walt Disney resort in Mineral King Valley, a wilderness area in the Sierra Nevada of California. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund had challenged the development permit that the U.S. Forest Service had granted to the Disney corporation, but the court that heard the case had ruled that the Sierra Club had no “standing”—because the club itself would not be “aggrieved” or “adversely affected” by the development, it had no right to sue. The club had appealed, and the case would soon reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Stone hastily pulled together an essay for an upcoming issue of the Southern California Law Review. “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers, and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole,” he wrote. He was not, he emphasized, suggesting that no one be allowed to cut down a tree. “To say that the natural environment should have rights is not to say that it should have every right we can imagine, or even the same body of rights as human beings have,” he wrote. “Nor is it to say that everything in the environment should have the same rights as every other thing in the environment.”…
Read the full article HERE.