Who Speaks for Trees?
A Quebec town takes up the cause. What if all of humankind spoke out as well?
Rare it is that the actions of small towns in French Canada win headlines in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s news website. Terrasse-Vaudreuil, a bosky municipality on the St. Lawrence River about 25 miles west of downtown Montreal, earned that trifecta this past June 9 by passing a unanimous city council resolution entitled “Municipal Commitment to Canopy Protection and the Recognition of the Fundamental Rights of Trees.”
Less law than statement of governing values, the resolution asserts three guiding principles:
The Tree, a sensitive living being and source of Life, is a common good of humankind.
Life on Earth depends on the existence of the Tree.
Human beings, endowed with reason and conscience, must act with the Tree in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity.
The principles come from the Universal Declaration of Tree Rights authored by French writer and environmentalist Ricardo Rey in 2018. Rey also founded the Assembly of the Tree, a loosely knit international organization of pro-tree groups and individuals in Europe and West Africa. Terrasse-Vaudreuil adds Canada to that list, and it stands as the first municipal government entity on the planet to incorporate tree rights into public policy.
No doubt, the notion that trees have rights sounds fancifully impossible even to Sierra Clubbers, Save-the-Redwoods members, and other environmentally minded folks. “Trees” and “rights” rarely appear in the same sentence except in reference to who holds the right to cut trees. Aren’t trees property? Lean in close and listen carefully. You hear nothing, right? If trees can’t speak, how they possibly have rights?
Those very questions led University of Southern California law professor Christopher D. Stone to write a pioneering and visionary article entitled “Should Trees Have Standing? – Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” more than 50 years ago. Stone recognized that on first glance the idea of granting trees rights – the legal consequence of standing – seems strangely weird. Trees are alive, for sure, but we think of them as inanimate, more things than beings. Yet that’s no stumbling block, Stone points out:
The world of the lawyer is peopled with inanimate right-holders: trusts, corporations, joint ventures, municipalities, Subchapter R partnerships, and nation-states, to mention just a few.
The fact that trees can’t speak for themselves is unimportant:
It is no answer [against tree rights] to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities, or universities. Lawyers speak for them.
Granting the voiceless and inanimate standing changes their status:
Until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us” – those who are holding rights at the time…. 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.
Building on the cosmology of the Indigenous Māori people, New Zealand has translated Stone’s legal theory into policy. A 2017 law granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River by creating Te Awa Tupua, an entity that represents the river and “all its physical and metaphysical elements.” Just like you or I or a corporation, Te Awa Tupua can sign contracts, buy property, file lawsuits, and borrow money. It does so through two representatives, one named by the Crown and the other by the Māori iwis (tribes) with interests in the Whanganui. New Zealand has likewise extended legal personhood to Te Urewera, a former national park sacred to the Tühoe iwi, and to Mount Taranaki, the North Island volcano that formed the Fuji-like backdrop to Tom Cruise’s 2003 film The Last Samurai.
New Zealand stands at the forefront of rights for nature, but it isn’t alone. Under Indian law, the Ganges and Yamuna rivers enjoy legal personhood to fight back against the pollution that fouls them. Colombia has done the same for the Atrato River, and California’s Yurok Tribe granted personhood under tribal law to the Klamath River, which centers its reservation. The constitution Ecuador adopted in 2008 gives the whole of nature the right to take steps necessary to preserve itself. Bolivia passed 2010 legislation called the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which grants legal standing to the planet and the life systems it supports, both ecological and human.
These changes and shifts in environmental law signal a slow-moving shift in the way we humans perceive and treat the natural world. Since at least the late Neolithic period, much of humankind, particularly in the West, has drawn a hard line between itself and the wild. Consider Yahweh’s divine command in Genesis 9 to subjugate the earth to human needs and wants:
The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you…. As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.
Religious dictates of this sort enshrine our species as different and special, the sole owner among all lifeforms of souls, consciousness, and divine favor. As long as humans are singular and exceptional, the wild world remains an object, a thing we can use as we wish. But when legal standing is granted to trees, mountains, and rivers, all that changes. They become beings more like us, cousins and companions who require decent and respectful treatment.
Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, and its beloved trees aren’t weird or odd. They’re a harbinger of better times to come.