[tsimionescu]

Such a weird idea. Do they recognize the right of cockroaches to life as well - as they are much more clearly living beings with some realistic chance of being sentient and feeling pain? What about tomatoes or roses or other plants?

Note that I'm all for the protection of trees - for pretty obvious environmental, esthetic, and human usage reasons. I just don't think recognizing trees as having their own rights as living beings makes any sense whatsoever.

[roughly]

We recognize corporations as legal entities with rights because it makes a great deal of the legal wrangling around, eg, assigning blame for criminal activity, or assigning permissions to operate, more convenient. Assigning rights to trees means not having to draw the entire causal chain to the harms done to people by environmental degradation, which can take years to manifest and is often irreversible. It’s the same legal fiction for the same reason.

[ClarityJones]

I think this is the opposite of missing the forest for the trees.

It's not a legal fiction that ~"corporations are people." Corporations are literally individual owners, managers, employees, etc. with various personal rights and responsibilities. There is no forest but for the trees that compose it.

[arch_deluxe]

A corporation is a single legal entity with distinct rights and obligations, that’s the entire point of incorporating, so you don’t have to create a fully connected graph of agreements between people, you can group them into entities that can then enter into agreements. The fact that corporations then have some rights similar to those of “natural persons” is the legal fiction referred to.

[roughly]

Right - you can sue CorpCo for violating the law, you don't need to dig in far enough into the corporate structure, decision logs, and personal actions to figure out that Bob, head of accounting for CorpCo greenlit the budgetary plan for Project Alpha, which makes Bob an accessory to the actions of Jim, who signed the contract to the subcontractor who performed the illegal digging operation, who therefore is responsible for incentivizing the violation of the law by way of making false statements about the status of the permitting process, and therefore both Bob and Jim must each pay damages, as must Tracy, who was aware that the permitting process was delayed (and even brought it up in meetings), but didn't contact the regulator when she should have.

Now, the fact that we've also agreed that corporations can act as political actors is fucking stupid, but the intent behind corporate personhood is that without it, it's effectively impossible to hold corporations accountable in any kind of reasonably efficient fashion.

[roughly]

"People" in this case is a legal term, not a colloquial one. Nobody's arguing that corporations are not composed of people.

And, arguably, yes, the same argument applies to the legal personhood of a forest - that proving that the impact on a group of trees aggregates to something significant and legally actionable is unnecessarily time consuming to keep doing every time someone tries to argue their clear-cutting operation hasn't actually harmed anyone, so you assign legal personhood to the forest so you can say "you harmed the forest" in the same way you can say "you harmed the corporation."

[tsimionescu]

This is unnecessary and over-shooting. States and localities are perfectly able to create legislation that specifically protects trees and other living beings and/or the environment in specific ways as necessary to prevent harm to people. You don't need to draw the whole causal chain to sue someone cutting down a tree needlessly all the way to some specific human harm - you just check that their actions contradict the law.

Actually recognizing a tree's right to life would mean extending constitutional limitations on any such legislation, and putting some kind of equality between human needs and a tree's needs, which is absurd: not just impractical, but not even morally tenable.

[ForceBru]

Yeah, the article reads like they suddenly realized that trees are alive and rushed to make their discovery a law. Look how ridiculous this sounds:

> Desrochers' film, called Des arbes et des arts convinced citizens that trees are living entities that breathe and communicate with each other through their root systems.

Did the citizens... not know that trees are alive? Have they never seen a tree? What do you mean a film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.

> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."

Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!

> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.

Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?

> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."

I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.

> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."

This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.

[dgellow]

That reads like a parody of pseudoscience

[nemomarx]

We kinda draw arbitrary lines? I mean we do animal rights and animal welfare, so what really is the difference between a mouse and a tarantula in those terms

[tsimionescu]

Well, I don't think we recognize a general right to life for animals, even for those protected under the law. Euthanizing a cat or a dog is allowed virtually everywhere, unlike a human, for example. We certainly don't recognize any right to bodily integrity for animals, as even cats and dogs are routinely sterilized.

Generally, we instead have animal welfare laws that protect various animals to various extents for various reasons, based on human interest in said animals (e.g. You can sterilize any cat you find, unless it's owned by someone else, but you can never shoot a cat; you can shoot many wild animals within certain limits, but you can't sterilize them outside very special circumstances).

[sdellis]

In the U.S., animal "rights" are superseded by property rights. There are many places in the U.S. where you can legally shoot a dog if it is chasing your chickens, cat, dog, or other domestic animals as long as you don't shoot it on its owner's property. Many people consider Kristi Noem to be cruel for shooting her puppy (on her own property) for killing someone else's chickens, but it's not illegal. What is tragic is that her dog was being trained to hunt fowl, and it was then killed for doing what it was taught.

The same priority on property rights applies to trees. I can't cut down a tree on your property, but I can cut down a tree on my property. The town in the article made a assertion that is no weirder than corporations being considered "persons" with "rights", yet that is widely accepted in our society.

In fact, corporate "personhood" is even weirder: This town did not make a law to enforce trees rights. However, applying "personhood" status to corporations is written into law all over the place even though corporations are a human construct, not sentient beings. So, again, the only way the current laws are logical is to see that they are all about enforcing property rights, not out of concern for trees, animals, and -- at one time -- humans.

[tsimionescu]

It's not just property rights. The framework for protecting animals is more complex than "animal rights < property rights". You can't for example go and shoot or poison a stray dog out in the city - but you can a rat or a cockroach. For fishing, there are typically limits on how many fish you can catch and of what kinds, even though they aren't anyone's property. You can't harm your own animals in certain ways, at least in certain states - you may be allowed to shoot them, but you're not allowed to torture them almost anywhere.

The general point is that animal protection are almost entirely subsumed to human rights - animals are protected in so far as their protection helps humans in some way (either specifically, such as your chicken being useful to you so that no one else can kill them; or environmentally, such as elk being important for the health of certain forests). Given the human need to consume or displace other living beings, this is the only tenable moral position that can be held anyway.

[sdellis]

You're right it's not _just_ property rights, but it's mostly property rights and their relationship to capitalism.

Outside of some endangered species laws those limits on fishing are to support commerce around fishing.

My kids grew up with rats as pets, and in many ways rats are proven to be more intelligent than dogs. But rats and cockroaches are notorious for upsetting commerce. Would you go back to a restaurant you saw had cockroaches? Consequentially, they are less protected because they are seen as a nuisance.

And if you have ever seen an industrial scale pig or chicken farm, those animals are most definitely tortured -- all legally. Why? To support commerce and big industry.

It's complex because government contorts ethics to accommodate capital and industry. Morality also changes over time. These days many people who eat pork would not want to kill a pig unless it was absolutely necessary to their survival.

[fl4regun]

In Ontario we have MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), not sure if Quebec also has something like this, but it's not unprecedented in Canada.

[nemomarx]

> Bourdeau says the new resolution means the town will review its existing rules and bylaws to ensure that trees are protected or replaced if they must be cut down. He also plans to implement measures to further increase the canopy, including offering trees for residents to plant.

This seems roughly in line with how we treat certain wild animal populations though.

[tsimionescu]

Probably, and wild animal population protection doesn't depend in any way on any recognition of some right to life for wild animals.

[functionmouse]

are cockroaches threatened by industry in the same way trees are?

[tsimionescu]

Much more so, yes - innumerably many cockroaches are killed every day in every city around the entire world.

[baal80spam]

> Note that I'm all for the protection of trees - for pretty obvious environmental, esthetic, and human usage reasons. I just don't think recognizing trees as having their own rights as living beings makes any sense whatsoever.

Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.

[Larrikin]

What kind of people?

[mannanj]

I studied an ancient form of communing with trees, through treediets (https://sacredtreekeepers.com) where I had a ~10 day fast with tree bark tea. there's certainly sentience and life form in them, unlike ours and also able to be connected to, if we have the right modulation of our awareness and sensory experience.

it doesn't just take a psychedelic experience to see this though.

Just because you haven't experienced something, and overely on your intellectual and thinking faculties (because you can't rationalize or understand something with you mind you discount its rights or existence) doesn't mean its true. Edit: I mean we in general overrely on our minds as filters for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when in reality much of knowledge, wisdom and understanding cannot be grasped by the mind or thinking; in many cases the mind deceives & tricks us.

[tsimionescu]

If you consumed treebark, then according to your own world view, you willingly tore off pieces of a living, sentient being just in order to see what it feels like.

There is simply no way to live, as an animal at least, without doing harm to other living, possibly sentient, beings - and certainly not without killing such. Any moral position that holds that all living beings have an equal right to life is untenable.