Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Trees are fantastic creatures.
(I'd happily go as far as calling them Beings, but I'm afraid it would sound like some kind of a new age esoteric bullshit, even so I'm borderline convinced they are sentient.)
The important thing that fascinates me is how Tree actually work. They are generally perceived as growing from the soil to the atmosphere. However, the opposite is true. About 98% of the material of a tree is originated from the air, namely the carbon extracted from the CO2 content of the air. Trees are literally growing from the air, and piercing down into the soil to get water to run their Calvin cycles to extract the carbon and produce the ATP.
Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do. And by destroying them, we are limiting this control. Looking from this angle, there is very little surprise in the onset of weather extremes.
I summary, I'm very happy with this legislation. I hope this a first step in many that is actually going to help us taming the climate of our planet again. With more trees. Because trees are awesome.
Recently there was an article posted here that claimed trees do have some ability to control the weather. The claim is trees simultaneously release water vapor into the atmosphere influencing rains.
Regardless, the net result has been 100% NIMBY warriors using it to block as much infill and urbanization as possible. We've got "Tree Action" organizations that jump in and use the law to block low income apartment buildings and construction of sidewalks leading to transit stations. Random example: https://www.treeactionseattle.org/campaigns/first-ave-shade-...
This is 100% NIMBYs finding new ways to protect their property values.
I would be very surprised if Quebec doesn't already have some longstanding clean water act type law that accomplishes the same "can't clear let alone develop land without our discretion and paying $$" type restriction that the NIMBYS are getting here.
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.
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).
This seems roughly in line with how we treat certain wild animal populations though.
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.
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.
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.
Our descendants will look at us the way we do our slave owning ancestors. Except worse, because we’re leaving trillions of images and videos showing the grotesqueness of our behavior towards other sentient beings treating them worse than the way our ancestors treated other humans they saw the way we do other sentient animals.
Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Or can it be conditionally true in some cases, in some living experiences, and not others?
> 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.
Sentience is what deserves rights. Not life.
Nearly every cell in our body is alive. Hair follicles are alive. Does that mean shaving should be illegal now?
But yes, a cockroach should have the right to not be unnecessarily killed and caused harm just like we wouldn’t accept for a dog or a cat because a cockroach isn’t just alive, but it has consciousness and feelings (ie sentience).
The current "humans matter and others not so much" spawns from Abrahamic ass-backward beliefs, primarily from
Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
And, from a warlord petulant child-god, this is rich. Basically its license to disregard all of life since "We" are it's ruler.
And I think that view is horrible. Science is even backing that up.
Multiple corvids can solve puzzles, share descriptions of mean people, and more. Lots of animals are similar. We even mapped prairie dogs language and dialects. They have words for child, man, woman, man with gun.
Plants also communicate with chemicals and other things. And even though plants don't have neurons like mammals, SOMEHOW anesthetic drugs anesthetize them and prevent them from giving pain stimuli. Yet, we say they can't think... But respond as if they do.
And at the world level with climate devastation, protecting our biosphere should he the utmost importance, and working WITH biotics, not against. But its that judeo-chriatian-islam human centrism that says "Naw, we humans are the only species that matters". That will be our undoing, with a front seat (for those who live) to our planet's destruction.
And those people in those rural areas spend LESS time moving under their own power because the places they need to get to are so far away they have to drive cars to get there.
Akshually we don't. We used to do that but not anymore. Unless you have obscene cash to buy offsets and credits and whatnot you can't get approved for anything even remotely close to an old school 1970s concrete jungle site plan.
It’s unclear whether the reporter failed to describe the real impact of this or whether it actually has no teeth.
Regarding tree rights, I do think cities cut down trees too lightly. For example, the city where I live recently rehabbed a large park and cut down a mature tree to make a new path, where it could have easily made the path a few meters away. (Of course the tree may have been diseased, but it seemed quite healthy.) I’m not sure my argument would be that trees have rights so much as that trees take a long time to grow, and a replacement tree is not as good as a mature one for a long long time.
Fast forward about forty years. The trees are TALL and HUGE! So, so cool. We hoominz top out at our own heights. But trees just keep treein' on.
If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
I'd hate to speculate about what this means for people that might stand in their way.
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
The property taxes are largely offset by the carbon credits, though.
Right…
Right…????