Should Trees Have Standing

* Article: The Journal of Human Rights and the Environment published a retrospective, "Should trees have standing: 40 years on?

URL = http://www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/jhre/3-0/jhre.2012.02.00.xml

Stephen Woolpert: An excellent precursor to the concept of ecocide is Christopher Stone's iconic 1972 Yale Law Review article, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’. It remains the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights.

Summary

"Stone argued that special guardians should be empowered to speak for the "voiceless" elements in nature, in effect, to give legal standing to endangered species and threatened forests. Human rights courts have taken important steps to protect the environment, but always so as to protect the rights of the human. This leads some to identify a fundamental contradiction: by placing environmental claims in a human rights framework, the system reinforces the very conditions that give rise to natural harms in the first place, by shackling the protection of the natural object to the interests of the human(s) espousing the claim. Stone challenged the assumption that the human person is necessarily and naturally at the center of any legal order, be it national or international. He caused a great many readers to reflect in an ecological manner, by imagining what it means to conceive of the interests of a natural object from a non-human perspective." (GTN email, July 2016)