This might seem silly on the face of it, but I live in a town where native forest is regularly leveled to bare earth, built on, and non-native trees planted in its stead. It's dumb and ugly. But profitable!
Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
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Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#72Finally! 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 tr…
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Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#73So when they plan to cut it for whatever reason, they will have to submit a MAID request for the tree to be legally taken down?
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#74Well, maybe we SHOULD consider all life sacred, and approach from that way.
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.
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#75I got a quick tree education. When my buddy and I were in grade school his family moved into a new housing development with streets lined with puny new trees surrounded by the usual wires and rubber guards. They were frail and we were growing faster than they were.
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.
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#76Finally. There should be major repercussions for destroying trees, especially within the cities that look increasingly like concrete blocks.
We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.
>We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.
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.
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#77Obligatory: Rush - The Trees (Live From The Montreal Forum / 1981)
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#78Such 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 liv…
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…
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.
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#79Such 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 liv…
are cockroaches threatened by industry in the same way trees are?
Much more so, yes - innumerably many cockroaches are killed every day in every city around the entire world.
Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights
#80This will be weaponized by NIMBYs to further limit construction of housing and infrastructure, leading to a situation in which trees have more human rights than people.
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