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Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

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Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#81

Post by bloppe »

neonihil wrote: post #5

Finally! 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…

I love trees, but I wonder where this legislation is headed. It sure sounds like it's creating the conditions for regulating trees on private land. This could have some perverse incentives. A tree on your land could become a liability. It could lower the value of your property, because you won't be able to sell it to someone who wants to build something that might interfere with that tree. Would that actually discourage people from planting trees in the first place?

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#82

Post by tsimionescu »

mannanj wrote: post #35
tsimionescu wrote: post #9

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 liv…

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 experienc…

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.

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#83

Post by tsimionescu »

sdellis wrote: post #66
tsimionescu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 va…

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 i…

It's not just property rights. The framework for protecting animals is more complex than "animal rights 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.

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#84

Post by tsimionescu »

nemomarx wrote: post #56
tsimionescu wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 va…

> 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.

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

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#86

Post by roughly »

arch_deluxe wrote: post #65
ClarityJones wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#87

Post by roughly »

ClarityJones wrote: post #61
roughly wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

"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."

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#89

Post by kyleee »

jimbokun wrote: post #28
I-M-S wrote: post #14

This 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.

It already says in the article they won’t be building anymore housing because they are forbidding cutting down trees to clear land to build, and they’re already out of open lots to build on. This is 100% NIMBYs finding new ways to protect their property values.

And that is for the best generally. There is more than enough room for infill development
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