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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

#91

Post by sdellis »

tsimionescu wrote: post #83
sdellis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the U.S., animal "rights" are superseded by property rights.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 fo…

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.

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#92

Post by jimbokun »

meristohm wrote: post #60
jimbokun wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.

...and a consequence of living in dense concrete "jungles" is increased energy consumption to cool ourselves, further increasing average global temperatures. What might the consequences be of living amongst trees (and plants in general) and spending much more of our time meeting our basic needs by moving around on the earth under our own power?

Living in dense cities requires LESS energy consumption than spread out over rural areas.

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.

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#93

Post by quasse »

bloppe wrote: post #81
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 discour…

This is already the case in Seattle. It's hard to tell if the law was originally created with any good intention or if it was just NIMBYism from the start.

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-...

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#94

Post by frrlpp »

jimbokun wrote: post #92
meristohm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and a consequence of living in dense concrete "jungles" is increased energy consumption to cool ourselves, further increasing average global temperatures. What might the consequences be of living amongst trees (and plants in general) and spending much more of our time meeting our basic needs by moving around on the earth under our own power?

Living in dense cities requires LESS energy consumption than spread out over rural areas. 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.

No and no. Rural != suburban

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#96

Post by gnabgib »

zuzululu wrote: post #90
cwillu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quebec's legal system is not based on common-law like the rest of the provinces.

[flagged]

Montreal is in Quebec. None of your random statements apply to the province or the city.

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#98

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

ForceBru wrote: post #59
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…

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 f…

And yet they don’t protect cockroaches which are sentient, unlike trees.

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).

Re: Quebec town recognizes trees as living beings with rights

#99

Post by adjejmxbdjdn »

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…

In the U.S. property rights superseded human rights. That’s what slavery was. In fact, slaves were essentially treated as we do animals today.

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.

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