>See Christopher Stone, "Should Trees have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for
>Natural Objects". I haven't the exact original publication place at hand but
>it is collected in something called People, Penguins, and Plastic Trees.
> Stone actually argues that legal rights can be easily extended beyond
>living things to lakes, rivers, ecosystems etc. After all, corporations
>are not
>usually considered living beings but they have legal rights. Ecologists etc.
>could hire lawyers to represent environmental interests and rights just as
>lawyers now can argue for corporate rights and interests.
Thanks for the reference. I'll look into _People, Penguins, and Plastic Trees_. Meanwhile, I've found the following review on the Net:
***** Should Trees Have Standing?
by Christopher Stone
An Article Review by Kathleen Lynn Nolan
Last Update: July 8, 1997
Christopher Stone believes that nothing in society is a continuing problem because of itself, but rather, something becomes and remains a problem because of shortcomings in the institutional arrangements society relies on to deal with the problem. This theory is evident in the titles of his books: Law, Language, and Ethics: An Introduction to Law and the Legal Method, Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior, Earth and Other Ethics, and The Gnat is Older Than Man: Global Environment and the Human Agenda. To understand the problem of corporations and industries, for instance, the question to be answered is "Exactly what is it about corporations, and exactly what is it about the institutions we have available to control them, that so often seems to leave the one so frustratingly outside the grasp of the other (Stone, 1975)?" Up until now, the law system has operated with concern mainly focused on individual human beings. Unfortunately it is the institutional systems, corporations in particular, who are most in need of reform and social action.
In Stone's Should Tree's Have Standing?, he answers the question "What sort of new controls can be, and must be adopted to control corporations, and improve existing measures taken towards the environment?". The solution is to assign guardianship of a natural object, perceived to be endangered, to a friend of that object, such as the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Counsel. Stone writes,
"It is not inevitable, nor is it wise, that natural objects have no rights to seek redress in their own behalf. It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak...One ought, I think, to handle the legal problems of natural objects as one does the problems of legal incompetents...(Cahn and O'Brien eds., 1996, 221)."
This can be done, according to California laws, since the natural object, like any incompetent person, is unable to properly take care of himself or his property, and is likely to be taken advantage of (in this case, by corporations). Lawyers have previously been assigned to speak for corporations, universities, states, and unborn children, so why not the environment?
There is already a judicial movement of "marked liberalization of traditional standing requirements", a movement of broad interpretations of the law, which gives the environment the benefit of having a voice. This only works, however, when federal or public lands are involved, and only when there is statutory language within the law itself, which special action groups can rely on. Guardians could be assigned to all natural objects, public or private, and would be responsible for all legal affairs without relying on the language. The guardianship approach would work in cases where these actions outside the federal jurisdiction were not involved (such as those falling under the Dept. of the Interior). Guardians would have the right of inspecting the land's condition and bringing it to the court's attention, as well as carrying out tasks such as monitoring, and setting legal standards.
Before solving the legal dilemma involved in assigning guardianship, the government first needs to exercise its statutory power and advance important social goals, such as changing society's perception of our environment so that the people will recognize the need to protect nature. Assigning guardianship of the environment would change the view society has on nature.
Lawyers, politicians, and policy makers can take the theme of existential humanism, explained in Bishin and Stone's Law, Language and Ethics, to broaden awareness of our environment. This theory states that man is nothing but that which he makes for himself. Man primarily exists, as something which propels itself towards a future fully aware that he is doing so.
"When a man commits himself to anything, fully realizing that he is not only choosing what he will be, but is thereby at the same time a legislator deciding for the whole of mankind-in such a moment a man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility - Sartre (Bishin and Stone eds., 1972, 67)."
This existential humanist would believe that by declaring guardianship over the environment, he himself as an individual is bettering the whole. The existential humanist would also feel that to "allow the trees to have standing", the vocabulary of the legal system (rights, privileges, ownership, duty), must ultimately be defined. To do this would make visible the role man plays in environment, and would define his own sense of self (Bishin and Stone eds., 1972, 1236).
Works Cited
Bishin, William R. and Christopher Stone, eds. 1972. Law, Language and Ethics: An Introduction to Law and Legal Method. Mineola, New York: Foundation Press, Inc.
Cahn, Matthew Alan and Rory O'Brien, eds. 1996. Stone, Christopher. 1974. "Should Trees Have Standing?" Thinking About the Environment: Readings on Politics, Property and the Physical World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.
Stone, Christopher. 1975. Where the Law Ends: The Social Control of Corporate Behavior. New York, Evanston, San Francisco, and London: Harper & Row.
<http://www.tamucc.edu/~whatley/padm5370/read12c.htm> *****
It appears from the review, though, that, according to Christopher Stone's reasoning, it is in effect humans (environmentalists) who are to gain rights of the "guardians," and, for this purpose, natural objects are anthropomorphized into fictive persons who are "incompetent." Through this anthropomorphism, natural objects are imagined to possess "property interest" in themselves, only to become vehicles of human agents' assertions of control. Such reasoning, it appears to me, expresses nothing less than the aporia of environmentalism under capitalism. In an effort to protect the natural environment from capital's uncontrolled plunder, one strand of environmentalism ends up projecting the ideology of *possessive individualism* beyond humans onto natural objects. While I'm not a big fan of Adorno, I'd have to say that Stone's thinking is a good example of what Adorno called "the rage of idealism": "Out of itself, the bourgeois _ratio_ undertook to produce the order it had negated outside itself. Once produced, however, that order ceased to be an order and was therefore insatiable. Every system was such an order, such an absurdly rational product: a posited thing posing as being-in-itself....Idealism...gives unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I, _l'autrui_, and finally all that reminds us of nature is inferior, so the unity of the self-preserving thought may devour it without misgivings. This justifies the principle of the thought as much as it increases the appetite. The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism....The august inexorability of the moral law was this kind of rationalized rage at nonidentity....Yet the process in which the systems decomposed, due to their own insufficiency, stands in counterpoint to a social process...[T]he bourgeois _ratio_ really approximated to the systems whatever it would make commensurable with itself, would identify with itself -- and it did so with increasingly, if potentially homicidal, success. Less and less was left outside. What proved idle in theory was ironically borne out in practice" (_Negative Dialectics_).
In my view, it is a big mistake to think (as Christopher Stone does) that we can fight property rights with property rights and should argue for "sustainable capitalism." Giving "rights" to nature is wrong for the same reason that giving "rights" to fetuses and corporations is wrong. The world in which such entities are given "rights" -- capitalism with its insatiable appetite to devour anything and everything -- cannot but dehumanize human beings and negate our needs and desires.
Yoshie