Oh happy day:
In the 70s, Obama’s Science Adviser Endorsed Giving Trees Legal Standing to Sue in Court
(CNSNews.com)Since the 1970s, some radical environmentalists have argued that trees have legal rights and should be allowed to go to court to protect those rights.
The idea has been endorsed by John P. Holdren, the man who now advises President Barack Obama on science and technology issues.
Giving “natural objects” — like trees — standing to sue in a court of law would have a “most salubrious” effect on the environment, Holdren wrote the 1970s.
“One change in (legal) notions that would have a most salubrious effect on the quality of the environment has been proposed by law professor Christopher D. Stone in his celebrated monograph, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’” Holdren said in a 1977 book that he co-wrote with Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich.
“In that tightly reasoned essay, Stone points out the obvious advantages of giving natural objects standing, just as such inanimate objects as corporations, trusts, and ships are now held to have legal rights and duties,” Holdren added.
According to Holdren and the Ehrlichs, the notion of legal standing for inanimate objects would not be as unprecedented as it might sound. “The legal machinery and the basic legal notions needed to control pollution are already in existence,” they wrote.
“Slight changes in the legal notions and diligent application of the legal machinery are all that are necessary to induce a great reduction in pollution in the United States,” Holdren added.
Holdren, who is the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and President Obama’s top science advisor, made the comments in the 1977 book “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment.”
Stone’s article — “Should Trees Have Standing?” — which Holdren called a “tightly reasoned essay,” was published in the Southern California Law Review in 1972.
In that article, Stone plainly states: “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment–indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”
Update: From a reader:
I think that I shall always rue…
…the day a tree got rights to sue.
A tree whose hungry lawyer’s plea
Is filed on a contingency
A tree that reads the Volokh blog
And wonders if she becomes a log…
…can her saplings file as her survivors
for harms and torts of reasons diverse?
Joyce Kilmer would be so happy