Should Trees Have Standing?
Notes from our second session, on Christopher Stone's proposal to give rivers and forests legal standing, and on whether Western law is the right instrument for it.
The Reading
Christopher Stone's essay "Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects", a 1970s text, circulated in both full and excerpted form after being cited in the Sierra Club v. Morton dissent read last session.
Overview
This session examined Stone's proposal to grant legal personhood and standing to natural objects such as rivers and forests. Discussion centred on whether Western law is the right vehicle for this, how damages and value get priced, the role of guardianship and of "romantic" views of nature, and comparisons to corporate personhood, artworks, and landmarks. The conversation closed with speculative directions — LLMs as guardians, and Coasean bargaining at scale — plus logistics for the next reading and session.
Key Points & Themes
- Square peg, round hole: One line of argument held that Western law is built around individual persons and monetary damages, so extending personhood outward from corporations to natural objects feels forced. A human legal subject, even one who needs a guardian, still has a history and a personality; a corporation plausibly develops a collective "personality"; a natural feature does not fit that shape in Western culture without a mythological or animist basis.
- Personhood as recognition, not only standing: A consequence of granting personhood would be cultural — natural objects would be recognised as persons, not merely defendable in court. Against the scepticism in the room it was pointed out that the group risked missing the essay's opening move: rights we now take as common sense, such as children's rights, once seemed unthinkable, and the discussion was "illustrating what the entry to the text says."
- Value, ownership, and economics: Framed through economics, assigning ownership or property rights to a thing — invoking Hernando de Soto and collateralisation — transforms how people interact with it, for good or ill. Personhood here may functionally resemble another mode of ownership or representation, comparable to cap-and-trade and carbon credits, which ascribe tradable value to something previously unpriced. Any such system needs an underlying shared societal goal or morality, which is exactly where environmental disagreement lives.
- The standing problem: A river has no "motive power" to make a claim of its own, so the real question becomes who gets authority to enforce on its behalf. Many historically protected areas were protected precisely because someone sought to exploit them. The recurring comparative question of the session: why grant a scientific or guardian body legally actionable standing, rather than simply appointing it a specialised regulator empowered to restrict polluting activity?
- Limits of the civil remedy system: Courts traditionally impose monetary damages and are reluctant to compel behaviour through injunctions or writs of mandamus; higher-level regulation belongs to legislatures and regulators. Loading environmental protection onto a damages-based civil system asks too much of it, even where the loss — a spiritually or culturally significant river — genuinely exceeds any monetary sum. The familiar objection that $300,000 cannot make someone "whole" after losing an arm was raised as the same failure in miniature.
- Pricing the ineffable: An interest in how a culture puts numerical prices on things of ineffable value, via Stone's car-damage example: damages default to the cost of repair and fall back to fair market value when repair is untenable — a logic that becomes strange the moment it is applied to pollution in a river.
- The animist framing: If we believed in river gods or place gods, standing for natural objects would feel natural; for us objects are not sufficiently personified, and animals feel closer to persons than rivers or rocks. A counterpoint conceded sympathy for the animist view but separated it from the legal question — whether or not everything has a spirit, including Wi-Fi headphones or music, that is distinct from being able to make individuated claims in a specific court.
- Romanticism and the myth of the "original": One thread traced a Romantic-era sense of separation between humans and nature — the sublime, the fantasy of "the wild" and of going back to the original — and argued there is no original: nature is us, and we are intertwined with the ecosystem. The cultural/natural gap is itself the problem, and romanticism blinds us to what is actually happening, illustrated by a crowded, dying Alpine glacier where tourists stood transfixed by grand nature while the place died. An ecological addition: the original is not a fixed object but an evolving one, which makes any counterfactual baseline vexing. This drew pushback — that romanticism is not in the text, and that the reading dismissed the essay's arguments — along with a proposal to appoint scientists and biologists as guardians who could give objective damage guidelines rather than being blinded by beauty.
- Who is being protected, and from whom: Landscapes now framed as wilderness were often emptied of the peoples who cared for them, so protection is really protection from Western extractive capitalism. Modern disasters stem partly from people interacting with landscapes whose history and workings they no longer know — building in unsafe places, for instance.
- Artworks, murals, and landmarks: Should an artwork have rights separate from its creator or owner? The case of a Queens building whose graffiti was whitewashed overnight by a developer ahead of demolition was raised, alongside the observation that buildings do effectively gain rights through landmark status — though enforced by a civic authority rather than a guardian. No clear logical distinction emerged between protecting art or landmarks and granting standing to natural objects, except that we do not personify artworks, locating the right in the owner or the artist instead.
- The artist's right: Artists can retain a right that their work not be destroyed regardless of who owns it — "almost like a right to life of the work."
- The two-edged sword of expanded standing: Stone wrote at a moment of maximum optimism about class actions and expanded court standing. California shows both edges: environmental lawsuits are a major reason high-speed rail has stalled, which is ironic given that rail would benefit the environment. This was taken to support balancing interests through regulatory authority instead.
- Displacement: Protecting one area may simply displace the harm — the unprotected river becomes the dumping ground, and countries that cut emissions import from dirtier ones. Drawing hard lines around one natural object inside a larger system may not improve overall outcomes.
- Stone's rebuttal: The essay anticipates the objection that this is just existing regulation by other means, arguing that rights are less vulnerable than regulatory bodies to political change and competing stakeholders.
Questions & Disagreements
- Is personhood the right vehicle at all? Scepticism from several directions favoured regulatory or technocratic authority; others were more open, seeing value in recognition; the session ended unsure that personhood is the right framework but willing to keep exploring it.
- Standing versus regulation — the session's recurring comparative question. Why give a guardian legal standing rather than regulatory power? Left open.
- Can guardians know what is best? How does a guardian know a forest's or river's true interests, given that browning grass is too simple a signal? The proposal of objective scientists met the counter that scientists are not fully objective, that public opinion is more emotional than science, and that specialists who live with a place develop their own attachments.
- Is romanticism actually in the text? Disputed, with the charge that the reading dismissed the essay's arguments, against the view that it shapes which objects get protected at all — the scenic Alps or Grand Canyon over an "ugly" field.
- Foetuses and children as edge cases: rights-holders who cannot make claims themselves. One argument held that children's rights feel intrinsic and should not require an external instrumental justification, unlike Stone's framing.
- Where is the baseline? Which version of an ecosystem counts as the "original" to be restored — an unresolved thread that links the 1970s text to the speculation about LLMs.
- Could an LLM be trained to speak for a river's significance? Open, with concerns about where the data would come from, how much would be needed, and the fact that LLMs lack bodily or worldly experience and may be trained on human-biased data.
References Mentioned
- Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing?" — the reading under discussion.
- The Whanganui River and the Te Awa Tupua Act (New Zealand river personhood), raised previously and proposed as related reading for October.
- A three-author paper, cited by last names only, framing legal personhood for rivers as a memetic or viral but awkward instantiation of a pre-existing indigenous framework.
- Hernando de Soto — property rights and collateralisation.
- Cap-and-trade and carbon credits.
- The Code of Hammurabi — ancient Mesopotamian eye-for-an-eye law.
- 5Pointz, the Queens graffiti building whitewashed and demolished by a developer.
- Landmark and historic preservation status; a recent Supreme Court case dismissed for lack of standing over Trump-era demolition and construction in Washington.
- "Coasean bargaining at scale" — an AI-agent negotiation proposal, with agents negotiating, for example, tax breaks in exchange for accepting a garbage dump.
- Conservation bias toward charismatic species — cuter animals attract more donations, and it is easier to save pandas than insects.
Action Items & Next Time
- The next reading will be decided in a few days, after members vote by emoji poll on the options posted in the group channel. Some options relate to today's discussion, such as Te Awa Tupua; others pivot to new areas.
- Members: react to the proposed readings, and contribute to the channel between sessions.
- A longer list of prospective readings and the group's generated research questions are now on the website, as agreed last session.
- Next session: 1 October, in the other slot — 19:00 organizer's local time, the evening rather than the afternoon. Details to follow by email. The two-time-slot experiment continues.
Memorable Quotes
"You're trying to load too much on a system that wasn't intended for it."
"Nobody was really seeing this place was dying... everybody was just transfixed about the grand big nature."
"It's almost like a right to life of the work."