(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 tree is originated from the air, namely the carbon extracted from the CO2 content of the air. Trees are literally growing from the air, and piercing down into the soil to get water to run their Calvin cycles to extract the carbon and produce the ATP.
Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do. And by destroying them, we are limiting this control. Looking from this angle, there is very little surprise in the onset of weather extremes.
I summary, I'm very happy with this legislation. I hope this a first step in many that is actually going to help us taming the climate of our planet again. With more trees. Because trees are awesome.
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?
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-...
> Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do.
Recently there was an article posted here that claimed trees do have some ability to control the weather. The claim is trees simultaneously release water vapor into the atmosphere influencing rains.
I seem to remember kinda recently-ish reading about a discovery that trees also rely on an extensive sub-surface (underground) mycelium network for "communication" of a sort. Let's hope they never become actually sentient and decide humanity's a threat (like in a certain Stephen King movie I watched once). :grin:
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.
I would be very surprised if Quebec doesn't already have some longstanding clean water act type law that accomplishes the same "can't clear let alone develop land without our discretion and paying $$" type restriction that the NIMBYS are getting here.
Cynically, to make a documentary and get articles written. None of the rules they mention seem that extreme, they're just wording it in an unusual way.
Same nefarious reasons corporations were given "personhood". Is it illegal to "assult" trees now? If someone pisses on a tree, are they going to call in the SVU? The legal system isn't a toy. Trees, in the general sense, don't need extra laws, the ones that need protecting are already covered by property law.
Imagine trees having more rights than fetuses because "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things."
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 living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
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 legal fiction for the same reason.
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.
"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."
This is unnecessary and over-shooting. States and localities are perfectly able to create legislation that specifically protects trees and other living beings and/or the environment in specific ways as necessary to prevent harm to people. You don't need to draw the whole causal chain to sue someone cutting down a tree needlessly all the way to some specific human harm - you just check that their actions contradict the law.
Actually recognizing a tree's right to life would mean extending constitutional limitations on any such legislation, and putting some kind of equality between human needs and a tree's needs, which is absurd: not just impractical, but not even morally tenable.
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 film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.
> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."
Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!
> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.
Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?
> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."
I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.
> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."
This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.
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).
We kinda draw arbitrary lines? I mean we do animal rights and animal welfare, so what really is the difference between a mouse and a tarantula in those terms
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 various reasons, based on human interest in said animals (e.g. You can sterilize any cat you find, unless it's owned by someone else, but you can never shoot a cat; you can shoot many wild animals within certain limits, but you can't sterilize them outside very special circumstances).
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 is that her dog was being trained to hunt fowl, and it was then killed for doing what it was taught.
The same priority on property rights applies to trees. I can't cut down a tree on your property, but I can cut down a tree on my property. The town in the article made a assertion that is no weirder than corporations being considered "persons" with "rights", yet that is widely accepted in our society.
In fact, corporate "personhood" is even weirder: This town did not make a law to enforce trees rights. However, applying "personhood" status to corporations is written into law all over the place even though corporations are a human construct, not sentient beings. So, again, the only way the current laws are logical is to see that they are all about enforcing property rights, not out of concern for trees, animals, and -- at one time -- humans.
It's not just property rights. The framework for protecting animals is more complex than "animal rights < property rights". You can't for example go and shoot or poison a stray dog out in the city - but you can a rat or a cockroach. For fishing, there are typically limits on how many fish you can catch and of what kinds, even though they aren't anyone's property. You can't harm your own animals in certain ways, at least in certain states - you may be allowed to shoot them, but you're not allowed to torture them almost anywhere.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.
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 experienced something, and overely on your intellectual and thinking faculties (because you can't rationalize or understand something with you mind you discount its rights or existence) doesn't mean its true. Edit: I mean we in general overrely on our minds as filters for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when in reality much of knowledge, wisdom and understanding cannot be grasped by the mind or thinking; in many cases the mind deceives & tricks us.
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.
Do you think that having an equal right to live as any other being must be true in all scenarios, in all cases, and all experiences? i.e. if a tree has that right to equal life, its true all the time through every possibility space of its existence? (same for humans)
Or can it be conditionally true in some cases, in some living experiences, and not others?
Living in Queens NYC I can see the large disparity between the greenery prevalent in the tax photos present on 1940s.nyc. After my grandparents passed we sold the house that had three nice shade trees, patio, a garden, grass along the side and a front lawn. Only the front lawn remains. The rest was entombed in concrete. Houses around the area suffer the same fate - yards completely devoid of green life and instead concrete. When it rains water pours down driveways into the gutter leaving the combined sewer system to deal with water that should be in the earth.
Most cities already have strict rules for removing existing trees. Usually anything over 6 inch diameter at shoulder level is off limits without getting specific approval.
...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.
>We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.
Akshually we don't. We used to do that but not anymore. Unless you have obscene cash to buy offsets and credits and whatnot you can't get approved for anything even remotely close to an old school 1970s concrete jungle site plan.
> 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.
It’s unclear whether the reporter failed to describe the real impact of this or whether it actually has no teeth.
Regarding tree rights, I do think cities cut down trees too lightly. For example, the city where I live recently rehabbed a large park and cut down a mature tree to make a new path, where it could have easily made the path a few meters away. (Of course the tree may have been diseased, but it seemed quite healthy.) I’m not sure my argument would be that trees have rights so much as that trees take a long time to grow, and a replacement tree is not as good as a mature one for a long long time.
I got a quick tree education. When my buddy and I were in grade school his family moved into a new housing development with streets lined with puny new trees surrounded by the usual wires and rubber guards. They were frail and we were growing faster than they were.
Fast forward about forty years. The trees are TALL and HUGE! So, so cool. We hoominz top out at our own heights. But trees just keep treein' on.
If we start letting trees communicate by underground signalling though a network of mycorrhizal fungus, it’s going to be the death of French. It’s important that every living being learns to adopt the culture.
> "We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living," she said in a phone interview. "So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?"
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
This might seem silly on the face of it, but I live in a town where native forest is regularly leveled to bare earth, built on, and non-native trees planted in its stead. It's dumb and ugly. But profitable!
If you don't know anything about the difference between civil law and common law in Quebec, you should be reading wikipedia articles on the topic and such rather than asserting nonsense in comments on hn.
I just finished Michael Christie’s Greenwood, a generational epic on family and, well, trees. Part of the book takes place in a future where the only trees left in the world are on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia where the rich go to replenish.
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
Well, maybe we SHOULD consider all life sacred, and approach from that way.
The current "humans matter and others not so much" spawns from Abrahamic ass-backward beliefs, primarily from
Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
And, from a warlord petulant child-god, this is rich. Basically its license to disregard all of life since "We" are it's ruler.
And I think that view is horrible. Science is even backing that up.
Multiple corvids can solve puzzles, share descriptions of mean people, and more. Lots of animals are similar. We even mapped prairie dogs language and dialects. They have words for child, man, woman, man with gun.
Plants also communicate with chemicals and other things. And even though plants don't have neurons like mammals, SOMEHOW anesthetic drugs anesthetize them and prevent them from giving pain stimuli. Yet, we say they can't think... But respond as if they do.
And at the world level with climate devastation, protecting our biosphere should he the utmost importance, and working WITH biotics, not against. But its that judeo-chriatian-islam human centrism that says "Naw, we humans are the only species that matters". That will be our undoing, with a front seat (for those who live) to our planet's destruction.
> We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living. So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?
If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.
whats the appeal of living in quebec or montreal ? seems like they are very intolerant of non-french people and race seems to play a huge role there when i visited
Montreal is a multicultural city but I'm talking about rest of Quebec but I don't think its wise to deny the numerous stories and anecdotes of the negative experiences anglophones have had including racism.
You really can't integrate in a society when you will remain an outsider even if you speak french fluently
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 tree is originated from the air, namely the carbon extracted from the CO2 content of the air. Trees are literally growing from the air, and piercing down into the soil to get water to run their Calvin cycles to extract the carbon and produce the ATP.
Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do. And by destroying them, we are limiting this control. Looking from this angle, there is very little surprise in the onset of weather extremes.
I summary, I'm very happy with this legislation. I hope this a first step in many that is actually going to help us taming the climate of our planet again. With more trees. Because trees are awesome.
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?
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-...
> Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do.
Recently there was an article posted here that claimed trees do have some ability to control the weather. The claim is trees simultaneously release water vapor into the atmosphere influencing rains.
Yep! Evaporation through leaf stomata creates the internal pressure drop that pulls water from the earth into the roots.
I seem to remember kinda recently-ish reading about a discovery that trees also rely on an extensive sub-surface (underground) mycelium network for "communication" of a sort. Let's hope they never become actually sentient and decide humanity's a threat (like in a certain Stephen King movie I watched once). :grin:
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
Does this actually do that thought?
I would be very surprised if Quebec doesn't already have some longstanding clean water act type law that accomplishes the same "can't clear let alone develop land without our discretion and paying $$" type restriction that the NIMBYS are getting here.
This is like saying guns will be weaponized. The entire point of this is to be a NIMBY weapon.
.. coming soon to San Francisco I bet
Quebec law is not based on common-law, so I'm not sure how that would be managed…
[dead]
I'm pro-tree, but I feel like you can protect them without sounding this ridiculous
The goal is definitely not to protect trees.
Oh yeah? What is it then? Please enlighten us.
This will be weaponized by NIMBYs to further limit construction of housing and infrastructure.
Cynically, to make a documentary and get articles written. None of the rules they mention seem that extreme, they're just wording it in an unusual way.
Feels like the primary concern was virtue signaling, with protecting trees being a close second
Same nefarious reasons corporations were given "personhood". Is it illegal to "assult" trees now? If someone pisses on a tree, are they going to call in the SVU? The legal system isn't a toy. Trees, in the general sense, don't need extra laws, the ones that need protecting are already covered by property law.
Imagine trees having more rights than fetuses because "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things."
Does a tree have a direct blood connection to a person? Does a tree die if that connection is severed?
In rare cases, yes. https://nypost.com/2009/04/16/small-tree-found-growing-insid...
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 living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
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 legal fiction for the same reason.
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.
"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."
This is unnecessary and over-shooting. States and localities are perfectly able to create legislation that specifically protects trees and other living beings and/or the environment in specific ways as necessary to prevent harm to people. You don't need to draw the whole causal chain to sue someone cutting down a tree needlessly all the way to some specific human harm - you just check that their actions contradict the law.
Actually recognizing a tree's right to life would mean extending constitutional limitations on any such legislation, and putting some kind of equality between human needs and a tree's needs, which is absurd: not just impractical, but not even morally tenable.
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 film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.
> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."
Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!
> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.
Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?
> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."
I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.
> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."
This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.
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).
That reads like a parody of pseudoscience
We kinda draw arbitrary lines? I mean we do animal rights and animal welfare, so what really is the difference between a mouse and a tarantula in those terms
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 various reasons, based on human interest in said animals (e.g. You can sterilize any cat you find, unless it's owned by someone else, but you can never shoot a cat; you can shoot many wild animals within certain limits, but you can't sterilize them outside very special circumstances).
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 is that her dog was being trained to hunt fowl, and it was then killed for doing what it was taught.
The same priority on property rights applies to trees. I can't cut down a tree on your property, but I can cut down a tree on my property. The town in the article made a assertion that is no weirder than corporations being considered "persons" with "rights", yet that is widely accepted in our society.
In fact, corporate "personhood" is even weirder: This town did not make a law to enforce trees rights. However, applying "personhood" status to corporations is written into law all over the place even though corporations are a human construct, not sentient beings. So, again, the only way the current laws are logical is to see that they are all about enforcing property rights, not out of concern for trees, animals, and -- at one time -- humans.
It's not just property rights. The framework for protecting animals is more complex than "animal rights < property rights". You can't for example go and shoot or poison a stray dog out in the city - but you can a rat or a cockroach. For fishing, there are typically limits on how many fish you can catch and of what kinds, even though they aren't anyone's property. You can't harm your own animals in certain ways, at least in certain states - you may be allowed to shoot them, but you're not allowed to torture them almost anywhere.
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.
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.
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.
In Ontario we have MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), not sure if Quebec also has something like this, but it's not unprecedented in Canada.
> 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.
are cockroaches threatened by industry in the same way trees are?
Much more so, yes - innumerably many cockroaches are killed every day in every city around the entire world.
> 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 living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.
What kind of people?
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 experienced something, and overely on your intellectual and thinking faculties (because you can't rationalize or understand something with you mind you discount its rights or existence) doesn't mean its true. Edit: I mean we in general overrely on our minds as filters for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when in reality much of knowledge, wisdom and understanding cannot be grasped by the mind or thinking; in many cases the mind deceives & tricks us.
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.
Do you think that having an equal right to live as any other being must be true in all scenarios, in all cases, and all experiences? i.e. if a tree has that right to equal life, its true all the time through every possibility space of its existence? (same for humans)
Or can it be conditionally true in some cases, in some living experiences, and not others?
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Are they definitely the same people?
Finally. There should be major repercussions for destroying trees, especially within the cities that look increasingly like concrete blocks.
Living in Queens NYC I can see the large disparity between the greenery prevalent in the tax photos present on 1940s.nyc. After my grandparents passed we sold the house that had three nice shade trees, patio, a garden, grass along the side and a front lawn. Only the front lawn remains. The rest was entombed in concrete. Houses around the area suffer the same fate - yards completely devoid of green life and instead concrete. When it rains water pours down driveways into the gutter leaving the combined sewer system to deal with water that should be in the earth.
Most cities already have strict rules for removing existing trees. Usually anything over 6 inch diameter at shoulder level is off limits without getting specific approval.
And they were able to do that without declaring trees to have equal rights with people???
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.
No and no. Rural != suburban
>We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.
Akshually we don't. We used to do that but not anymore. Unless you have obscene cash to buy offsets and credits and whatnot you can't get approved for anything even remotely close to an old school 1970s concrete jungle site plan.
> 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.
It’s unclear whether the reporter failed to describe the real impact of this or whether it actually has no teeth.
Regarding tree rights, I do think cities cut down trees too lightly. For example, the city where I live recently rehabbed a large park and cut down a mature tree to make a new path, where it could have easily made the path a few meters away. (Of course the tree may have been diseased, but it seemed quite healthy.) I’m not sure my argument would be that trees have rights so much as that trees take a long time to grow, and a replacement tree is not as good as a mature one for a long long time.
I got a quick tree education. When my buddy and I were in grade school his family moved into a new housing development with streets lined with puny new trees surrounded by the usual wires and rubber guards. They were frail and we were growing faster than they were.
Fast forward about forty years. The trees are TALL and HUGE! So, so cool. We hoominz top out at our own heights. But trees just keep treein' on.
I wonder if they adhere to Quebec's language laws.
If we start letting trees communicate by underground signalling though a network of mycorrhizal fungus, it’s going to be the death of French. It’s important that every living being learns to adopt the culture.
We probably need to plant more trees or be diligent about ones we remove, but this seems to proceed from an erroneous worldview
> "We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living," she said in a phone interview. "So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?"
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
Inbefore extreme NIMBY
This might seem silly on the face of it, but I live in a town where native forest is regularly leveled to bare earth, built on, and non-native trees planted in its stead. It's dumb and ugly. But profitable!
If you don't know anything about the difference between civil law and common law in Quebec, you should be reading wikipedia articles on the topic and such rather than asserting nonsense in comments on hn.
Who represents the trees and what are they able to do with these rights?
Corn, soybeans, and wheat would like a word… that is, unless this isn’t actually about “plant rights” and is really about faux-environmental NIMBYism.
> the town will ... ensure that trees are ... replaced if they must be cut down.
I'd hate to speculate about what this means for people that might stand in their way.
Calling a sentient living thing "a common good of humanity" is pretty dark. Putting those concepts together like that is an oversight.
This is what lawmakers that don't want to deal with the real life issues do. They work on nonsense laws while citizens live in squalor.
Obligatory: Rush - The Trees (Live From The Montreal Forum / 1981)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H0lwRqNF5I
Jainism
I just finished Michael Christie’s Greenwood, a generational epic on family and, well, trees. Part of the book takes place in a future where the only trees left in the world are on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia where the rich go to replenish.
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
So they’re all vegan right…
Right…
Right…????
Do they pay taxes?
For something to be recognized as a living being with rights does it need to pay taxes?
On every penny they make.
The property taxes are largely offset by the carbon credits, though.
You're forgetting about property taxes (adverse possession / squatter's rights.)
No, they are tax cheats. It has been notoriously hard to arrest them and send them to jail however.
Well, maybe we SHOULD consider all life sacred, and approach from that way.
The current "humans matter and others not so much" spawns from Abrahamic ass-backward beliefs, primarily from
Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
And, from a warlord petulant child-god, this is rich. Basically its license to disregard all of life since "We" are it's ruler.
And I think that view is horrible. Science is even backing that up.
Multiple corvids can solve puzzles, share descriptions of mean people, and more. Lots of animals are similar. We even mapped prairie dogs language and dialects. They have words for child, man, woman, man with gun.
Plants also communicate with chemicals and other things. And even though plants don't have neurons like mammals, SOMEHOW anesthetic drugs anesthetize them and prevent them from giving pain stimuli. Yet, we say they can't think... But respond as if they do.
And at the world level with climate devastation, protecting our biosphere should he the utmost importance, and working WITH biotics, not against. But its that judeo-chriatian-islam human centrism that says "Naw, we humans are the only species that matters". That will be our undoing, with a front seat (for those who live) to our planet's destruction.
So when they plan to cut it for whatever reason, they will have to submit a MAID request for the tree to be legally taken down?
> We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living. So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?
If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.
Nice -- now can they do fetuses?
Can we send them end grain cutting board as a gift?
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Quebec's legal system is not based on common-law like the rest of the provinces.
whats the appeal of living in quebec or montreal ? seems like they are very intolerant of non-french people and race seems to play a huge role there when i visited
Montreal is in Quebec. None of your random statements apply to the province or the city.
Montreal is a multicultural city but I'm talking about rest of Quebec but I don't think its wise to deny the numerous stories and anecdotes of the negative experiences anglophones have had including racism.
You really can't integrate in a society when you will remain an outsider even if you speak french fluently
Stories and anecdotes are so hot right now! I'm an anglophone who is welcomed in Quebec. Update your opinion.
Doubt seeding like yours is certainly a barrier to our (North) American society.
‹shrug› that hasn't been my impression visiting and working there.
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This definitely qualifies as a weird legal hack.
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