Christopher Stone, Who Proposed Legal Rights for Trees, Dies at 83
A law review article he wrote in 1972 kick-started a worldwide movement to grant nature the same rights enjoyed by human beings.
Christopher D. Stone in an undated photo. “I am quite seriously proposing,” he wrote in an influential article, “that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment.”Credit...via USC Gould School of Law
May 28, 2021, 5:13 p.m. ET
Christopher D. Stone, who in 1972 made what seemed a whimsical argument — that forests and rivers should have rights in the eyes of the law — and in the following decades found his work galvanizing environmental lawyers in the United States and launching a global movement to grant nature the legal status of personhood, died on May 14 at an assisted living facility in Los Angeles. He was 83.