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.
The aim of the report was to create some kind of long-term plan to meet a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples signed onto by the National-led Government in 2010. (It has been very politically useful to the current Government that National began this process.) The report itself proposes an ambitious set of possible constitutional changes including a Māori upper house of Parliament and a separate court and justice system for Māori.
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David Seymour and Judith Collins are playing from a similar deck of cards. According to the Government, none of this is anywhere near Government policy. Indeed, it hasn’t even been to Cabinet yet – although Māori Development Minister Willie Jackson has prepared a draft paper on it.
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