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Thu Jun 30 23:44:32 CEST 2016

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An excellent precursor to the concept of ecocide is Christopher Stone's
iconic 1972 Yale Law Review article, =E2=80=98Should Trees Have Standing?=
=E2=80=99. It
remains the definitive statement as to why trees, oceans, animals, and the
environment as a whole should be bestowed with legal rights.

Stone argued that special guardians should be empowered to speak for the
"voiceless" elements in nature, in effect, to give legal standing to
endangered species and threatened forests. Human rights courts have taken
important steps to protect the environment, but always so as to protect the
rights of the human. This leads some to identify a fundamental
contradiction: by placing environmental claims in a human rights framework,
the system reinforces the very conditions that give rise to natural harms
in the first place, by shackling the protection of the natural object to
the interests of the human(s) espousing the claim. Stone challenged the
assumption that the human person is necessarily and naturally at the center
of any legal order, be it national or international. He caused a great many
readers to reflect in an ecological manner, by imagining what it means to
conceive of the interests of a natural object from a non-human perspective.

The Journal of Human Rights and the Environment published a retrospective,
"Should trees have standing: 40 years on?" here:
www.elgaronline.com/view/journals/jhre/3-0/jhre.2012.02.00.xml

Steve Woolpert

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On 7/1/16 8:17 AM, Great Transition Network wrote: