The Shape of the Signifier by Michaels Walter Benn.;

Author:Michaels, Walter Benn.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

and trees

“We thought that we would never see / A suit to compensate a tree,” begins the decision of the Oakland, Michigan County Appeals Court in the case of Fisher v. Lowe (No. 60732 [Mich. CA], 69 A.B.A.J., 436 [1983]). The decision, which went against the tree, is cited in the introduction to a 1996 collection of essays by Christopher D. Stone (!) which reprints (and is named after) Stone’s famous essay “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects” (1972). Like the original essay, the collection as a whole argues that natural objects—not only trees and forests but also rivers and rocks—should, when damaged or threatened, be entitled to seek legal redress and protection, as Stone puts it, “in their own behalf” (12). It has always, of course, been possible for the owners of natural objects to seek legal redress for damage done to those objects; Stone’s point is that we should now recognize the rights of the objects themselves to be represented in court and to have lawyers who will “speak for them” rather than speaking for their owners. The idea is that natural objects have rights—or, more generally, have value—independent of the value ascribed to them by humans, and therefore that trees and rivers should be protected not because some humans value them (this would be the position of an “anthropocentric” environmentalism) but because they are intrinsically valuable (this is the position of what is called deep ecology).

Stone makes this argument—the argument that natural entities should now be understood to have rights—through an analogy with other entities once denied rights. Children, for example, and women and slaves have at different times and in different places been regarded as having no rights. But if we understand our history to have consisted in what Stone calls “a widening of the circle” (140) of those deserving moral consideration, why shouldn’t other entities—“animals, plants, … the entire planet”—come to be included in the circle? And if the analogy between women and children on the one hand and trees and rocks on the other seems significantly flawed—after all, once their rights were acknowledged, women and blacks could speak for themselves (indeed, their ability to speak for themselves is part of what made it plausible to think of them as having the relevant rights in the first place); trees, rivers, and rocks can’t—Stone points out that “corporations cannot speak, nor can states, estates, infants [or] incompetents,” and recommends that “the legal problems of natural objects” be treated like “the problems of legal incompetents—human beings who have become vegetable” (12). The tree or rock, which “cannot speak,” should thus be appointed a lawyer—“to speak for it” (13).

The general position here—that nature has value independent of its value to humans—is controversial, but, of course, the acknowledgment that nature, even if valuable, is not articulate is not. Although, as we have already seen, some writers (like Kim Stanley Robinson) treat even the project of speaking for nature as inappropriately anthropocentric and imagine the possibility of a nature that speaks for itself (“One had to let things speak for themselves,” as Saxe says.

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