Republicans insist lakes are not human: ‘We need to be protecting the rights of people, not things’
If a tree falls in the forest, can it sue for physical, mental and emotional harm?
Not in Wisconsin, and two state lawmakers want to make sure the door isn’t opened to the possibility.
State Rep. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart) and state Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) have introduced a bill that “prohibits a city, village, town, or county from enacting a “rights of nature ordinance” that confers “legal rights to a natural resource to exist, to be protected against pollution, or to maintain a healthy ecosystem.”
In short, an ordinance that would grant to the falling tree the same rights as that of a human being.
Goeben said she acted after a member of the City of Green Bay’s Sustainability Commission, Alderman Joey Prestley, called on the commission to create a rights of nature resolution.
It wasn’t until she did a little research that Goeben realized “rights of nature” is an international movement with the goal of granting legal standing to most anything in the name of environmental protection.
In the past two decades the movement has had some success. Colombia and Ecuador have written rights of nature guarantees into their constitutions. Ecuador was first, in 2008, referring to the rights of “Pacha Mama,” or Mother Earth, where “every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before” government bodies.
In the United States it has been a different matter. No rights of nature law has ever been successfully used in enforcement litigation by local governments or private citizens, according to environmental law scholar Sam Bookman.
That fact has prompted a pointed change in tactics among rights of nature advocates in this country, Alexandra Huneeus, a professor of international law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Badger Institute.
Proponents, beaten up in court, have turned to their county boards and city councils to keep the rights of nature dialogue alive by passing ordinances and resolutions that emphasize environmental protection and downplay prescriptive legal action, Huneeus said.
There are at least five dozen ordinances or resolutions around the country by Huneeus’ count, including Milwaukee County, which passed the state’s first rights of nature resolution in 2023.
“How can a movement keep losing and keep going?” Huneeus asked. “A social movement uses all the tools at its disposal. It is not a litigation movement. It is the use of the democratic system to change the conversation.”
Like the Milwaukee County resolution, the Green Bay resolution — not an ordinance — is meant to be nonbinding and advisory, Prestley told a local TV news reporter.
“Nobody is going to be able to sue on behalf of a tree or a stream,” Prestley said. “My idea with this resolution would be sort of codifying it for our city to look at the environmental impact sooner in the development process and more thoroughly in the development process.”
Goeben isn’t buying any of it. “I did a little research and I could not believe this was a thing,” she told the Badger Institute. “I said, ‘Are you kidding me? No way.’”
Goeben said she also realized that most average people assume the idea that rights could or should be granted to forests or lakes or interesting rock formations was a joke.
“I think it needs to be made clear that this would be a dangerous shift for our entire legal system,” she said. “We need to be protecting the rights of people, not things.
“You have to ask yourself, if these so-called nonbinding resolutions don’t do anything, why do they want them passed? They haven’t explained why they’re doing it.”
The issue is serious enough that Florida, Idaho, Ohio and Utah have passed laws curbing the passage of local ordinances granting rights to nature.
Wesley J. Smith told the Badger Institute that Goeben’s and Nass’ attention to the rights of nature movement is overdue.
Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism in Seattle, has been tracking and writing about the methods of the movement for more than 10 years.
In a recent piece for National Review about the proposed bill against such ordinances, Smith called the entire rights-of-nature movement and its underlying philosophy “crackers.” Because it’s so crackers, however, people have consistently underrated or ignored its danger.
“It’s anti-human thinking, a way of thinking that humans are the enemy,” Smith told the Badger Institute. “It’s irrational. It’s mystical. If everything in our world has rights, then nothing has rights.”
Huneeus said legal setbacks explain why nature rights advocates lean so heavily on what Native Americans have done in tribal courts.
The Ho-Chunk and Menominee nations have nature rights clauses in their tribal constitutions.
The Menominee in 2020 declared rights for their ancestral Menominee River, even though it is more than 60 miles northeast of the current reservation. It is just one example of why tribal law has never been successfully applied in any rights of nature case in the state, Huneeus said.
In April, Mary Kunesh, the first Native American to serve in the Minnesota Senate, created an uproar with her “Protection of Wild Rice Act,” a bill currently in committee. She and her supporters say the bill doesn’t seek to give human rights status to the aquatic plant but preserves tribal culture and tradition.
Unpersuaded, state Sen. Nathan Wesenberg said he had no intention of supporting the legislation. “Giving a plant an inherent right over people is something that goes against my God and my religion,” Wesenberg said during an environmental committee hearing in April.
Mark Lisheron is the Managing Editor of the Badger Institute.
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