On Faith Canada: Do rocks, and trees, have rights?
The city council of small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec has voted that trees are living beings with rights.
The vote, taken on June 9, declares that trees are worthy of protection, “including the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity and to regeneration.”
“A tree is like a human being,” the mayor said of the declaration, believed to the first in Canada. “It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things.”
The declaration about trees reminded me of a column I wrote in 2014 about whether rocks—and now trees—have rights.
In 1807, the British Parliament signed into law the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, the first step towards the worldwide eradication of the African slave trade.
Today, over 200 years later, it seems obvious that people should not be bought, sold and enslaved. But back then the prevailing view was that the slave trade was necessary, even if it was brutal.
Stopping it, it was argued, would have negative economic consequences; only a very few people believed that it was morally wrong. It took 20 years of tireless work by William Wilberforce, a courageous Christian Member of Parliament, before the trade was ended.
The abolition of slavery is just one example of how humans have evolved ethically. Other examples include the civil rights movement in the U.S., the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and the extension of human rights to women, LGBTTQ+ people, people with disabilities, and others.
It can be argued that the human race has often failed to live up to these ideals—shamefully, there are still parts of the world where people are enslaved, and there is still far too much discrimination of all kinds. But most would agree that these are noble aims to strive for.
While progress has been made in developing rules to govern human relationships, we have not done as well when it comes to developing an ethic to guide our relationship to the earth.
True, there is a growing consensus that we need to change the way we live if humans are to survive. But real change won’t occur until we believe that it is morally wrong to pollute the planet.
Not wrong because it has negative economic consequences. Not wrong because it will negatively affect our way of life. And not even wrong because we will die if we don’t stop dumping on, paving over and polluting the environment. It’s wrong because that’s no way to treat anyone—or anything.
Rocks, in other words, have rights, too.
It’s a radical shift in thinking. Traditionally, we have mostly thought of rights as belonging to human beings. But more and more ecologists are arguing that the earth is not to be prized because it sustains life, but because it has value in and of itself.
One of the earliest to promote this way of thinking was Aldo Leopold, considered the father of wildlife management in the U.S.
In his classic 1949 essay, The Land Ethic, Leopold suggested that the next human moral evolution would be the expansion of ethics to govern our relationship to the earth.
Leopold proposed the following ethic for the way we deal with the environment: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the earth. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
More recently, Wendell Berry, a Christian environmentalist, author and farmer, has added a spiritual dimension to Leopold’s idea by suggesting that there is a sacredness to the material world, and all of its nonhuman inhabitants.
Berry argues that the earth, and all its aspects, are invested with value not just because they were created by God, but because they are expressions of the divine.
Says Berry: “We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us . . . we must recover the sense of the majesty of the creation and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it.”
Many people today, including many religious people, are taking the issue of earth care seriously. That’s all good, but maybe the next step is to believe that it is morally, religiously, spiritually and ethically wrong to abuse the earth—that rocks, trees, flowers and all other living things have rights, too.
We have many ancient cultural lenses and even complex legal systems (such as the Gaelic Brehon Law) that can offer us clarity and sign posts as we begin to remember what each of our indigenous ancestors understood (yes we all have them regardless of skin color and genetic background).
The concepts explored in this post (and that instance of a Quebec town declaring trees have right) are not new or emergent, but rather very ancient and starting to be re-membered by those that had been suffering from the trauma that results from multigenerational trauma and what some call wendigo sickness.
There are many facets of modern western culture that perpetuate generational amnesia and instill an arrogant and disrespectful attitude in humans towards our non human kin.
For instance, the English language is structured to re-enforce anthropocentric delusions of grandeur, relegating all our non-human relations on earth to the demeaning status of being an “it”. Older languages with an animistic ethos of deep belonging to place do not refer to the trees, or the birds, or the fish, or the river or the mountain as an “it”, they refer to those beings as kin.
These variations in language in how we refer to the beings we share this world with may seem inconsequential to the indoctrinated self-important statist that trusts “The Science”, but ask yourself this, how much easier is it to train human beings to be willing to poison a river, or carve into a mountain for lithium or clear cut an ancient forest for profit when you raise them describing those beings as inanimate objects, rather than referring to them in the same way you would refer to a sister or a grandfather?
The forest and all aspects of the living Earth were seen as sacred and revered by the Druids, and their successors, the Brehon.
Within ancient Gaelic cultures the springs, rivers, lakes, mountains and trees were seen as beings that have a spirit and innate rights. Under their Brehon Laws (known in the Gaelic language as 'Fénechas) the Gaels (Druids and their Brehon successors) acknowledged the living waters of the Earth had innate rights just as all human beings did (including equal rights for women, which at the time was far ahead of any other European laws for women). The Brehon Law defined our Kinship with Water, our responsibilities to respect her and offer blessings and express gratitude when we receive her gifts.
Brehon Law (is seen by some) to have facilitated the foundation for a peaceful and productive (stateless) society which existed for nearly a millennium without police or prisons.
Jesus of Nazareth tried to tell people of the importance of respecting the beings we share this world with by speaking words like “what you do to the least you do to me” (no he was not just talking about humans) but the Romans did a great job distorting his teachings to be anthropocentric instead of filled with humility.
In the times before Christ, Ireland was known as a place of advanced learning and young nobles from kingdoms far and wide were sent by their families to study with the Druidic teachers before returning home. This illustrious culture of higher learning was almost totally annihilated by the imperialistic Roman invasion.
Even after the Romans sought to commit cultural and literal genocide, the Druids were wise enough to preserve their knowledge in a small few individuals and pass it onto who would become the Brehon.
The Bardic Schools had existed as renowned institutions instructing in the native tongue the Irish language, literature, history and Brehon Law. They were highly developed and scholarly institutions providing what amounted to a university education in multiple subjects of study up until the middle of the seventeenth century. This long tradition had produced an abundance of poets, physicians, historians and Brehon’s – skills and knowledge which was often found overlapping in individuals.
Thanks to the courageous Eolaí (Gaelic knowledge keepers of the Druidic/Brehon ways) of the hedge schools and the harpists of the Scottish highlands (which preserved the Druidic knowledge “wrapped in the thread of poetry”) we still have pieces of their wisdom to help guide us forward.
Many in modern times have been conditioned to see the ancient Druids and their Celtic predecessors the Brehon (Breitheamh) Judges as "savages". This is also nothing more than the sad propaganda of a socially, agriculturally and scientifically inferior involuntary governance Statist regime attempting to erase the cultural accomplishments and memory of those they sought to silence and dehumanize in the name of imperialistic conquest and greed.
The Druidic wisdom keepers encapsulated their combined memory of medicines, conflicts, natural disasters, geology, meteorology, pathways to peaceful resolution and stories that educate the listener about astronomy, mathematics and ecology into rhymed verse (often recited as part of a song with harps or flutes). Those concentrated expressions of their culture were passed down to the time of the Celts arriving and were then written down in Ogham on stone and wood to become the Brehon (Breitheamh) Laws (or Fenechus).
They had laws to honor and protect the bees and the trees and saw men and women as equals (long before anyone in Europe).
(continued in more comments below..)