Legal Loraxes: Who Will Stand for the Trees?

Source: The Lorax (1972)

“I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”

By Michael Merolla

Michael Merolla is a first-year student at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences studying Political Science.

Locus standi, commonly known as legal standing, is the right of a person or group to be heard in court. [1] The concept of “standing” is relatively simple in theory. In order to bring a lawsuit in a court, a party must meet four conditions: interest, injury, causation, and redressability. First, a plaintiff must have a legally recognizable interest in the case. Second, the plaintiff must have suffered an injury or infringement upon their person or rights. Third, the alleged injury must have been caused by the named defendant. Last, a favorable court decision must be able to redress, or alleviate, the injury. However, the concept of legal standing becomes convoluted in the context of environmental law. In America, the environment lacks the right to stand as its own entity. As the global climate crisis worsens, the legal world may be the last resort to deliver the decisive action needed and neglected by political and economic forces for much too long. [2] The question must be asked: Who will speak for the trees in the court of law?

It is not a radical or unprecedented idea to provide legal standing for non-human and/or non-speaking entities. In his groundbreaking paper, “Should Trees Have Standing,” environmentalist Christopher Stone argues, “It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak. Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them, as they customarily do for the ordinary citizen with legal problems.” [3] Supporting this proposition, corporations have been entitled to many of the legal rights of natural persons for over a century in America. In 1886, the Supreme Court established the tenet of “corporate personhood” in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road. [4] Protected by the Court ever since, corporate personhood has allowed industry titans like The Walt Disney Company and Microsoft Corporation to protect their intellectual property through litigation. Evidently, the ability to speak in one’s own defense is not a prerequisite to be spoken for in the courts. Non-human personhood is a settled concept of American law.
 
Although emerging into the spotlight relatively recently, environmental law is hardly a new development for the legal system. Oxford professor Elizabeth Fisher notes, “Environmental problems have been inherent in civilization since the beginning and have needed collective management.” [5] Fisher provides historical examples to back this assertion. Ancient Imperial China restricted the bird-hunting and the burning of forests in the first-century. Ancient Rome regulated rubbish and noxious processes, such as the tanning of animal hides. The Magna Carta-adjacent Forest Charter oversaw the King’s Forests through specialized forest courts.

This is clear historical precedent for both non-human personhood and legal stewardship of the environment. Still, the recognition of environmental personhood in American courts falls far behind. Simply put, nature has no voice right now. Monti Aguirre, a member of the environmental organization International Rivers, says, “Traditionally, nature has been subject to a Western-conceived legal regime of property-based ownership…an owner has the right to modify their features, their natural features, or to destroy them all at will.” [6] Aguirre is addressing the redressability concerns of environmental litigation. Unlike corporate law, in which court decisions revolve around economic damage inflicted upon or by a company, it is much more difficult to put environmental justice in terms of dollar signs or prison sentences.

In socioeconomic theory, the climate change crisis would be described as a common pool problem. Our world has a finite “resource” pool, providing individuals with an incentive to exploit limited benefits that would otherwise go to their competitors. [7] If users attempt to conserve resources, they will not benefit from their reservation, as their competitors can still exploit the larger pool. This phenomena can be extrapolated to environmental personhood. Let’s say America entitles the environment to legal rights, particularly against environmentally-destructive corporate practices. Lawyers would still have little incentive to actually take up a case for the environment, to wager their time and reputation against powerful corporate firms. Erin O'Donnell, a University of Melbourne Law School academic fellow, explained to NPR, "It becomes everybody's responsibility and then, possibly, nobody's responsibility...who actually has the funding, usually, to run a lawsuit. Lawsuits are very expensive.” [8] Presently, there is little economic promise for governments and lawyers to support the environment, as their competitors can retain exploitative practices for greater profits.

Climate justice transcends these economic concerns; this is about morals. Climate change is no longer simply theoretical. It is imminent. The world is overheating, the sea levels are rising, and extreme weather occurrences are raging with more fervor than ever before. Fossil fuel industries abuse the Earth’s natural resources and release greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere without penalty or repercussion. Scientists have warned that to avoid the worst effects of global warming, world-wide carbon emission must be reduced 45% by 2030 and reach a net zero equilibrium of carbon production and absorption by 2050. [9] No one, governments especially, is acting fast enough to reverse, or at least mitigate, the pace of global warming. As it seemingly too often does, the burden here falls upon the scales of justice. The legal community must put pressure on the political infrastructure to impart nature with legal standing, activating the law in defense of the biosphere. We must all selflessly stand-up for and work to protect the environment from corporate, government, and individual abuses. To preserve humanity’s tomorrow, lawyers must begin to speak for the trees today.

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.
It’s not.”

[1] Walsh, Jennifer. “Standing: What It is and Why It Matters.” Brown & Crouppen Law Firm (2023) https://www.brownandcrouppen.com/blog/what-is-standing/.
[2] Laszewska-Hellriegel, Martyna. (2022). Environmental Personhood as a Tool to Protect the Nature. Philosophia. 51. 1-16. 10.1007/s11406-022-00583-z. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/364312784_Environmental_Personhood_as_a_Tool_to_Protect_the_Nature.
[3] Stone, Christopher D. “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Southern California Law Review (1972). https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christopher-d-should-trees-have-standing.pdf.
[4] Torres-Spelliscy, Ciara. “The History of Corporate Personhood.” Brennan Center for Justice, www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/history-corporate-personhood.
[5] Fisher, Elizabeth.'The history of environmental law', Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction, Very Short Introductions (Oxford, 2017; online edn, Oxford Academic, 26 Oct. 2017), https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198794189.003.0004.
[6] Westerman, Ashley. “Should Rivers Have Same Legal Rights as Humans? A Growing Number of Voices Say Yes.” NPR, NPR, 3 Aug. 2019, www.npr.org/2019/08/03/740604142/should-rivers-have-same-legal-rights-as-humans-a-growing-number-of-voices-say-yes.
[7] McLaughlin, Dennis, and Parag Pathak. “Common Pool Resources: Environmental Solutions Initiative.” Environmental Solutions Initiative | Focusing MIT’s Talents on the Interdisciplinary Environmental Challenges of Today, 17 Apr. 2018, https://environmentalsolutions.mit.edu/common-pool-resources/.
[8] Westerman, "Should Rivers Have the Same Legal Rights as Humans? A Growing Number of Voices Say Yes."
[9] “Net Zero Coalition.” United Nations, United Nations, www.un.org/en/climatechange/net-zero-coalition.

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