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  • > Bourdeau says the new resolution means the town will review its existing rules and bylaws to ensure that trees are protected or replaced if they must be cut down. He also plans to implement measures to further increase the canopy, including offering trees for residents to plant.

    It’s unclear whether the reporter failed to describe the real impact of this or whether it actually has no teeth.

    Regarding tree rights, I do think cities cut down trees too lightly. For example, the city where I live recently rehabbed a large park and cut down a mature tree to make a new path, where it could have easily made the path a few meters away. (Of course the tree may have been diseased, but it seemed quite healthy.) I’m not sure my argument would be that trees have rights so much as that trees take a long time to grow, and a replacement tree is not as good as a mature one for a long long time.

    by seizethecheese
  • Finally. There should be major repercussions for destroying trees, especially within the cities that look increasingly like concrete blocks.
    by wiseowise
  • Well, maybe we SHOULD consider all life sacred, and approach from that way.

    The current "humans matter and others not so much" spawns from Abrahamic ass-backward beliefs, primarily from

    Genesis 1:26-28: Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

    And, from a warlord petulant child-god, this is rich. Basically its license to disregard all of life since "We" are it's ruler.

    And I think that view is horrible. Science is even backing that up.

    Multiple corvids can solve puzzles, share descriptions of mean people, and more. Lots of animals are similar. We even mapped prairie dogs language and dialects. They have words for child, man, woman, man with gun.

    Plants also communicate with chemicals and other things. And even though plants don't have neurons like mammals, SOMEHOW anesthetic drugs anesthetize them and prevent them from giving pain stimuli. Yet, we say they can't think... But respond as if they do.

    And at the world level with climate devastation, protecting our biosphere should he the utmost importance, and working WITH biotics, not against. But its that judeo-chriatian-islam human centrism that says "Naw, we humans are the only species that matters". That will be our undoing, with a front seat (for those who live) to our planet's destruction.

    by nekusar
  • Such a weird idea. Do they recognize the right of cockroaches to life as well - as they are much more clearly living beings with some realistic chance of being sentient and feeling pain? What about tomatoes or roses or other plants?

    Note that I'm all for the protection of trees - for pretty obvious environmental, esthetic, and human usage reasons. I just don't think recognizing trees as having their own rights as living beings makes any sense whatsoever.

    by tsimionescu
  • Imagine trees having more rights than fetuses because "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things."
    by chingabazinga
  • I'm pro-tree, but I feel like you can protect them without sounding this ridiculous
    by bloppe
  • This will be weaponized by NIMBYs to further limit construction of housing and infrastructure, leading to a situation in which trees have more human rights than people.
    by I-M-S
  • Finally!

    Trees are fantastic creatures.

    (I'd happily go as far as calling them Beings, but I'm afraid it would sound like some kind of a new age esoteric bullshit, even so I'm borderline convinced they are sentient.)

    The important thing that fascinates me is how Tree actually work. They are generally perceived as growing from the soil to the atmosphere. However, the opposite is true. About 98% of the material of a tree is originated from the air, namely the carbon extracted from the CO2 content of the air. Trees are literally growing from the air, and piercing down into the soil to get water to run their Calvin cycles to extract the carbon and produce the ATP.

    Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do. And by destroying them, we are limiting this control. Looking from this angle, there is very little surprise in the onset of weather extremes.

    I summary, I'm very happy with this legislation. I hope this a first step in many that is actually going to help us taming the climate of our planet again. With more trees. Because trees are awesome.

    by neonihil

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