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- Hacker News
- We probably need to plant more trees or be diligent about ones we remove, but this seems to proceed from an erroneous worldviewby erelong
- > We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living. So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?
If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.
by kgwxd - I got a quick tree education. When my buddy and I were in grade school his family moved into a new housing development with streets lined with puny new trees surrounded by the usual wires and rubber guards. They were frail and we were growing faster than they were.
Fast forward about forty years. The trees are TALL and HUGE! So, so cool. We hoominz top out at our own heights. But trees just keep treein' on.
by euroderf - I wonder if they adhere to Quebec's language laws.by swader999
- If we start letting trees communicate by underground signalling though a network of mycorrhizal fungus, it’s going to be the death of French. It’s important that every living being learns to adopt the culture.by andy99
- > 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.
- Finally. There should be major repercussions for destroying trees, especially within the cities that look increasingly like concrete blocks.by wiseowise
- We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.by jimbokun
- Most cities already have strict rules for removing existing trees. Usually anything over 6 inch diameter at shoulder level is off limits without getting specific approval.by koolba
- Living in Queens NYC I can see the large disparity between the greenery prevalent in the tax photos present on 1940s.nyc. After my grandparents passed we sold the house that had three nice shade trees, patio, a garden, grass along the side and a front lawn. Only the front lawn remains. The rest was entombed in concrete. Houses around the area suffer the same fate - yards completely devoid of green life and instead concrete. When it rains water pours down driveways into the gutter leaving the combined sewer system to deal with water that should be in the earth.by MisterTea
- 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 - are cockroaches threatened by industry in the same way trees are?
- We kinda draw arbitrary lines? I mean we do animal rights and animal welfare, so what really is the difference between a mouse and a tarantula in those termsby nemomarx
- Yeah, the article reads like they suddenly realized that trees are alive and rushed to make their discovery a law. Look how ridiculous this sounds:
> Desrochers' film, called Des arbes et des arts convinced citizens that trees are living entities that breathe and communicate with each other through their root systems.
Did the citizens... not know that trees are alive? Have they never seen a tree? What do you mean a film convinced them that trees are living entities??? Did schools not convince them of this? Seems like a massive failure of the education system.
> "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water..."
Yes! They're ALIVE and thus are "like a human being". A tree is like a human being, a cockroach is like a human being, a horse is like a human being. Everything that's alive is "like a human being"!
> ...the tree declaration is special because it acknowledges that a single tree is an ecosystem of its own, which can provide shade, food and habitat for other species.
Special compared to what? It seems like the lawmakers went outside for the first time, saw trees and were genuinely fascinated with them. Yes, even a single tree can be an ecosystem of its own. Is this not common knowledge? How is this special?
> ...[trees] have dignity and they have senses," she said. "Not sentiments, but senses ... They can feel and they communicate with each other in a very specific way."
I'm not an expert in trees, but it would make a lot of sense if trees could communicate with each other. Complex root systems, various pheromones, sure, communication could totally be possible. Dignity, though? Of course, a robust, tall tree definitely looks like a worthy person. But they seem to mean this literally, which sounds like nonsense.
> "What do trees do if not standing?" she said. "If anything has standing, it's a tree."
This sounds profound, but I'm not sure what it means.
by ForceBru - > 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.
Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.
by baal80spam - I studied an ancient form of communing with trees, through treediets (https://sacredtreekeepers.com) where I had a ~10 day fast with tree bark tea. there's certainly sentience and life form in them, unlike ours and also able to be connected to, if we have the right modulation of our awareness and sensory experience.
it doesn't just take a psychedelic experience to see this though.
Just because you haven't experienced something, and overely on your intellectual and thinking faculties (because you can't rationalize or understand something with you mind you discount its rights or existence) doesn't mean its true. Edit: I mean we in general overrely on our minds as filters for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when in reality much of knowledge, wisdom and understanding cannot be grasped by the mind or thinking; in many cases the mind deceives & tricks us.
by mannanj - We recognize corporations as legal entities with rights because it makes a great deal of the legal wrangling around, eg, assigning blame for criminal activity, or assigning permissions to operate, more convenient. Assigning rights to trees means not having to draw the entire causal chain to the harms done to people by environmental degradation, which can take years to manifest and is often irreversible. It’s the same legal fiction for the same reason.by roughly
- 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."
- Does a tree have a direct blood connection to a person? Does a tree die if that connection is severed?
- I'm pro-tree, but I feel like you can protect them without sounding this ridiculousby bloppe
- The goal is definitely not to protect trees.by kgwxd
- 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
- .. coming soon to San Francisco I betby derwiki
- This is like saying guns will be weaponized. The entire point of this is to be a NIMBY weapon.
- It already says in the article they won’t be building anymore housing because they are forbidding cutting down trees to clear land to build, and they’re already out of open lots to build on.
This is 100% NIMBYs finding new ways to protect their property values.
by jimbokun - 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 - I seem to remember kinda recently-ish reading about a discovery that trees also rely on an extensive sub-surface (underground) mycelium network for "communication" of a sort. Let's hope they never become actually sentient and decide humanity's a threat (like in a certain Stephen King movie I watched once). :grin:by blooalien
- > 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.
Recently there was an article posted here that claimed trees do have some ability to control the weather. The claim is trees simultaneously release water vapor into the atmosphere influencing rains.
by MisterTea - I love trees, but I wonder where this legislation is headed. It sure sounds like it's creating the conditions for regulating trees on private land. This could have some perverse incentives. A tree on your land could become a liability. It could lower the value of your property, because you won't be able to sell it to someone who wants to build something that might interfere with that tree. Would that actually discourage people from planting trees in the first place?by bloppe