When Trees Have Standing

Rethinking our place in the world

“In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on, just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we will need will be for mourning. For the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers and the memory of snow.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer (from Braiding Sweetgrass)

More than forty years ago, law professor Christopher Stone advanced the view that natural objects and areas should have legal rights. “Should Trees Have Standing” Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” became arguably one of the most provocative pieces of environmental law ever written. Stone observed that throughout history rights have been conferred to those previously seen as “unthinkable,” either incapable or unworthy—children, women, slaves, endangered species, etc. and so why not nature? Stone writes:

To be able to get away from the view that Nature is a collection of useful senseless objects is deeply involved in the development of our abilities to love—or, if that is putting it too strongly, to be able to reach a heightened awareness of our own and others’ capacities in their mutual interplay. To do so, we have to give up some psychic investment in our sense of separateness and specialness in the universe.

Tree, Kejimkujik National Park. Photo: Linda Pannozzo

This notion of connection and love is deeply rooted in indigenous cultures. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and Anishinabekwe scientist. In her book Braiding Sweetgrasss: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, she weaves indigenous and scientific knowledge together to show the interdependence of people and the natural world. Kimmerer says indigenous cultures had rules governing what they took from the living world. While the details of these rules were specific to different cultures and ecosystems, there were fundamental principles of restraint that were common among those who lived close to the land.

According to Kimmerer, the deep connection to the natural world was evident in indigenous languages where the same words were used to address both the living world and family members—the word “it” would “never be used to refer to a person, and similarly would not be used to describe a bay, a forest, an animal, or a plant,” she says. Using the word “it” separates and objectifies living beings, a precursor to being able to turn them into “natural resources” and destroy them.

Cormac Cullinan is a practicing environmental lawyer and former anti-apartheid activist in South Africa. Cullinan says the legal system has failed us. Decades of treaties, laws, and policies have not been able to slow down, let alone halt or reverse, the destruction of the planet. He argues that our understanding of the nature and purpose of law and governance needs to change and the only “living models of truly sustainable human governance available to us” are indigenous communities.

In Cullinan’s book, “Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice,” he writes that “law is the self-directed becoming of society…[and] legal relations embody relations of social power.” Cullinan believes that human beings will soon realize that the failure of our laws to recognize the right of a river to flow, or a wetland to exist, and to prohibit acts that endanger our life support systems will one day become as reprehensible as allowing people to be bought and sold.

Path to Big Dam Lake, Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia. Photo: Linda Pannozzo

When we think of our life support systems being endangered in this way, we often only think of climate change. But in 2015, a team of international scientists identified nine areas that underpin life on earth and they found that each of the nine boundaries, many of them inter-related, has a “safe operating space.”

In other words, the Earth can only absorb so much growth and after a certain point it becomes overwhelmed and less hospitable to human life. According to the study authors, we’re pushing the limits with climate change, land system change—through land clearing and deforestation—and with biodiversity loss or biosphere integrity. Crossing any of these boundaries “might push the Earth system into a new state,” they predict.

So, if we were able to meet the climate change targets, what about all the other thresholds we seem to be bumping up against?

Solving biodiversity loss—which is highly connected to habitat loss, a result of human activity—may be an even tougher problem to solve than climate change. We have to be careful that in trying to solve climate change, through what’s called “green growth,” doesn’t end up putting more pressure on the planet and creating more environmental damage as a result of mining and all the extractive activities related to shifting the global energy systems away from fossil fuels.

Shifting to renewables will also have to be accompanied by a reduction in our energy demands.

Anders Hayden, associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University, Halifax.

Anders Hayden is someone who has his finger on the pulse of the growing debate about economic growth, green or otherwise, and the alternatives. Hayden is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University and the author of the 2014 book, When Green Growth is Not Enough: Climate Change, Ecological Modernization, and Sufficiency, which compared Canada’s and Britain’s actions on climate change, focusing on three competing approaches to the problem: business as usual, ecological modernization, and sufficiency. On the first page of his book, Hayden raises the “inconvenient issue” of whether the continued prioritization of economic growth is even compatible with the deep emissions cuts that climate science suggests are urgently necessary. It’s a subject I explored in some detail in a 4-part “Climate Emergency”series that can be found here, here, here, and here.

“Capitalism is built on endless cycles of profit-making and capital accumulation,” but this notion of unlimited growth, in which capitalism is firmly rooted, is a “fantasy,” says Hayden.

So, even though some “win-win” situations do exist, new approaches to dealing with climate change need to be able to emerge. “But in the political sphere there has been very little space for those other ideas,” he says, and “gaining political support around alternatives to endless growth” has been difficult.

“Partly it’s about what business wants to hear. They want expansion and profit, but it’s also what labour wants to hear, they want jobs, they’re concerned about employment, and you have to have a message for workers if you’re going to build a political coalition.” Hayden says there’s an “economic growth dance” among those “who acknowledge that endless growth does not make sense on a finite planet and yet they are finding themselves having to go back to these growth-based arguments because they are the ones there’s political space to advance.”

Climate march, 2019, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Photo: Linda Pannozzo

When is enough, enough?

If ever there was an antidote to the environmental and societal damage arising from capitalism, it would be found in the ideas of “sufficiency.” It’s also the subject of much of Hayden’s recent work.

There are two sides to sufficiency, he tells me: the idea that we can “live well” within limits or “have enough for a good life,” while also “not consuming so much that it is ecologically excessive,” or “creating harm in terms of undermining the possibilities of other people today and in the future to be able to meet their needs.” Precisely where those boundaries lie is unclear.

Hayden says that when we “move beyond a growth way of thinking” there is a “balanced approach to ecological solutions” that would involve efficiency, greener technologies, and the idea of sufficiency.

“The good news is that in terms of thinking about solutions there’s a whole other side of the question that we’ve barely even tapped.”

Hayden says there’s been some discussion about individual-level strategies to reduce consumption and therefore GHG emissions, like reducing reliance on private vehicles, having more public transit, living in smaller homes, reducing meat and dairy, flying less, and buying less stuff.

But he says what’s needed is for sufficiency to become an organizing principle for society as a whole. “We would definitely shift away from GDP as the indicator of our overall goals, and have other indicators, other ways of measuring progress that are more consistent with a focus on sustainable wellbeing rather than just more production and consumption,” he explains.  This kind of recognition then opens up the possibilities for “post-growth alternatives” such as de-growth and a steady-state-economy.

Hayden has also written about work–time reduction, and work redistribution, which is also part of a sufficiency perspective. In his seminal 1999 book, Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet, Hayden notes that working people have pushed for reduced hours since the start of the industrial revolution and while historically their motivations have been to create more jobs and live healthier lives, today there is another new powerful motivation: “the increasing recognition of ecological limits.”

He says there are possibilities for people to have improved quality of life, not through more consumption or income but through more leisure time. “That’s a way that you could improve wellbeing in a way that’s far less consumption-oriented.”

Hayden says our adherence to making economic growth the priority “needs to be discarded,” which means a policy would be judged based on its environmental and social benefit, not on how it would affect GDP. “That should no longer be a deciding factor,” he says.

“We need to do what we need to do on the ecological front and do it in a way that maintains high levels of social equity and protects people. We need to get on with those tasks, and if doing that does something that knocks the GDP growth rate down then that shouldn’t be a reason against doing it.”

Clearcut on crown land, near Lake Rossignol, Nova Scotia. Photo: Linda Pannozzo

These days when I walk through the woods near my home my mind sometimes conjures up images of Windigo, the legendary cannibal monster that is part of the lexicon of the characters that inhabit Algonquian folklore. Windigo is said to inhabit the cold northland forests of the Atlantic coast and Great Lakes Region of both the U.S. and Canada. As I turn a bend on the path, especially on a foggy morning, I wonder, will I see the emaciated giant, with bloody lips and the stench of decay and corruption, lurking hidden in the mist? Legend has it that the Windigo is insatiable—every time it eats it grows, and so it is always hungry. It can also transform its human victims into cannibals by consuming their flesh. Only those who have become overpowered by greed or overindulgence are its intended prey and should fear it.

According to Kimmerer, because sharing was essential to survival in common-based societies “greed made any individual a danger to the whole.” She writes that stories like the one about Windigo were designed to “build resistance against the insidious germ to take too much.” In her book, she describes how her ancestors were oriented in the world and how they understood the earth to be sacred. To the Potawatomi Nation—a tribe that originally occupied parts of Indiana but were forced to relocate twice, first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma—everything the earth provided was seen as a gift. They knew “how to say thank you,” she writes. The “cultures of gratitude” among indigenous people were also “cultures of reciprocity,” where all beings in the living world were “bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship,” where “duties and gifts are two sides of the same coin.”

Kimmerer says the cautionary tales about the dangers of taking too much are ubiquitous in indigenous cultures. She says that all human people struggle with self-restraint. “The dictum to take only what you need leaves a lot of room for interpretation when our needs get so tangled up with our wants,” she writes.

While stories like this one about Windigo were necessary in order to reign in the rogue tendencies of individuals, what happens when whole societies go rogue? What do we do then? Kimmerer says that today the “dishonourable harvest has become a way of life—we take what doesn’t belong to us and destroy it beyond repair… How can we distinguish between that which is given by the earth and that which is not? When does taking become outright theft?”

For Kimmerer it’s a matter of harm. When something is given, we don’t need to inflict irreparable damage to get it. The other side is the reciprocity part, that we need to restore the land where damage has been done.

If we can do what Hayden suggests—de-couple our well-being from commodity consumption—then we might be on the right track.

We need to ask ourselves, what is truly required to live a good life? How much is enough?

We might even be surprised by the answers.

[Parts of this article are adapted from previous work, including my 2016 book About Canada: The Environment, and my 2019 four-part series titled “Climate Emergency,” that appeared in The Halifax Examiner.]