Over the years, I have read many articles arguing that legal rights should be granted to animals and other natural entities, like rivers (e.g., see Strategic CSR – Personhood and Strategic CSR – Cats and dogs). The article in the url below is merely the most recent of those articles but, very usefully, it references the original source for such arguments (in the U.S., at least):
"The notion that 'natural objects' like woods and streams should have rights was first put forward half a century ago, by Christopher Stone, a law professor at the University of Southern California."
The logic advocates use to support their claims vary to some degree, but almost all, at some point, make this point:
"In April, 1972, the Supreme Court upheld the appellate court's decision against the Sierra Club, by a vote of four to three. (Two seats on the Court were vacant.) Douglas, drawing heavily on Stone's article, penned a dissenting opinion. 'A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes,' he wrote. A corporation, too, 'is a person for purposes of the adjudicatory processes. . . . So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.'"
In essence, 'if corporations can be persons and they are unable to talk (and do other people-like things), then other things that are unable to talk should also be persons.' In other words:
"The objection that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak was, in Stone's view, easily addressed. 'Corporations cannot speak either,' he observed. 'Nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities.' And yet these entities were amply represented—some might say overrepresented—in the courts."
But, as many CSR advocates also like to argue, with rights come responsibilities. And, one of the many advantages of granting personhood to corporations (and it really is the foundational pillar of our economic system, post industrial revolution, primarily because it permits limited liability) is that, although corporations can sue others, as persons they can also be sued themselves.
To me, this seems like a major argument against granting legal rights to animals and elements of the natural environment. If I am currently out walking my dog and it bites someone else, the victim does not sue the dog, they sue me. There would not be much point suing the dog, since the dog does not own any assets from which compensation could be paid. Equally, if I go swimming in a river and drown due to the strong currents (which would be the river's fault, now that we are assigning rights to it), then it is not much use to me (or my estate) to sue the river. The enforcement of contracts is not everything in our economic/legal/societal system, but it is a hell of a lot.
So, while there are increasing numbers of cases where advocates act on behalf of animals and the natural environment to sue for legal standing (most recently here in the U.S., Happy the elephant), I think this would create more problems than it solves. Again, pursuing the argument that responsibilities are the flipside of rights, I think we need to solve how we are going to assign responsibilities to these actors before we rush to grant them rights (especially because, in general, they have no discernible interests that we can understand or meet).
Take care
David
David Chandler
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A Lake in Florida is Suing to Protect Itself
By Elizabeth Kolbert
April 11, 2022
The New Yorker
