(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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
This might seem silly on the face of it, but I live in a town where native forest is regularly leveled to bare earth, built on, and non-native trees planted in its stead. It's dumb and ugly. But profitable!
> "We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living," she said in a phone interview. "So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?"
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
If you don't know anything about the difference between civil law and common law in Quebec, you should be reading wikipedia articles on the topic and such rather than asserting nonsense in comments on hn.
I just finished Michael Christie’s Greenwood, a generational epic on family and, well, trees. Part of the book takes place in a future where the only trees left in the world are on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia where the rich go to replenish.
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
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.
> 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.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
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.
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.
I'm pro-tree, but I feel like you can protect them without sounding this ridiculous
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.
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.
> 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.
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."
This might seem silly on the face of it, but I live in a town where native forest is regularly leveled to bare earth, built on, and non-native trees planted in its stead. It's dumb and ugly. But profitable!
> the town will ... ensure that trees are ... replaced if they must be cut down.
I'd hate to speculate about what this means for people that might stand in their way.
We probably need to plant more trees or be diligent about ones we remove, but this seems to proceed from an erroneous worldview
> "We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living," she said in a phone interview. "So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?"
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
If you don't know anything about the difference between civil law and common law in Quebec, you should be reading wikipedia articles on the topic and such rather than asserting nonsense in comments on hn.
Finally. There should be major repercussions for destroying trees, especially within the cities that look increasingly like concrete blocks.
Calling a sentient living thing "a common good of humanity" is pretty dark. Putting those concepts together like that is an oversight.
Inbefore extreme NIMBY
Who represents the trees and what are they able to do with these rights?
I wonder if they adhere to Quebec's language laws.
Obligatory: Rush - The Trees (Live From The Montreal Forum / 1981)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_H0lwRqNF5I
This is what lawmakers that don't want to deal with the real life issues do. They work on nonsense laws while citizens live in squalor.
I just finished Michael Christie’s Greenwood, a generational epic on family and, well, trees. Part of the book takes place in a future where the only trees left in the world are on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia where the rich go to replenish.
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
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.
So when they plan to cut it for whatever reason, they will have to submit a MAID request for the tree to be legally taken down?
Do they pay taxes?
> 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.
Hacker news!
Can we send them end grain cutting board as a gift?
retards
what the hell is going on with Canada as of late?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Please stop with the politics on HN.