Timothy Williams, Should a Lake Get Legal Rights Like a Person? Toledo Voters Will Decide. NYTimes, February 17, 2019.
The failing health of Lake Erie, the world’s 11th largest lake, is at the heart of one of the most unusual questions to appear on an American ballot: Should a body of water be given rights normally associated with those granted to a person?Shades of object-oriented ontology (OOO)!
Voters in Toledo, Ohio, will be asked this month to decide whether Lake Erie, which supports the economies of four states, one Canadian province and the cities of Toledo, Cleveland and Buffalo, has the legal right “to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.”
The peculiar ballot question comes amid a string of environmental calamities at the lake — poisonous algal blooms in summer, runoff containing fertilizer and animal manure, and a constant threat from invasive fish. But this special election is not merely symbolic. It is legal strategy: If the lake gets legal rights, the theory goes, people can sue polluters on its behalf.
The proposed Lake Erie Bill of Rights is part of a growing number of efforts to carve out legal status for elements of nature, including rivers, forests, mountains and even wild rice. The efforts, which began decades ago but have gathered momentum in recent years, seek to show that existing laws are insufficient to protect nature against environmental harm. Under current law, lakes and deserts do not have legal standing, so people cannot sue on their behalf. [...]
Tamaqua Borough, Pa., in the center of the state’s historic coal-mining region, was the first place in the nation to approve a rights-of-nature ordinance in 2006 after it banned companies from dumping dredged minerals and sewage sludge into open pit mines.
The bill approved by the borough council included language that said corporations could not “interfere with the existence and flourishing of natural communities or ecosystems, or to cause damage” to them within the township.
Four years later, Pittsburgh approved a rights-of-nature ordinance that prohibited fracking in city limits.
Santa Monica, Calif., has since passed an ordinance that requires the city to “recognize the rights of people, natural communities and ecosystems to exist, regenerate and flourish.”
And earlier this year, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota announced that it had granted wild rice its own legal rights, including “the right to pure water.”
Yes!
ReplyDeleteAfter reading I fired up my kindle copy of the Kings Two Bodies. By chance it opened on chapter V.I. (On Continuity...) Last thing I was reading was on 'Perpetua necessitas.'
ReplyDeleteAn alteration in the meaning of 'necssitas' i.e 'casus necessitatis' to 'emergencies arising chiefly from without' e.g when attacked you use 'casus necessitatis' as the grounds to increase taxes for defense.
An emergency power.
Sense of necessitas is altering to cover the ordinary 'budgetary needs of administrations, a new fiction 'perpetua necessitas' (in modern terms something like 'perpetual revolution'). An ongoing exception to the rule or momentary deviation, the perpetuation of necessity.
Related to concepts of continuity and time that are central to animating the subject (in its medieval context).
Rivers, forests, wild- rice and walls?
Ah, yes, the Kind's Two Bodies. I've not read it, but I know of it, and of the argument. That argument in crucial in establishing the concept of a juridical person that is a continuing entity temporarily inhabited/enacted by a specific human. Push it another step and it can be inhabited by any kind of creature.
DeleteYes, its like a church, on the death of the prelate, possession and property remains with Christ, who lives eternally, property holding is eternal, it will always exist.
DeleteA collective ongoing entity.
When you look at the survival of Europe's urban environments and ecclesiastical origin's in comparison to the continual fragmentation of medieval kingdoms.
Highly successful legal move. Church had resolved the central issue facing medieval kingdoms.
A mind- altering state.
Native Hawaiians have been fighting these kinds of battles for years. In particular now is the fight about building the thirty-meter telescope on Mauna Kea.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/hawaii-telescope-protests-tmt-mauna-kea_n_7044164.html
"We are Mauna Kea, The ocean embraces her"
ReplyDeleteEcstatic vision= continuity= theory of apparitions.
Relationship, half wondering if human awareness of mortality has been an ancient psychological factor in developing and shaping thought here.