The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.
A few countries and local jurisdictions around the world have recognized the rights of nature to varying degrees. This town of about 2,000, just west of Montreal, is the first governing body to adopt the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, according to the global environmental law tracker, Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. The resolution recognizes that trees, as living beings, have the right to exist, thrive and receive protections in the law.
“If we live in Terrasse-Vaudreuil, it’s because we love trees,” said Sylvie Trépanier, a member of the town’s environmental committee, which drove the resolution. “We want to keep what we have.”
Trees, Please
Last spring, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. “We decided we really need to do something,” Ms. Trépanier said.
The town’s environmental committee wrote a proposal to prioritize tree protection for the health of the canopy and the broader community, and it gained widespread support.
When councilors adopted the resolution unanimously, Mayor Michel Bourdeau declared, “Today, we affirm that trees are not merely a backdrop in our community. They are indispensable allies for our health, our climate resilience, and our quality of life.”
The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Trees was drafted in France in 2018 and 2019 by lawyers, ecologists and lawmakers. It mandates that humanity “act with the Tree in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity” and has been presented as a petition to the United Nations and the European Parliament, among others.
Adopting the resolution was not merely symbolic, Mr. Bourdeau said in an interview. In Terrasse-Vaudreuil, practically, the resolution requires the town to prioritize canopy protection across all municipal planning. The next step is to review existing regulations and strengthen tree protections, the mayor said, followed by plans to plant and distribute trees to schools, businesses and residents in an ongoing effort to protect and diversify what has now been deemed a collective asset.
What precisely this will all mean when put into law — whether it will require simple replacement of trees, limits on development or on cutting down trees — remains to be decided.
The resolution was an easy sell in Terrasse-Vaudreuil. “There were not people who were resistant. On the contrary, they welcomed it.”
Standing for Nature
The notion that trees could have legal rights is alien to many and an affront to some, which is why the town’s move has generated international headlines and anger.
Critics see granting rights to nature as a threat to humanity’s ability to extract resources or develop.
In an article in The National Review, Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism, called the nature rights movement a “subversive ideology” and described the town’s legal strategy plainly: “It is an inch by inch, step by step tactic,” Mr. Smith wrote. “One small town today, a city, province, or country tomorrow, and eventually, an international treaty.”
This month, a bill was introduced in the British Parliament to recognize the rights of nature. More than three dozen communities in the United States, and a handful in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Ireland, and Northern Ireland have adopted laws or nonbinding resolutions recognizing such rights, according to Mari Margil, who heads the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. And Ecuador enshrined rights of nature in its Constitution in 2008.
Nature has long been considered property in legal systems around the world and treated as a resource. The rights of nature movement advances laws recognizing nature’s independent right to exist, thrive and regenerate.
In 2008, the organization Ms. Margil leads worked with delegates to Ecuador’s constitutional convention to develop rights of nature provisions. Since then, laws and court rulings in Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Uganda, Bangladesh, and Spain “have recognized that nature possesses legally enforceable rights — including the most basic of rights, the right to exist,” she wrote. “This is a movement that has grown quickly,” she added.
But it took decades to gain traction.
Once Unthinkable
“Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable,” wrote Christopher D. Stone in a 1972 Southern California Law Review article proposing legal rights for “natural objects” like trees.
He argued that “the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’” seems inherent or fundamentally true, rather than “a legal convention acting in support of some status quo.” Just as laws denying rights to women, children and people of various abilities, races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions were once considered just before becoming unacceptable, views on nature could similarly change, Mr. Stone suggested.
“It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,” he wrote. “Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them.”
That same year, United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas echoed this view, dissenting in a case that ruled the Sierra Club lacked standing to challenge development in California’s Sequoia National Forest. Justice Douglas argued people should be able to sue on behalf of “environmental objects” for their preservation, and that if inanimate objects, like ships, can be parties in litigation, “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.”
The justice’s stance more than a half century ago is “still pretty far out,” said Carl R. Gold, a Maryland lawyer and naturalist who has written about tree rights. But he praised Terrasse-Vaudreuil for taking “a terrific first step.”
“Trees need someone to speak up for them,” he said.
