by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
What if you face difficult legal battles, and I announce that I’ve appointed myself as your lawyer? We have never met, and I don’t know anything about your needs. You know nothing of my credentials. You never agreed to hire me or signed any contract. No matter, I’m representing you anyway.
What an absurd scenario — no thinking person hires a stranger to represent them without at least a conversation, a document, or a handshake. But what about a mountain, a tree, or a river? I can appoint myself to represent entire ecosystems, and who is going to challenge me?
Such absurdities are the basis of the “rights of nature” movement, a theory that the land should own itself. Land has its own rights — not just the intrinsic value we all agree nature has, but legal rights protected by law, like other property rights. Except that all property has an owner — that’s what property is. No property goes to court to protect itself. Property owners do that.
Who owns nature? The whole point of the “rights of nature” movement is that nobody does. Its adherents ask, “If a person, association, or corporation can have legal standing, why can’t a river or mountain?” The question displays breathtaking ignorance of 1,000 years of common law, oblivious to the reality that property rights can only exist under a system of laws. Some authority must establish rules under which property can exist, and one must establish their property right under those rules. Mountains cannot do that because nobody can ask them, nor can they answer. No mountain ever filed a lawsuit; no river ever wrote a letter to its congressman; no tree ever spoke at a public hearing. What conceit can presume to speak for nature?
