SHOULD TREES Have STANDING?  How to protect & restore forests?! Legal Representing Natural Environments  By Christopher Stone, lawyer, 1975.

Rev Micheal sunanda ‘08

This radical ecology book came out in pro-nature movement a decades after A Bill of Rights of Wilderness (1960s) by William O Douglas, US Supreme court judge from NW.  Stone explains that natural things, living or earth have no legal rights in court, ever since Romans.  So by law trees are not living being with rights to protect to live & be healthy.  NO matter how much or long forests are polluted they can’t be defended by laws that don’t exist!

 I am offering a Permaculture solution for public  forest protection & to prosecute for crimes against nature.  We need open & honest principles for wilderness having legal standing & laws to protects it.

So here my goals is to promote our healthy respect for nature, trees & watershed integrity we all depend on, aware or not.  More desperate are vast damaged to eco-systems still ignored because industry fears our awareness of toxins, like in Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ book. 

The issues at stake is Forest habitats having legal standing in courts must be linked to watershed quality effecting human & fish whole-life cycles, healthy habitat protection & preservation. The current government tax breaks, subsidies & ignoring destruction of forest habitats must be reversed for court cases to be heard/decided for forest protection now & restored for future generation healthy lives.

Restitution for damages to whole healthy forest habitats for crimes by polluters, miners, developers, illegal loggers, damming, burning & poisoning watersheds may-be forced by courts to restore the original healthy forest habitat, whatever it costs to do it.  Convicted forest criminals can’t be trusted to know how, or work to restore damage they have done or allowed.  Unless they get therapy for reversing their relationships to forest habitats is rare.

So expert native EcoForestry restoration & wilderness Permaculture designers in that bioregion will be hired & lead teams in local designing native restoration: replanting, seeds, composting, clearing & reinhabiting ecozones with native species takes many years after a wholistic forestry restoration design process on site.  Healthy diverse Native species of varied ages will be brot into the ecozones for replanting to restore healthy habitats for diverse wildlife living together in ecozones can be monitored over growing seasons for several years by plans & agreement.

Most US social institutions don’t care about nature, except to extract, poison &or dump poisons into water, air &  land.  Few government agencies work to protect nature, but the BLM, USFS & FDA support industry in many secret & ‘legal’ ways.  Most courts refuse to hear cases of public damage from industry, public protesting pollution & ecocide destroy-ing natural living ecosystems & hurting human health now & for generations.  Now many corporations have ‘civil rights’ in court, but not nature, forests or wilderness, except in rare cases of water pollution where damage & death are proven caused by pollution, logging,

I wonder if  U.O. Environmental Law school has any teacher or students now leanring or working law for protecting healthy forests, people injured by attacks to healthy forest in their bioregions.  We need wise legal help to get our native forests legal respect with new cases to stop crimes against wilderness & new whole plans for restoring damaged native habitats & require retribution by criminals.