On Rivers, Robins, and Rights

            In 1972, Christopher D. Stone published a short but provocative piece in the Southern California Law Journal entitled, “Should Trees Have Standing?” His answer was, “Yes,” and part of the evidence he used to make his case was the history of emancipation for African-Americans. Streams, trees, rivers and hills “have traditionally been regarded by the common law … as objects for man to conquer and master and use – in such a way as the law once looked upon ‘man’s’ relationship to African Negroes.” If the law is adaptive enough to recognize former slaves as citizens, argues Stone, then surely it can extend rights to rivers and forests.

            Of course, it was no easy matter to transform slaves to what political scientists call “rights-bearing citizens.” Just because President Lincoln emancipated the slaves didn’t mean white Americans were willing to dignify the newly-freed persons with something as valuable as rights. The bitter story of Reconstruction is one of broken promises. Blacks were promised southern acres, and then chased away; promised good terms for good land only to be told that “their kind” was only fit to work the worst fields, under the most odious form of financing. It was only when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (almost a hundred years after Emancipation) that African-Americans could begin to expect their rights would be recognized.

            If it took almost a hundred years for a class of sentient human beings to be recognized as rights-bearing, how long might it take for rivers and robins? This is not an idle question, as time does not appear to be on our side in this matter. Species are disappearing at an alarming rate and watersheds around the world are vulnerable to the decisions made by property-owners upstream. We may not have a hundred years to transform nature from an object for our private use to a subject with recognizable rights. We may have to do this right away.

            When Christopher Stone was writing in 1972, American legal theorists were coming up with all sorts of ways to extend rights in new directions. Besides giving trees standing to sue, lawyers proposed giving welfare recipients the same rights as social security beneficiaries. Poor women, they argued, should have the same right to privacy as pensioners. We don’t ask retirees to explain how they are using their benefits, so why should we interrogate women on welfare?

             Unfortunately, the story of welfare reform is as bitter as the story of Reconstruction. Expectations were dashed and conditions became crueler. Since Clinton changed “welfare as we know it,” many recipients find themselves in as untenable a situation as that faced by Southern sharecroppers. The welfare system provides no dignity, only scrutiny and shame. Why should a welfare recipient think that rights would improve the situation?

            Given America’s history of slavery and punitive welfare policies, one might think that extending rights to natural objects is a doomed affair. Just because we say we’re going to stop conquering, mastering, and using something, doesn’t mean we will actually respect its dignity. No doubt, property owners will start blaming the robins for their poor parenting skills or arguing that this riverbed didn’t have it in her to be clean. As Harold Cruse pointed out in 1968, “White America has inherited a racial crisis that it cannot handle and is unable to create a solution for it that does not do violence to the collective white American racial ego.” The same could be said for the ecological crisis and the collective (largely white) property-owning ego.

            I’d be ready to give up on this whole notion of extending rights to natural objects were it not for an insight of Patricia Williams, a law professor who wrote in the early nineties about rights and white America’s habit of blaming blacks for their poverty. While its true that “blacks never fully believed in rights,” she writes in The Alchemy of Race and Rights, “blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before; we held onto them, put the hope of them into our wombs, mothered them and not the notion of them.” The civil rights movement, she argues, was nothing less than the “making of something out of nothing,” an achievement that she calls alchemical.

            Like Christopher Stone, Patricia Williams argues that we must not give up on rights but rather we must give them away. “Unlock them from reification by giving them to slaves. Give them to trees. Give them to cows…. Give them to rivers and rocks.” All of these objects deserve “privacy, integrity, and self-assertion.” When we make something out of all these nothings, she tells us, we change ourselves. No longer owners, we become owned by the “luminous spirit” of robins, rivers and rocks. Having made the world more fully alive, we are blessed with its increased energy.

            Which is exactly what ownership precludes. To conquer, master and use something is to reduce a precious life force to its most depressed status.  The energy crisis comes not just from a history of wasting fossil fuels but of wasting souls. Indeed, I would argue that a history of wasting souls cultivated the habits that have landed us in our current predicament. Once we shed the fiction of absolute power, we may find a strange bliss in being owned by these newly-animated objects around us. Once we’re all owned by the life force of the planet, the true ecological transformation will be complete. Can we do it in a hundred years? Maybe. The lovely thing about alchemy, is that with enough mothering and holding, we could do it within a week.

Meg Mott teaches political theory at Marlboro College. Comments welcome at www.megmottshottopics.com.