Should Trees Have Legal Standing?

Evaluating Christopher Stone’s Arguments for the Legal Rights of Nature 

Christopher Stone’s Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects was revolutionary during his time; however, the legal personhood of natural entities has become more prevalent in recent years. In January 2025, Mt. Taranaki in New Zealand was declared a ‘legal person’ (DasguptaDasgupta).  In previous years the Whanganui River and the dolphins of certain Pacific Indigenous Islands also attained legal rights (Doornbos). By extending legal personhood to nature, we must consider if they are deserving. Although Stone presents cogent legal arguments for granting nature rights, his assumption that nature already possesses intrinsic value weakens his argument. This essay will explore the legal-operational aspects of Stone’s arguments, including his three criteria for becoming a ‘holder of rights,’ followed by my critique of his assumptions and arguments. 

Stone first addresses legal extensionism as a historical trend: women, African Americans, and even inanimate entities such as “trusts, corporations, and municipalities” have gained legal rights (Stone 452). Therefore, even though extending legal personhood to inanimate nature may initially sound laughable, Stone would claim that we cannot reject nature’s legal rights simply because it sounds ridiculous. 

Stone then defines his usage of the term, “holder of legal rights” (Stone 458). In addition to an “authoritative body that will review the actions of those who threaten that ‘right,’” Stone introduces three additional necessary criteria that “go towards making the thing count jurally” (Stone 458). However, Stone acknowledges that nature lacks these three required criteria, and thus provides solutions that would qualify nature as a holder of legal rights. 

1) “The entity can institute legal actions at its behest” (Stone 458). While a river cannot directly sue someone for polluting it, Stone proposes a guardianship approach. Similar to the legal care system for infants or incompetents represented through guardians that oversee their affairs and speak for them in court, Stone imagines the same for nature, securing an effective voice for the environment in law. He also sees no shortage in “the potential ‘friends’ that such a statutory scheme would require”: organizations including The Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund (Stone 466). A critic may attest that humans cannot judge the needs of nature, but Stone would refute that we can determine nature’s needs through the cues they present to us: wilted flowers need water, and a weed-infested lawn must be tended. 

2) “In determining the granting of relief, the court must consider injury to it” (Stone 458). The current system requires a human plaintiff to prove personal harm in order to initiate legal action. Stone refutes that this system fails to recognize the intrinsic rights of nature. Therefore, Stone proposes the idea of invoking property rights on nature. Similar to copy-right laws protecting the works of authors, Stone suggests that we “make the violation of rights in them to be a cost by declaring the ‘pirating’ of them to be the invasion of a property interest” (Stone 476). Then, Stone continues that calculations of the damage costs would entail the monetary compensation needed to restore the natural entity to its original form. 

3) “The relief must run to the benefit of it” (Stone 458). Stone approaches ‘benefit’ as a means of ensuring environmental restoration rather than mere punishment of the defendant. He proposes “a beneficiary of money awards” that would be trusted with the guardian “to preserve the natural object as close as possible to its condition at the time the environment was made a rights-holder” (Stone 480). Stone maintains that making relief directly benefit nature helps to reinforce their intrinsic worth and encourages greater respect for the environment. 

Although Stone presents feasible solutions to making nature a holder of legal rights, he does not support the philosophical basis of nature’s intrinsic right on which all his arguments rest, thereby weakening his claims. Stone aligns with Paul Taylor and his biocentric egalitarianism, where “humans are thought of as members of the Earth’s community of life” (Taylor 105). This view recognizes that nature is worthy independent from its use for humans because all living things “ are equally teleological centers of life in the sense that each is a unified system of goal-oriented activities directed toward their preservation and well-being” (Taylor 108).

With this logic, Stone insinuates that is reasonable to treat nature identically to humans in situations where the roles of plaintiff and defendant are switched, and nature must compensate humans: he briefly acknowledges that “if ‘rights’ are to be granted to the environment, then for many of the same reasons it might bear ‘liabilities’ as well” (Stone 481). Although Stone suggests that the trust funds established to protect nature could be “available for the satisfaction of judgments against the environment,” this situation poses another issue regarding the burden of responsibility: “When the Nile overflows, is it the ‘responsibility; of the river? the mountain? the snow? the hydrologic cycle?” (Stone 481). This ambiguity of the defendant makes it difficult to benefit the plaintiff after a legal decision, because it is unclear from which entity the monetary compensation comes from. Additionally, the scale at which nature harms humans renders this solution unfeasible and frankly ridiculous. Nature inflicts harm on humanity to a degree far more severe degree than humans do to nature: rivers drown people, forest fires destroy communities, and droughts bring famine. With this model, nature conservancy would regress, and would nullify all the efforts of granting nature legal rights in the first place. 

Alternatively, I would suggest a legal model that does not punish nature for its harm to humans, but instead treats these inanimate natural objects as incompetents. Similar to how an individual can plead insanity, where the defendant admits to the crime but seeks to excuse it due to a mental illness, we should choose to exonerate nature since it is neither conscious of its actions nor feels culpability due to their non-sentience. Humans have a choice to look past nature’s flaws: “Unlike lions, we have a choice about whether to hunt gazelles, and we are capable of deliberating about that choice in a reflective way” (Schmidtz 118). This idea refers back to the idea that our treatment of nature reflects our self-respect. A critic may argue that this system insinuates an inherent human superiority by treating humans and nature differently. Despite the potential truth behind this statement, I would align with Schmidz’s perspective that treating all living things the same invokes a sense of disrespect because it fails to recognize each organism's unique characteristics. 

Works Cited

Dasgupta, Shreya. “Taranaki Maunga, New Zealand Mountain, Declared a ‘Legal Person.’” Mongabay Environmental News, 20 Feb. 2025, news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/02/taranaki-maunga-new-zealand-mountain-declared-a-legal-person/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2025.

Doornbos, Elliot, and John Whitehead. “Whales and Dolphins Now Have Legal Personhood in the Pacific – but One Treaty Won’t Be Enough to Protect Them.” The Conversation, 15 Apr. 2024, theconversation.com/whales-and-dolphins-now-have-legal-personhood-in-the-pacific-but-one-treaty-wont-be-enough-to-protect-them-227615.

Schmidtz, David. “Are All Species Equal.” Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 15, 1998.

Stone, Christopher D. “Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 26, no. 6, 1974, https://doi.org/10.2307/1228012.

Taylor, Paul W. Respect for Nature a Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Honor Pledge: I pledge my honor that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized assistance on this essay. 

• Danielle Choi