(I'd happily go as far as calling them Beings, but I'm afraid it would sound like some kind of a new age esoteric bullshit, even so I'm borderline convinced they are sentient.)
The important thing that fascinates me is how Tree actually work. They are generally perceived as growing from the soil to the atmosphere. However, the opposite is true. About 98% of the material of a tree is originated from the air, namely the carbon extracted from the CO2 content of the air. Trees are literally growing from the air, and piercing down into the soil to get water to run their Calvin cycles to extract the carbon and produce the ATP.
Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do. And by destroying them, we are limiting this control. Looking from this angle, there is very little surprise in the onset of weather extremes.
I summary, I'm very happy with this legislation. I hope this a first step in many that is actually going to help us taming the climate of our planet again. With more trees. Because trees are awesome.
MisterTea 38 minutes ago [-]
> Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do.
Recently there was an article posted here that claimed trees do have some ability to control the weather. The claim is trees simultaneously release water vapor into the atmosphere influencing rains.
meristohm 4 minutes ago [-]
Yep! Evaporation through leaf stomata creates the internal pressure drop that pulls water from the earth into the roots.
tsimionescu 45 minutes ago [-]
Such a weird idea. Do they recognize the right of cockroaches to life as well - as they are much more clearly living beings with some realistic chance of being sentient and feeling pain? What about tomatoes or roses or other plants?
Note that I'm all for the protection of trees - for pretty obvious environmental, esthetic, and human usage reasons. I just don't think recognizing trees as having their own rights as living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
roughly 25 minutes ago [-]
We recognize corporations as legal entities with rights because it makes a great deal of the legal wrangling around, eg, assigning blame for criminal activity, or assigning permissions to operate, more convenient. Assigning rights to trees means not having to draw the entire causal chain to the harms done to people by environmental degradation, which can take years to manifest and is often irreversible. It’s the same legal fiction for the same reason.
nemomarx 43 minutes ago [-]
We kinda draw arbitrary lines? I mean we do animal rights and animal welfare, so what really is the difference between a mouse and a tarantula in those terms
tsimionescu 29 minutes ago [-]
Well, I don't think we recognize a general right to life for animals, even for those protected under the law. Euthanizing a cat or a dog is allowed virtually everywhere, unlike a human, for example. We certainly don't recognize any right to bodily integrity for animals, as even cats and dogs are routinely sterilized.
Generally, we instead have animal welfare laws that protect various animals to various extents for various reasons, based on human interest in said animals (e.g. You can sterilize any cat you find, unless it's owned by someone else, but you can never shoot a cat; you can shoot many wild animals within certain limits, but you can't sterilize them outside very special circumstances).
fl4regun 18 minutes ago [-]
In Ontario we have MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), not sure if Quebec also has something like this, but it's not unprecedented in Canada.
mannanj 24 minutes ago [-]
I studied an ancient form of communing with trees, through treediets (https://sacredtreekeepers.com) where I had a ~10 day fast with tree bark tea. there's certainly sentience and life form in them, unlike ours and also able to be connected to, if we have the right modulation of our awareness and sensory experience.
it doesn't just take a psychedelic experience to see this though.
Just because you haven't experienced something, and overely on your intellectual and thinking faculties (because you can't rationalize or understand something with you mind you discount its rights or existence) doesn't mean its true. Edit: I mean we in general overrely on our minds as filters for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when in reality much of knowledge, wisdom and understanding cannot be grasped by the mind or thinking; in many cases the mind deceives & tricks us.
baal80spam 42 minutes ago [-]
> Note that I'm all for the protection of trees - for pretty obvious environmental, esthetic, and human usage reasons. I just don't think recognizing trees as having their own rights as living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.
Larrikin 8 minutes ago [-]
What kind of people?
tekla 40 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
jstanley 38 minutes ago [-]
Are they definitely the same people?
balozi 7 minutes ago [-]
This is what lawmakers that don't want to deal with the real life issues do. They work on nonsense laws while citizens live in squalor.
I-M-S 43 minutes ago [-]
This will be weaponized by NIMBYs to further limit construction of housing and infrastructure, leading to a situation in which trees have more human rights than people.
DonsDiscountGas 15 minutes ago [-]
This is like saying guns will be weaponized. The entire point of this is to be a NIMBY weapon.
jimbokun 30 minutes ago [-]
It already says in the article they won’t be building anymore housing because they are forbidding cutting down trees to clear land to build, and they’re already out of open lots to build on.
This is 100% NIMBYs finding new ways to protect their property values.
16 minutes ago [-]
derwiki 20 minutes ago [-]
.. coming soon to San Francisco I bet
cwillu 15 minutes ago [-]
Quebec law is not based on common-law, so I'm not sure how that would be managed…
bloppe 48 minutes ago [-]
I'm pro-tree, but I feel like you can protect them without sounding this ridiculous
kgwxd 45 minutes ago [-]
The goal is definitely not to protect trees.
enraged_camel 43 minutes ago [-]
Oh yeah? What is it then? Please enlighten us.
I-M-S 42 minutes ago [-]
This will be weaponized by NIMBYs to further limit construction of housing and infrastructure.
boomboomsubban 31 minutes ago [-]
Cynically, to make a documentary and get articles written. None of the rules they mention seem that extreme, they're just wording it in an unusual way.
kgwxd 16 minutes ago [-]
Same nefarious reasons corporations were given "personhood". Is it illegal to "assult" trees now? If someone pisses on a tree, are they going to call in the SVU? The legal system isn't a toy. Trees, in the general sense, don't need extra laws, the ones that need protecting are already covered by property law.
cwillu 10 minutes ago [-]
If you don't know anything about the difference between civil law and common law in Quebec, you should be reading wikipedia articles on the topic and such rather than asserting nonsense in comments on hn.
chingabazinga 19 minutes ago [-]
Imagine trees having more rights than fetuses because "A tree is like a human being," Bourdeau said. "It breathes, it lives, it takes in water. It protects us from all sorts of things."
malcolmgreaves 7 minutes ago [-]
Does a tree have a direct blood connection to a person? Does a tree die if that connection is severed?
seizethecheese 38 minutes ago [-]
> Bourdeau says the new resolution means the town will review its existing rules and bylaws to ensure that trees are protected or replaced if they must be cut down. He also plans to implement measures to further increase the canopy, including offering trees for residents to plant.
It’s unclear whether the reporter failed to describe the real impact of this or whether it actually has no teeth.
Regarding tree rights, I do think cities cut down trees too lightly. For example, the city where I live recently rehabbed a large park and cut down a mature tree to make a new path, where it could have easily made the path a few meters away. (Of course the tree may have been diseased, but it seemed quite healthy.) I’m not sure my argument would be that trees have rights so much as that trees take a long time to grow, and a replacement tree is not as good as a mature one for a long long time.
jimbokun 33 minutes ago [-]
> "We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living," she said in a phone interview. "So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?"
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
erelong 34 minutes ago [-]
We probably need to plant more trees or be diligent about ones we remove, but this seems to proceed from an erroneous worldview
swader999 45 minutes ago [-]
I wonder if they adhere to Quebec's language laws.
andy99 39 minutes ago [-]
If we start letting trees communicate by underground signalling though a network of mycorrhizal fungus, it’s going to be the death of French. It’s important that every living being learns to adopt the culture.
superultra 8 minutes ago [-]
I just finished Michael Christie’s Greenwood, a generational epic on family and, well, trees. Part of the book takes place in a future where the only trees left in the world are on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia where the rich go to replenish.
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
wiseowise 1 hours ago [-]
Finally. There should be major repercussions for destroying trees, especially within the cities that look increasingly like concrete blocks.
MisterTea 51 minutes ago [-]
Living in Queens NYC I can see the large disparity between the greenery prevalent in the tax photos present on 1940s.nyc. After my grandparents passed we sold the house that had three nice shade trees, patio, a garden, grass along the side and a front lawn. Only the front lawn remains. The rest was entombed in concrete. Houses around the area suffer the same fate - yards completely devoid of green life and instead concrete. When it rains water pours down driveways into the gutter leaving the combined sewer system to deal with water that should be in the earth.
jimbokun 26 minutes ago [-]
We make cities look like concrete blocks in order to have dense housing and protect the little forest land we have left.
koolba 1 hours ago [-]
Most cities already have strict rules for removing existing trees. Usually anything over 6 inch diameter at shoulder level is off limits without getting specific approval.
jimbokun 25 minutes ago [-]
And they were able to do that without declaring trees to have equal rights with people???
moltar 1 hours ago [-]
Inbefore extreme NIMBY
skybrian 28 minutes ago [-]
Who represents the trees and what are they able to do with these rights?
kgwxd 20 minutes ago [-]
> We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living. So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?
If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.
NSUserDefaults 33 minutes ago [-]
Do they pay taxes?
roughly 13 minutes ago [-]
On every penny they make.
The property taxes are largely offset by the carbon credits, though.
gchamonlive 22 minutes ago [-]
For something to be recognized as a living being with rights does it need to pay taxes?
crunchiepooker 36 minutes ago [-]
Hacker news!
tsimionescu 26 minutes ago [-]
This definitely qualifies as a weird legal hack.
UrineSqueegee 15 minutes ago [-]
retards
ReptileMan 32 minutes ago [-]
Can we send them end grain cutting board as a gift?
zuzululu 21 minutes ago [-]
what the hell is going on with Canada as of late?
cwillu 13 minutes ago [-]
Quebec's legal system is not based on common-law like the rest of the provinces.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Please stop with the politics on HN.
Rendered at 17:04:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Trees are fantastic creatures.
(I'd happily go as far as calling them Beings, but I'm afraid it would sound like some kind of a new age esoteric bullshit, even so I'm borderline convinced they are sentient.)
The important thing that fascinates me is how Tree actually work. They are generally perceived as growing from the soil to the atmosphere. However, the opposite is true. About 98% of the material of a tree is originated from the air, namely the carbon extracted from the CO2 content of the air. Trees are literally growing from the air, and piercing down into the soil to get water to run their Calvin cycles to extract the carbon and produce the ATP.
Knowing this, I'd be more than surprised if Trees - or plants in general - haven't had any methods to control their food source: the atmosphere. I believe they do. And by destroying them, we are limiting this control. Looking from this angle, there is very little surprise in the onset of weather extremes.
I summary, I'm very happy with this legislation. I hope this a first step in many that is actually going to help us taming the climate of our planet again. With more trees. Because trees are awesome.
Recently there was an article posted here that claimed trees do have some ability to control the weather. The claim is trees simultaneously release water vapor into the atmosphere influencing rains.
Note that I'm all for the protection of trees - for pretty obvious environmental, esthetic, and human usage reasons. I just don't think recognizing trees as having their own rights as living beings makes any sense whatsoever.
Generally, we instead have animal welfare laws that protect various animals to various extents for various reasons, based on human interest in said animals (e.g. You can sterilize any cat you find, unless it's owned by someone else, but you can never shoot a cat; you can shoot many wild animals within certain limits, but you can't sterilize them outside very special circumstances).
it doesn't just take a psychedelic experience to see this though.
Just because you haven't experienced something, and overely on your intellectual and thinking faculties (because you can't rationalize or understand something with you mind you discount its rights or existence) doesn't mean its true. Edit: I mean we in general overrely on our minds as filters for knowledge, wisdom and understanding when in reality much of knowledge, wisdom and understanding cannot be grasped by the mind or thinking; in many cases the mind deceives & tricks us.
Sadly, I don't think making sense matters for this kind of people.
This is 100% NIMBYs finding new ways to protect their property values.
It’s unclear whether the reporter failed to describe the real impact of this or whether it actually has no teeth.
Regarding tree rights, I do think cities cut down trees too lightly. For example, the city where I live recently rehabbed a large park and cut down a mature tree to make a new path, where it could have easily made the path a few meters away. (Of course the tree may have been diseased, but it seemed quite healthy.) I’m not sure my argument would be that trees have rights so much as that trees take a long time to grow, and a replacement tree is not as good as a mature one for a long long time.
Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!
It’s eco-dystopian science fiction (by a Canadian no less) but I wonder if the people in that future would’ve supported something like this now. I imagine probably.
If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.
The property taxes are largely offset by the carbon credits, though.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Please stop with the politics on HN.