Should Trees have Standing? Quotes

“Increasingly, the death that occupies each human's imagination is not his own, but that of the entire life cycle of the planet earth, to which each of us is as but a cell to a body.”
― Christopher Stone, Should Trees have Standing?

“I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which Mankind is a functional part-the mind, perhaps: different from the rest of nature, but different as a man's brain is from his lungs.”
― Christopher Stone, Should Trees have Standing?

“The time may be on hand when these sentiments, and the early stirrings of the law, can be coalesced into a radical new theory or myth -felt as well as intellectualized-of man's relationships to the rest of nature. I do not mean "myth" in a demeaning sense of the term, but in the sense in which, at different times in history, our social "facts" and relationships have been comprehended and integrated by reference to the "myths" that we are co-signers of a social contract, that the Pope is God's agent, and that all men are created equal. Pantheism, Shinto and Tao all have myths to offer. But they are all, each in its own fashion, quaint, primitive and archaic. What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of geophysics, biology and the cosmos.”
― Christopher Stone, Should Trees have Standing?

“To be able to get away from the view that Nature is a collection of useful senseless objects is, as McCullers' "madman" suggests, deeply involved in the development of our abilities to love-or, if that is putting it too strongly, to be able to reach a heightened awareness of our own, and others' capacities in their mutual interplay. To do so, we have to give up some psychic investment in our sense of separateness and specialness in the universe. And this, in turn, is hard giving indeed, because it involves us in a flight backwards, into earlier stages of civilization and childhood in which we had to trust (and perhaps fear) our environment, for we had not then the power to master it. Yet, in doing so, we-as persons-gradually free ourselves of needs for supportive illusions.”
― Christopher Stone, Should Trees have Standing?

“To shift from such a lofty fancy as the planetarization of consciousness to the operation of our municipal legal system is to come down to earth hard. Before the forces that are at work, our highest court is but a frail and feeble-a distinctly human-institution. Yet, the Court may be at its best not in its work of handing down decrees, but at the very task that is called for: of summoning up from the human spirit the kindest and most generous and worthy ideas that abound there, giving them shape and reality and legitimacy.”
― Christopher Stone, Should Trees have Standing?