In a famous 1972 law article, Should Trees Have Standing?, the American law professor Christopher Stone proposed that forests, rivers, oceans and other natural things should have legal rights of their own, able to go to court through a human guardian as children and companies already do. The idea was taken up by a Supreme Court judge within months and is now the root of the rights-of-nature movement, from Ecuador’s constitution to the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his insight that treating other beings as rightless things is a choice of our culture, not a law of nature, and goes further, holding that trees and rivers are already persons.
Who was Christopher Stone? #
An American lawyer and philosopher of law, and one of the founders of modern environmental advocacy. He studied philosophy at Harvard and law at Yale, practised law in New York, and taught at the University of Southern California’s law school from 1965 until he retired in 2013. He was the son of the campaigning journalist I. F. Stone. His other books include Where the Law Ends (1975), on controlling the behaviour of corporations, and The Gnat Is Older than Man (1993), on the global environment. He died on 14 May 2021, aged 83.1
What did the article argue? #
That the law has extended rights, step by step, to beings and things once thought rightless, and could do so again. In ancient Roman law a child was less a person than an object under a father’s authority, and over time rights were extended to children, women, prisoners and foreigners, and even to things that are not people at all, such as trusts, companies and ships.2 Each time it seemed absurd beforehand. In Stone’s words, “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable.” People take the rightlessness of rightless “things” to be a decree of Nature, in his view, when it is really a legal convention propping up the way things are.3 And so: “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment.”3
He meant something practical. A natural thing would have standing, the right to bring a case, through a guardian, much as a court appoints a guardian for someone who cannot manage their own affairs. That trees and streams cannot speak is no objection, since companies and infants cannot speak either. The harm done to the river itself would count, not only the harm to its human owners or users, and any damages would go to restoring it.4 He did not claim that a river should have the same rights as a person, or every natural thing the same rights as every other. He also expected the change to work on people’s minds, helping them to see the natural world differently.2
Why did a Supreme Court judge take it up? #
Because of a case about a valley. The Walt Disney company had permission to build a $35 million resort in Mineral King Valley, a wild area of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, and the Sierra Club sued to stop it. Stone wrote his article with that case in mind. In April 1972 the Supreme Court decided, by four votes to three, that the Sierra Club had no standing to sue. Justice William O. Douglas dissented, citing the article: “Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” The case, he suggested, would be better named Mineral King v. Morton.5
What came of the idea? #
A worldwide movement. In 2008 Ecuador wrote rights for “Nature or Pacha Mama” into its constitution. In New Zealand the forest of Te Urewera became a legal person in 2014, and the Whanganui River in 2017, recognised in law as “an indivisible and living whole” with “all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person”. Bolivia, Uganda and Spain have passed their own laws, and courts in Colombia, India and Bangladesh have made rulings of their own.678
What do critics say? #
That a river cannot really hold rights. Visa Kurki, writing in Transnational Environmental Law, argues that a river cannot be wronged, held responsible or make legal decisions, so its “personhood” amounts in practice to something like a trust run by humans, though he allows that such arrangements can still be justified as legal fictions with symbolic value. Others say rights of nature fit badly with existing legal systems; the United Kingdom told a United Nations meeting in 2024 that rights can only be held by legal persons. Advocates, in the summary given by a 2026 study in the American Political Science Review, see personhood as a powerful tool both for protecting the environment and for redressing historical injustices against Indigenous peoples; and supporters of Ecuador’s law reply that early setbacks, such as the years in which Ecuador’s provisions were called ineffective, were teething troubles for a completely new kind of law, which its constitutional court has since begun to use.91011
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
At its root. Hunter-gatherers saw themselves not as owning the land but as part of it, belonging to it; the stones, hills, rivers and streams, and the land itself, were honoured as the body of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.12 With farming, other beings became possessions to be used, were downgraded or denied sentience, and as property had no rights.13 Stone’s “rightless ‘things'” are exactly what the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer made of the more-than-human world, and his point that their rightlessness is a convention, not a fact of Nature, is the same point made in law. See What are Taker and Leaver cultures?
It also connects with the slow recovery from the Fall. The psychologist Steve Taylor sees, over the last five hundred years or so, signs of a “post-fallen recovery” of our natural empathy, among them the abolition of slavery and the growth of animal rights, and Therapeutic Shamanism takes up his idea; there is still a long way to go in putting right our relationship with our fellow animals.14 Stone’s step-by-step extension of rights reads like a next step on the same road. See Who is Steve Taylor, and what is his idea of the Fall?
And it connects with the guardian. Part of the shaman’s role was always to be the champion and voice of the other Peoples, making sure that humans lived in right relationship with them.15 A court-appointed guardian for a river is a legal version of that old role.
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see further? #
In who the river is. Stone’s case is legal and practical, and needs no view on whether a tree is a someone. In animism everything is alive and everything is sacred. The plants and stones are the Plant People and the Stone People, kin to the human people, and the rivers and the land itself are honoured as the body of Mother Earth, whether or not a court says so.16 Words matter, since they define and shape how we perceive things, and Stone was right that the language of rights would change how people see.17 But the deeper change is in the relationship itself. A guardian in court speaks for a river; a person in right relationship with it also listens. See How do humans communicate and build relationships with the other-than-human Peoples?
