A Town Just Voted To Give Trees Legal Rights And The Lawyer Behind It Has The Best Quote.
The town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, a community of about 2,000 people built in the woods west of Montreal, voted unanimously on June 9th to become the first municipality in Quebec and Canada to recognize trees as living beings with legal rights of their own, adopting a resolution that declares trees worthy of protection including the right to life, to natural growth, to integrity, and to regeneration. The council simultaneously became the first Canadian municipality to formally sign on to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Tree, an international initiative developed by environmental organizations whose three core articles state that trees are living beings and a common human good, that life on Earth depends on their existence, and that humans must act in fraternity and solidarity with them. Mayor Michel Bourdeau said a Quebec documentary filmmaker named André Desrochers inspired the community to act, after his film about trees convinced citizens that these were living entities that breathe, communicate through their root systems, and deserve to be understood as something more than resources. Bourdeau put it directly: a tree is like a human being in the sense that it breathes, it lives, it takes in water, and it protects us from all sorts of things.
The movement to grant legal personhood to elements of the natural world has been gaining momentum globally for years, with New Zealand granting legal personhood to the Whanganui River in 2017, Colombia doing the same for the Amazon in 2018, and Quebec's own Magpie River gaining legal rights through a regional government and Indigenous council in 2021. Karine Péloffy, a lawyer with Ecojustice who has followed the rights of nature movement closely, offered what may be the most quotable defense of the idea: we know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living, she said, so if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood? And then she added: if anything has standing, it's a tree. The resolution means Terrasse-Vaudreuil will review its existing bylaws to ensure trees are protected or replaced if they must be cut down, and the mayor plans to offer residents trees to plant as part of an effort to expand the town's canopy. It is a small town in the woods that has been flooded three times by extreme weather and has decided, unanimously, that the trees around it deserve the same legal consideration as the corporations that operate nearby.
