Fun facts: the UK has crazy laws protecting trees and hedgerows. There’s a national tree registry for old boys.
and everyone just went with it.
Technically, how all law really works at its core.
Technically, how all law really works at its core.
Well, that and the threat of overwhelming unilateral violence
Which usually does cause one to just go with it
Someone thought me the concept of a legal fiction and I still think about it.
Land ownership, companies, nation states, citizenship: all exist because we agree that it does.
And money.
This crooked little vein of logic is what gave us sovereign citizens though, so be careful. Time may be an illusion and all, but schedules still exist.
I mean they aren’t technically wrong some of the time, we shouldn’t have to pay to exist it’s fucking crazy.
I honestly agree with them about how dumb a lot of our legal system is. Their response is to try and make it dumber, though
I’m pretty sure there’s a quirk in marriage and inheritance law that leads to a concept called a pregnant fetus
The trees owned the lands until the humans took it from them.
Nah, more like rented their place until they could give back to the earth with the ultimate sacrifice.
Isn’t that what we all do though?
Humans are bizarrely fond of stuffing their dead with preservatives, hermetically sealing them in a box, and/or incinerating them. Like, it’s our last chance to give a little bit back to nature, but nope.
How’s incinerating bad? Unless you’re keeping the leftovers I guess
That just delays things ultimately
With all the crap we put in ourselves it’s a good thing we slow down that process, like the casing of a slow action pill
The ownership of land is an odd thing when you come to think of it. How deep, after all, can it go? If a person owns a piece of land, does he own it all the way down, in ever narrowing dimensions, till it meets all other pieces at the center of the earth? Or does ownership consist only of a thin crust under which the friendly worms have never heard of trespassing?
-Tuck Everlasting
Dude’s lived how ever many hundred years and never even heard of mineral rights, smh.
Humans:
Lebanon enters chat
Tree law continues to be the wildest
Trees now have more rights than women in the State of Texas
What if the tree falls on them? Might they become governor?
Actually this tree is in Georgia, so it can’t get abortions after 6 weeks either.
wait so, can i just deed the title of my land to my land upon my death? Is that something i can just fucking do?
As long as enough of town decides to go along with it. If the town decides you were a coot and would rather have a gas station, the tree is fucked.
when the people who make the rules say “Sorry, the rules are the rules, there’s nothing we can do” remember that they literally gave a tree human rights just because they felt like it.
You’re not totally wrong, but an important distinction is that some rules aren’t there just to be arbitrary. They’re linked into a larger system, and you can’t change one without affecting thirty other things. It usually needs more than ten seconds of thought prior to posting on the Internet.
trees having human rights would shake up this whole system, what with us having entire economic sectors based on slaughtering them wholesale. so either you can just do things as a one-off without generalizing them or you can just shake up the whole system. obviously, this case was the former, which means that other cases can be too. way to end it by being a dick, though.
In this case “they” is a fairly small city and its sense of tradition, so you will find “they” is actually “because the people wanted to.”
I do like the info, I’m failing to see the science aspect, and even the meme aspect of this post. But I’m in the ‘microblog doesn’t equal meme’ camp.
I’m in the Dawkins definition of meme camp. Memes are a funny thing, pun intended. :)
Dawkin’s definition had nothing to do with humor. His definition was an idea that is spread through society. Its the intellectual equivalent to genes.
The ‘not science’ part is what irked me and I tagged that on for laughs and irrelevant discussion (as is the following I’m not mad, but like to dabble in pedantry today):
But on that part, in the old days the dawkinsian meme was misappropriated to denote a specific image format. Of course it is a Dawkinsian one, too as it is a vector of ideas.
Then it got misappropriated again as ‘any funny image on the internet’, including microblogs, like you seen to defend. You then use the argument that it’s a meme in the Dawkinsian manner (and you’d be technically correct).
But using that logic anything in any medium is a meme. I could upload a Gilbert Gottfried narration of Atlas Shrugged, a clay tablet or the transcripts of all of money pythons movies and sketches. That would all be Dawkinsian memes, and debatebly funny, however not the kind the people here are interested in seeing.
So in in the camp ‘a meme means an image with caption’ and not micro blogs, otherwise anything goes.
Thanks for entertaining my diatribe.
I think conservation techniques can count as science. If it was a rare species, the science connection would be more obvious
Legalism in shambles
Are they sure the original Tree that Owned Itself was the mother of the Son of the Tree that owned itself? Or did some whore squirrel just deposit the acorn near the stump?
Have they done a DNA test to confirm that the son has a legal stake in the property?
Now the son is young, dumb, and full of pollen. He’s gotta be spreading it as far as the wind will take it. What will happen when he inevitably dies and his estate has to be settled??
A tree owning itself and it’s a white oak tree, who would have guessed. You can be victim of specicism and still a white supremacist. Think about it.
Well, fuck.
Much worse. This tree was given freedom in the Southern US. Slavery was still ongoing. The University of Georgia leased out it’s slaves.
So this tree was more important than actual people.
Doubt that asshole paid taxes.
Okay curious question. There’s a legal movement arguing that nature should be protected by law/be considered when undertaking things that might affect it (esp. resource development).
Does anybody with any legal knowledge know if this would create some kind of legal precedent? Obviously it’s not enshrined in written law, but a tree that owns itself (even by mutual agreement) seems to suggest it’s somewhat plausible, and it’s not like laws always make sense lol. Or am I just reading too much into this?
Obviously, it would vary from country to country. But some countries do give legal status either to nature as a whole, or to rivers, mountains, etc. In practice, this means that the state / a citizen can sue anyone who pollutes or otherwise harms the river / mountain / nature, without needing to prove that the pollution is bad for other people.
I don’t think it’s crazy at all to protect trees. We need them. What baffles me is hiw much we rely on them and still cut while swaths of them down anyway without a thought.
It boggles my mind we feel the need to box ecology and not consider agency for any of the other parts that make life itself possible.
I get a lot of flack for my belief in other animals deserving agency. Your the first person that’s ever agreed with me on that. Usually people get aggressive and call me names, and tell me I’m crazy, or a wack job, or any other number of names.
People like that fundamentally do not understand nature. It’s like an engine, a procees, not a thing.
Study after study has shown that trees in cities offer huge benefits: offering shade and cooling (reducing energy consumption), draining storm/flood water (very useful in our more extreme climate), cleaning the air and emitting oxygen, homing wildlife, improving mental health by reducing anxiety and depression, being nice to look at.
Every city tree should be treasured and protected.
Based Georgia!
