# SIG-PRG 2026-09-13 — Session Notes

Participants:
  - Sarah Friend | utc +2
  - themandalore
  - misha 🪨 | UTC+2
  - Eric Alston (UTC - 6)
  - LisaRöingBaer-CEST
  - Sam Mandel (GMT -4)

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## 📖 The Reading
Christopher Stone's essay "Should Trees Have Standing? — Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects" (a 1970s text; the group repeatedly refers to Stone's proposal for legal personhood/standing for natural objects). The exact title is not spoken verbatim, but the author "Stone," the era ("in the seventies"), and the argument (legal standing for rivers/forests, guardianship) clearly identify it.

## 🧭 Overview
This session examined Stone's proposal to grant legal personhood/standing to natural objects such as rivers and forests. Discussion centered on whether Western law is the right vehicle for this, how damages and value get priced, the role of guardianship and "romantic" views of nature, and comparisons to corporate personhood, artworks, and landmarks. The conversation closed with speculative directions — LLMs as guardians, and Coasean bargaining at scale — plus logistics for the next reading and session.

## 💡 Key Points & Themes

- **Square peg / round hole (Sam Mandel):** Western law is built around individual persons and monetary damages; extending personhood from corporations to natural objects felt forced and unconvincing to Sam. He noted that a human legal subject (even one needing a guardian) still has a history and personality, and corporations plausibly develop a collective "personality," but natural features don't fit this in Western culture without a mythological/animist basis.

- **Personhood as recognition, not just standing (Lisa):** A consequence of granting personhood would be cultural — natural objects would be *recognized* as persons, not merely defendable in court. Lisa argued the group risks missing the essay's opening point: rights we now take as common sense (e.g. children's rights) once seemed unthinkable, and today's participants are "illustrating what the entry to the text says."

- **Value, ownership, and economics (themandalore):** Framed the question through economics — assigning ownership/property rights (invoking de Soto, collateralization) transforms how people interact with a thing, for good or ill. Suggested personhood here may functionally resemble another mode of ownership/representation, and compared it to cap-and-trade / carbon credits, which ascribe tradable value to something previously unpriced. Argued any such system needs an underlying shared societal goal or morality, which is where environmental disagreement lives.

- **The standing problem (Eric Alston):** A river has no "motive power" to make a claim, so the real question becomes *who* gets regulatory authority to enforce on its behalf. Eric noted many historically protected areas were protected precisely because someone sought to exploit them. His central comparative question: why grant a scientific/guardian group *legally actionable standing* rather than simply appointing them as a specialized regulatory body empowered to restrict polluting activity?

- **Limits of the civil remedy system (Eric):** Courts traditionally impose only monetary damages and are reluctant to compel behavior (injunctions, writs of mandamus); higher-level regulation belongs to legislatures/regulators. Loading environmental protection onto a damages-based civil system asks too much of it, even if the loss (a spiritually/culturally significant river) genuinely exceeds any monetary sum — echoing his tort students' frustration that "$300,000" cannot make someone "whole" after losing an arm.

- **Pricing the ineffable (Sarah Friend):** Interested in how culture puts numerical prices on things of ineffable value. Cited Stone's car-damage example: damages default to cost-of-repair, falling back to fair market value when repair is untenable — a logic that becomes strange when applied to pollution in a river.

- **The animist / religious framing (Sam, Misha):** If we believed in river gods or place gods, standing for natural objects would feel natural. For "us," objects aren't sufficiently personified; animals feel closer to persons than rivers or rocks. Eric said he'd be more sympathetic to an animist view but that having a spirit is separable from being able to make individuated legal claims in a specific court ("whether or not everything has a spirit... my Wi-Fi headphones... music").

- **Romanticism and the myth of the "original" (Misha, Eric, Lisa):** Misha traced a Romantic-era sense of separation between humans and nature (the sublime, the fantasy of "the wild"/going back to the original), arguing there *is* no original — nature is us, we are intertwined with the ecosystem; the cultural/natural gap is itself the problem, and romanticism blinds us to what is actually happening (recounting a crowded, dying Alpine glacier where tourists were transfixed by "grand nature" while the place died). Eric added ecologically that "the original is not a fixed object" but an evolving one, making any counterfactual baseline vexing. Lisa pushed back: she didn't get "romanticism" from the text, felt it dismissed the essay's arguments, and proposed appointing scientists/biologists as guardians who could give objective damage guidelines rather than being "blinded by beauty."

- **Who is being protected, and from whom (Misha):** Landscapes now framed as wilderness were often emptied of the peoples who cared for them; protection is really protection *from* Western extractive capitalism. Modern disasters partly stem from people interacting with landscapes whose history and workings they no longer know (e.g. building in unsafe places).

- **Artworks, murals, and landmarks (Sam):** Asked Sarah whether an artwork should have rights separate from creator/owner. Cited a Queens building (widely read as 5Pointz) whose graffiti was whitewashed overnight by a developer before demolition, and noted buildings *do* effectively gain rights via landmark status (though enforced by a civic authority, not a "guardian"). Saw no clear logical distinction between protecting art/landmarks and granting standing to natural objects — but noted we don't personify artworks, locating rights in owner or artist instead.

- **Artist's right (Sarah):** Noted artists can retain a right that their work not be destroyed regardless of who owns it — "almost like a right to life of the work."

- **Two-edged sword of expanded standing (Sam):** Stone wrote at a period of "maximum optimism" about class actions and expanded court standing. California shows both sides: environmental lawsuits are a major reason high-speed rail stalled — ironic, since rail would benefit the environment. This supports Eric's preference for balancing interests via regulatory authority.

- **Displacement problem (Eric):** Protecting one area may displace harm elsewhere (the un-protected river becomes the dumping ground; countries that cut emissions import from dirtier ones). Drawing hard lines around one natural object within a larger system may not improve overall outcomes.

- **Stone's rebuttal (Sarah):** Stone anticipates the "this is just existing regulation" objection by arguing rights are less vulnerable than regulatory bodies to political change and competing stakeholders.

## 🔀 Questions & Disagreements

- **Is personhood the right vehicle at all?** Sam and Eric were skeptical, favoring regulatory/technocratic authority; Lisa was more open, seeing recognition value; Sarah said she's unsure personhood is the right framework but hopes to keep exploring it.
- **Standing vs. regulation (Eric's recurring comparative question):** Why give a guardian legal *standing* rather than regulatory power? Left open.
- **Can guardians know what's best?** Sarah questioned how a guardian knows a forest/river's true interests (browning grass is too simple). Lisa proposed objective scientists; Misha and Eric countered that scientists aren't fully objective, that public opinion is more emotional than science, and that lived specialists develop their own attachments.
- **The "romanticism" reading:** Lisa disputed that romanticism is in the text and felt it dismissed the arguments; Misha and Eric maintained it shapes which objects get protected (scenic Alps/Grand Canyon over "ugly" fields).
- **Fetus and children as edge cases:** Raised (Sarah, Misha, Sam) as rights-holders who can't make claims themselves; Sam argued children's rights feel intrinsic and shouldn't require an external instrumental justification, unlike Stone's framing.
- **Where's the baseline?** Which version of an ecosystem counts as the "original" to be restored — an unresolved thread linking the 1970s text to the LLM speculation.
- **LLM as guardian (open):** Could an LLM be trained to speak for a river's significance? Concerns raised (Misha): where does the data come from, how much is needed, and LLMs lack any bodily/worldly experience and may be trained on human-biased data.

## 🔗 References Mentioned

- Christopher Stone, "Should Trees Have Standing?" (the reading under discussion)
- The Whanganui / **Te Awa Tupua Act** (New Zealand river personhood) — raised by Lisa previously; Sarah proposed related reading for October
- A three-coauthor paper (last names only) that Sarah says frames legal personhood for rivers as a "memetic/viral" but awkward instantiation of a pre-existing indigenous framework
- **Hernando de Soto** (property rights/collateralization) — themandalore
- Cap-and-trade / carbon credits — themandalore
- **Code of Hammurabi** (ancient Mesopotamian eye-for-an-eye law) — Sarah
- **5Pointz** (Queens graffiti building whitewashed and demolished by a developer) — Sam (not named verbatim but clearly this case)
- Landmark/historic preservation status; a recent Supreme Court case dismissed for lack of standing re: Trump-era demolition/construction in Washington — Sam
- **"Coasean bargaining at scale"** — an AI-agent negotiation proposal Sarah cited (agents negotiating e.g. tax breaks to accept a garbage dump)
- Animal conservation bias ("cuter animals get more donations... easier to save pandas than insects") — Sarah

## ✅ Action Items & Next Time

- **Sarah** will decide the next reading in a few days after members vote via emoji poll in the personhood research group channel; readings are posted there (some relate to today's discussion, e.g. Te Awa Tupua, others pivot to new areas).
- **Members:** cast emoji reactions on the proposed readings; contribute to the channel between sessions.
- **Sarah** posted a longer prospective reading list and the group's generated research questions to the website (from last week's notes).
- **Next session:** October 1, at the other (evening for Sarah, 7 PM her time) slot; Sarah will email details. The two time-slot experiment continues.

## ⭐ Memorable Quotes

- "You're trying to load too much on a system that wasn't intended for it." — Eric Alston (on the civil remedy system)
- "Nobody was really seeing this place was dying... everybody was just transfixed about the grand big nature." — Misha (on the melting Alpine glacier)
- "It's almost like a right to life of the work." — Sarah Friend (on an artist's right that an artwork not be destroyed)

*Note: the transcript is heavily interleaved (speakers overlap mid-sentence), so some attributions and the finer logic of a few exchanges are reconstructed and may be imprecise.*