Should Trees Have Standing?

Stone, Christopher D. (1974). Should trees have standing Towards legal rights for natural objects. Los Altos, CA William Kaufmann. 24. 

This legal tributary of the environmental movement spawned some important new theories of law that have begun to influence decisions in state courts. In 1970, Christopher Stone published Should Trees Have Standing Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, and in 1971 Joseph Sax published Defending... 

Plate 3. Forest destruction on the top of mountains in the Erzgebirge. Krusny hory, situated between the German Democratic Republic and Czechoslowakia caused by S02 emissions from lignite fired power plants 25 km away. Old trees, meanwhile cut, died first, medium aged trees followed. Young plants which should replace dead stand, have no future. North Bohemia, June 1970. 

They reason as follows let S denote the average size of the trees, interpreted as the total surface area of the branches in a stand. Then the carrying capacity K should be proportional to the available foliage, so K = K S. Similarly, the halfsaturation parameter A in the predation term should be proportional to S predators such as birds search units of foliage, not acres of forest, and so the relevant quantity A must have the dimensions of budworms per unit of branch area. Hence A = A S and therefore... 

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