Should Rivers Have Same Legal Rights as Humans? Growing Number of Voices Say Yes | Hacker News Reader

Should Rivers Have Same Legal Rights as Humans? Growing Number of Voices Say Yes

npr.org

38 pointspseudolus33 comments

Honestly, this sounds like a reasonable hack.

The dominant notion of property rights, wherein a given individual can do absolutely anything to something as long as they can get a government to say it's theirs, ends up being pretty flawed. E.g., the massive negative externalities that caused us to eventually adopt things like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

I'd rather see a more thoughtful and nuanced system that carefully weighs competing interests. But people being what they are, giving legal personhood to rivers seems less ridiculous than giving it to corporations.

Do you support the idea of giving fetuses legal rights and using this to sue the mother?* After all, once we give human legal rights to rivers quite a lot of the typical arguments become irrelevant in the other context.

Ultimately, people support this absurd idea because they like the results, but the abuse of the legal system is going to reverberate. I don't think you'd like the results of not having a functioning legal system.

* Don't think merely of the typical pro-life/pro-choice wrangling. Think of suing the mother for bad lifestyle decisions which may or may not affect the child once born. So many opportunities for a creative lawyer.

I am familiar with the "slippery slope to utter catastrophe" argument, but I don't really see it as applying here. Passing laws to give rivers corporate personhood won't automatically create rights for imaginary babies (which is how anti-abortion types typically perceive embryos). And patriarchal types are already working to subjugate women just fine without waiting for this.

I intentionally took a radical (but possible) example. A more related likely result is NIMBYs using the precedent to give all other ecosystems 'personhood' and strangling housing development in lawsuits. Now that I consider this, judges could use other creative readings of corporate law to actually weaken environmental law (can we use eminent domain on the river? Does it have a natural monopoly on water supply and we need to apply anti-trust?).

Ultimately this is an improper hack, suborning the law for political ends. There are some evils that can justify even a take-no-prisoners approach. But better protection of river ecosystems? Are there really no better ways to achieve that?

Again, I'm familiar with the "slippery slope to utter catastrophe" line of argument. But here you're not even really making it other than to handwave at the possibility. I get that you don't like this. But all law is a political fiction for political ends, so your horror is not something I share.

If you do have a better way to solve it, I encourage you to give it a try. Let me know how it goes.

Corporations are groups of people that behave at least somewhat similar to people, nothing about rivers allows analogy to a person.

E.g. do i harm a river when throw a bottle into it, or do i give her a toy to happily play with? It surely looks happy carrying trash, after all she often takes trees and boulders by herself.

The word "corporation", even in the legal sense includes things like towns. In a slightly broader sense, it includes things like provinces and countries. So why could it not include something like the community of people who live by and or use water from the river?

Now I can see all sorts of detailed problems with this (for example people upstream might have opposite interests from downstream, so the collective is not a coherent person-like entity). But I don't see a fundamental difference between this kind of corporation and that of the existing kinds.

Your suggestion is not problematic per se, but it's not the one advanced in the article. There are some very significant differences.

First, if it's the people who have the rights and not the river, than they can waive their rights as well. It's quite possible to imagine people who prefer development to a pristine river - this was the choice of every developing country after all.

Second, would the people have standing if the developments in question do not affect them or affect them positively? (e.g. diverting the river downstream, or drying up some swamps to halt some malaria-like disease).

The result is the giving communities those legal rights won't do for the purposes of those advancing this doctrine - many communities' political representatives will just waive the rights immediately, perhaps in exchange for some investment or another.

The purpose of this legal doctrine seems to be to stop developments even if the elected authorities agree to them, so they have to give the rights to something which can't waive them or trade them for something else.

Even if you could get one lawyer/rights group to agree a certain development is worth it, there would always be some other group ready to advance a claim in the "river's" name.

Both of these are perceptual choices you're making. In one case you've chosen to see the analogy as real. In the other case you're refusing to consider the analogy, and then casting your failure as some sort of universal ("nothing... allows"). But since other people clearly can see analogies, it's not universal; it's your preference leaking out.

I do not refuse to consider the analogy, after reading the article and all the comments here, i didn't find any logical ground for the analogy. Animistic religions believing that river has a spirit, or saying that river represents the group of people who live nearby (but who obviously have conflicting interesting) do not sound convincing to me. If you have any better arguments for the validity of the analogy, i'd be happy to hear them.

Analogies don't really have logical validity. They are a way of priming intuition. I agree it doesn't sound convincing to you; I'm just saying that isn't indicative of anything more than your reaction.

I am saying that any person who would use logic to analyze the proposed analogy and its consequences would see that it is absurd, independently from feelings and intuition. A normal reply to this would be a chain of arguments showing that in some case the analogy is giving a useful result.

Are you saying that logic is just "my reaction", and it is not any more valid than feelings?

I have already said I think it's an adequate analogy. Others clearly have too. Your belief that your personal thoughts are universal and infallible is your belief. It's not one I found persuasive at the beginning, and less so the more you insist on it.

You said that you think it is adequate, but you didn't say why you think that. I do not think that my personal, or anyone else's thoughts are universal or infallible, but i think it is possible to find common understanding using logic.

> It's not one I found persuasive at the beginning, and less so the more you insist on it

I didn't add anything to my initial argument to make it more persuasive, i merely asked you to tell your arguments in favor of the analogy, as i hoped you may have something more interesting to say than "your thoughts are your thoughts and my thoughts are mine" which is a tautological truth.

Clearly a river cannot have legal rights. If the river bursts its banks and floods my house, can I sue the river? Clearly I cannot because how do I sue the river, who represents the river and how does the river have money to pay me? The river cannot appointment executives to represent its interests.

In reality the local government acts for the protection of the environment, so why pretend the river has rights? If you want cleaner rivers then pass legislation with appropriate level of punishment such as fines/prison.

In the US, governments can put money on trial[1]. In the US, the same jurisdiction can be used to put any piece of land on trial as well[2].

> how does the river have money to pay me?

The remedy at the end of a lawsuit may or may not involve money. Not all successful suits result in financial transfer.

> why pretend the river has rights?

The article addresses this. By giving rights to the environment, harming the environment is punishable by default, even if you come up with a completely novel way to do it.

In our current system, you can harm the environment until someone notices, write a law or rule, and then stops you from doing it.

There's precedent for other living things to have rights[3], so where do we draw the line? Why can't an entire, complex ecosystem have the same rights as a human or a monkey?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...

2. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/in_rem

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...

River could do all of these. River can become a corporation which provides water as its main source of revenue in return for money which is held in a trust and used to pay people employed by the river to carry out its business. There are many implications to this idea, but it seems pretty sound alternative to having a river owned by shareholder for instance who pursue a profit motive.

The point of such an environmental corporation would be to ensure its survival over the long run, rather than shareholder profit. Could you sue a river, maybe, though the lawyers for the river would argue that the blame is not the river's but an act of god out of the control of the river and those who manage it.

The river does not have a mind, so any decisions on what actions to take in the name of the river are actually conducted by a person/organisation. In that case it is the person/organisation that becomes responsible. So the river is just a pointer deference to another entity. Just like a corporation is a pointer deference to the shareholders.

It could also be akin to the guardian of a minor, whilst a minor may have a mind, they wouldn't necessarily be in charge of making decisions regarding legal recourse, or in some cases personal health. If we pursue this train of thought, there could be some expectations for the "legal guardians of rivers" to justify what course of action they should take on behalf of such a thing, in that they may be expected to ensure the health and longevity of the river, and hopefully improve the quality of life for all living things in and around rivers.

As I said the point of the river, is longevity and therefore just as a corporation optimizes for corporate profit a corporation representing the river optimizes for the river's longevity. I don't see how much difference there is between any corporation representing the profit motive of shareholders vs. a corporation representing the environmental motive of a natural resource. They are both simply ideas personified.

Currently people simply plunder natural resources where their longevity is an after thought and not really incorporated into the profiteering of their consumption. This has to change.

Why is the point of a river longevity? Left to their own devices, rivers change course and dry up. The key characteristic of a river is a flow of water not longevity

On the surface, it seems like a good idea especially in the face of upcoming "water wars" if some transformational technology involving cheap clean water isn't trotted out by mid-century.

If Capital wants billions of new consumer and their resultant markets, Capital better steward the natural resources that enable those billions to thrive.

Ohio just banned this. http://www.norwalkreflector.com/Government/2019/07/18/Ohio-l... (self paying video)

Reminds me of the discussion of the tragedy of the commons from yesterday.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20602217

A river receiving the same treatment as a corporation looks a smart idea that will solve a lot of problems. Can Columbia be purchased and merged in Amazon yet?

Could Chicago exist if this were the law of the land from the beginning?

Who cares? Whether the answer were yes or no, it wouldn't have any bearing on the current discussion.

"This policy would've been bad in the past" not an argument against that policy now, especially ~180 yrs later.

Also, why is an alternate reality without Chicago a nightmare scenario?

If a policy would have prevented something we now enjoy from emerging in the past, we should at least be concerned about what it might suppress tomorrow.

Total environmental damage would be a lot worse if the populations of skyscraper cities were instead scattered across a broader, less intense sprawl. Environmental regulation can sometime be counterproductive that way.

The framers of the constitutuon recognized that land has rights too and made sure that geography, not just population, was part of the democracy via institutions such as the electoral college. Very forward thinking

I think this is stretching the stated intent of the Electoral College to the point of being disingenuous. The framers did want "land" to affect presidential election, but not because they wanted the land itself to be a separate legal entity.

Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

I never said they wanted land to be a separate entity but rather they sought to take into account geographic interests and not just individual ones when writing the constitution

Agreed, but "geographic interests" was an economic distinction. I don't see how it has any relationship to the original article, which is about giving rights to literal pieces of the Earth.

Because the first step in the law recognizing something has rights is first realizing they have interests to be protected.

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