June 9 2018
DO ANIMALS AND TREES HAVE RIGHTS?
But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds
of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.
Job 12: 7-9.
One of my very good friends loaned me two books on Animal Rights: “Do Animals have Rights,” by Alison Hills, an easy read which gave a measured approach, and “The Case for Animal Rights,” by Tom Regan, a hard slog and much more radical. In it he refutes the still current view that the animals we eat, hunt, and experiment on are, in the words of Ren? Descartes, “thoughtless brutes.” Regan’s opinion is that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value.
Is he right?
We all know that chickens are kept in cages and cows in confined conditions, not unlike people in faraway countries, packed in favelas, in shantytowns, and other make-shift slums. A few years ago a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, killed hundreds of people because they could not escape their packed places. We condemn it where it concerns people. Should we also agitate against the same situations for animals?
There is a curious passage in Genesis 2, where God named the first couple Adam and Eve. Later that same human pair were given the right to name animals. It seems to me that this signifies that we have a certain power over animals, which is plain in later biblical episodes.
At first, in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve apparently were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. Also the Bible is full of animals being slaughtered for ceremonial purposes.
Can our mass-production of animals continue? The on-going production of Tar-Sand oil and fracking are real signs that the easy energy has been used and that EROI or Energy Returned On Investment becomes ever smaller, with the result that the fuel price creeps up, and air-and water pollution grows by leaps and bounds, heralding hard times ahead.
As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cows roam the vast expanse of prairies where they belong.
But back to my original question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals have rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being.
It is exactly our ignorance of “the wider world out there” that has led to the mechanization of animal production.
However, our first duty is to see that people everywhere in the world live in humane conditions, as God has named them and they are made in His image. As long as this is not the case, we cannot demand that animals have priority over humans.
So how about trees? Do they have rights?
Some time ago I read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
Another sentence stayed with me, also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”
Nietzsche`s rebellion against the church originated from the preaching of the Heaven Heresy, still almost universally seen as the gospel truth. The much maligned Nietzsche was a genius. His father and both his grand fathers were Lutheran preachers, one even a bishop. He was also slated to join the ranks of clergy but, seeing that the church was dead and so concluding that God was dead as well, he changed course and at a very young age became a professor of classical languages.
Nietzsche loved the earth, loved animals. He lost his mind when he saw a poor horse whipped to death. He wanted to remain true to the earth and saw pollution and mistreatment of animals as blasphemy.
So how about trees?
I have long maintained that the original sin included taking fruit from a tree without asking permission. Simply we ignore the tree-mendous importance of trees in human life: they are our counterparts. They take in CO2 – a greenhouse gas –and breathe out oxygen, the very element we need every second of our lives.
When I accidentely brush against a tree, I always ask the tree for forgiveness. I see trees as my neighbors, and love them as such.
Last week the Globe and Mail had an article by Maria Banda, an international lawyer and the Graham Fellow at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She wondered whether Trees have Rights. Here’s in part what she wrote:
“I am the Lorax! I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.” These words, spoken by a small orange creature in a Dr. Seuss children’s book, point to a more fundamental question. Should trees and other voiceless elements in nature have rights? Courts, legislatures and communities increasingly say they should.
“An extraordinary legal revolution is unfolding around the world. Last month, in a historic ruling, Colombia’s Supreme Court declared that the Amazon (river) is a legal person with rights – to be protected, conserved and restored – and ordered the state to reduce deforestation.
“This past year alone, from India to New Zealand, four rivers, two glaciers and a sacred mountain have been granted legal personhood. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights declared that the regional human-rights treaty protects the rights of the environment as such. U.S. municipalities are joining in.”
This is the opening statement of Ms. Maria Banda.
She concludes with:
“The road will not be easy; there will be implementation challenges along the way. But rights evolve. And, over time, a healthier world may emerge.”
Trees really matter.
Trees really Matter: no trees, no LIFE. Dying trees mean death for humans. Nietzsche was right: “By killing creation we are killing God. Remember Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings. There talking trees were a decisive factor in the last battle against the evil empire.
North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.
The common factor has been hotter, drier weather. And drier weather means more fires, and more fires fuel hotter climate. Last May was the hottest EVER.
It always strikes me that, when in Genesis 2 trees are described, the beauty aspect is mentioned first. That also points to our original mandate of beautifying creation. It is my considerate opinion that the early humans mentioned in the Bible lived so long because the main cover of the planet was trees, breathing out super-rich oxygen.
Trees: yes, we take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. Photosynthesis trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.
For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.
Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels.
What we do know that what trees do is essential: they clean up our garbage, not only CO2 but also our oil spills. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain.
In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation.
Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.
In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.
Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature.
One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.
Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.
Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.
When we built our current house in 1975, I planted soft maples, fast growing trees, now shading our house to the extent that we hardly ever need the air conditioning. I also planted 4000 pine trees.
Luther once said, “even if I knew that the Lord would come back tomorrow, I still plant a tree today.
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds
of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you”.
We need ever closer contact with creation. Dying trees, forest fires, earth quakes, violent storms indicate a broken relationship with creation.
Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, tells us, “I entreat you to remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
At the root of all heresies is the notion that we go to heaven when we die, which makes sinning against the earth an acceptable act. It, in essence, means that we, by killing creation, we kill God also. But the Bible tells us that God, creation and the human race form an organic whole. That wholeness includes animals and trees.
Yes, they do have rights.
Next week some excerpts from Sylvia Keesmaat’s poetic essay on Trees.