18 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
decided to head off to see another plain-
tiff, a stream known as Boggy Branch.
O’Neal, who grew up in Orange
County and lives in the town of Apopka,
describes himself as a “serial entrepre-
neur.” These days, he runs a business
that mostly involves buying houses and
flipping them. As we talked, he occa-
sionally received calls on his cell phone
from building-supply stores. We rode
past fields occupied by clusters of black
cows. O’Neal speculated that these were
“rental cows.” In Florida, he explained,
land that’s being grazed enjoys special
tax advantages, which developers often
avail themselves of until a parcel can be
filled with something more profitable.
After a while, we pulled into a stretch
of brand-new, tightly spaced houses,
some still being framed. A banner that
hung on a construction barrier identi-
fied the development as Meridian Parks:
the “Perfect Place to Start,” it said. Be-
tween two groups of homes, the road
ended abruptly in a set of reflective warn-
ing signs. Just beyond the signs lay Boggy
Branch. More swamp than stream, it
seemed barely to be moving. Cypress
trees festooned with Spanish moss rose
out of the black water. A ridge, clearly
man-made, separated Boggy Branch
from a large retention pond, also clearly
man-made.
O’Neal had brought a map of the
development he was fighting—a pro-
posed extension of Meridian Parks
known, inelegantly, as Meridian Parks
Remainder. About a third of the map
was stippled with black dots, indicating
wetlands. To complete the project, which
is supposed to include town houses,
apartment buildings, and commercial
space, the development company, Beach-
line South Residential, planned to ex-
tend the road across Boggy Branch and
then across Wilde Cypress Branch. The
roadwork and various other rearrange-
ments of the landscape would entail fill-
ing in, or otherwise altering, wetlands
covering more than a hundred acres.
This was what the bodies of water were
suing over. The move, their lawyer ar-
gued, would restrict the natural f low
from the streams into the lakes, thereby
wreaking havoc with the local ecology
and threatening the lakes’ right to exist.
“This water has been flowing this
way for tens of thousands of years,”
O’Neal said, as we tromped along the
ridge, more or less in people’s back yards.
“Where’s that being considered any-
where in this development?”A
few years after Sierra Club v. Mor-
ton, Justice Douglas retired from
the Supreme Court. Stone, meanwhile,
moved on to other subjects. Like a ver-
nal pool in summer, interest in “Should
Trees Have Standing?” started to dry
up. Then it bubbled back to life.
In 2005, residents of Tamaqua Bor-
ough, in eastern Pennsylvania, were fight-
ing a plan to dump toxic sludge in an
open pit in town. One of the members
of Tamaqua Borough’s town council at-
tended a meeting with representatives
of the Community Environmental Legal
Defense Fund, which had been set up
to help local groups battle such projects.
The organization’s leader at the time, a
lawyer named Thomas Linzey, had re-
cently chanced upon Stone’s article. It
occurred to him that if trees—or, in the
case of Tamaqua, ecosystems more gen-
erally—had standing then the town
would have another legal tool to use in
its campaign. He helped draft a local
anti-sludge ordinance that, among many
other things, declared it “unlawful for
any corporation or its directors.. .to in-
terfere with the existence and flourishing
of natural communities.” For the purposes
of the ordinance, natural communities
were to be considered “persons.” When
the ordinance came up for a vote, in2006, the town council was split, three
to three. Tamaqua’s mayor cast the tie-
breaking vote, in favor of the “natural
communities.” He later said, “If I am
going to be sued, so be it.”
The proposed dump was cancelled,
so Tamaqua’s ordinance, believed to be
the first of its kind in the world, was
never put to the test. Still, one thing led
to another, and a year later Linzey re-
ceived what he described to me as a
“weird phone call.” Ecuador had elected
a group of delegates to rewrite its con-stitution, and someone involved in the
assembly had somehow heard about the
Tamaqua ordinance. Linzey was invited
to the Ecuadorian city of Montecristi.
He ended up travelling to the country
several times to consult with the dele-
gates. “That was pretty cool,” he recalled.
When Ecuador’s new constitution
was adopted, in 2008, it marked another,
much more significant world first. The
constitution’s preamble celebrates Pacha
Mama, usually translated from Quechua
as “Mother Earth,” and a later section
enumerates the rights that Pacha Mama
enjoys. These include “the right to inte-
gral respect for its existence” and “the
right to be restored.” The constitution
also includes a right to buen vivir, which
translates into English as “good living,”
but is itself a translation of the Quechua
term sumak kawsay, which has far-reach-
ing spiritual and political implications.
“Ecuador is a country that takes plu-
ralism very seriously,” Hugo Echeverría,
an environmental lawyer in Quito, told
me. “And the philosophical concept be-
hind the rights of nature fits into the vi-
sion of its Indigenous peoples. That’s
why you find the words Pacha Mama in
the constitution.” In a recent landmark,
or at least land-centric, decision, the coun-
try’s highest court ruled that mining per-
mits that had been granted in Los Ce-
dros, a protected forest north of Quito,
violated the constitution and should be
voided. (Most of the permits are held by
Ecuador’s national mining company,
which goes by the acronym ENAMI.)
“Los Cedros is a key case because it
applied the constitution in a context
where it was difficult to apply,” Eche-
verría said. “Wildlife was chosen over
mining, which is a very important ac-
tivity in Ecuador because it provides
income to the state. No court has ever
taken that step before.”
After his experience in Ecuador,
Linzey continued to travel, in the hope
of finding more communities—or coun-
tries—interested in granting rights to
nature. In 2013, he flew to Orlando to
speak at a seminar at the Barry Univer-
sity School of Law. Sitting in the audi-
ence was Chuck O’Neal. O’Neal, who
was active in local environmental causes,
was intrigued by what he heard, but he
had his doubts. “For Florida, I just didn’t
think it would work,” he told me. Then,
in 2018, a toxic algae bloom the size of