THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 19Connecticut turned the Florida Gulf
Coast into a slick of dead fish.
O’Neal put aside his doubts. It was
time, he decided, to try something new.
In the spring of 2019, he invited Linzey
back to Florida, to speak to a group of
concerned citizens from around the state.
(Soon afterward, Linzey went to work
for the Center for Democratic and En-
vironmental Rights, a group that he
helped found.) The attendees agreed to
go home and try to pass rights-of-na-
ture laws in the regions where they lived.
With the help of some other Orange
County residents, O’Neal wrote up a “bill
of rights” for the Wekiva River and for
the Econlockhatchee, a second river that
passes near Orlando. He presented the
bill to a commission that had been ap-
pointed to revise Orange County’s char-
ter. To his surprise, the commission didn’t
just take up his proposal; it expanded it.
In November, 2020, when voters went to
the polls, they were asked whether all of
the county’s waterways—be they “fresh,
brackish, saline, tidal, surface or under-
ground”—should have the “right to exist,
flow, to be protected against pollution
and to maintain a healthy ecosystem.”
Eighty-nine per cent voted to approve
the charter amendment, which did bet-
ter than almost anything or anyone else
on the ballot in the county, including Joe
Biden, who got sixty-one per cent.
The Orlando Sentinel said that the
amendment had unified voters “in a
state with a lousy track record for pro-
tecting natural resources.” It nominated
O’Neal for “Central Floridian of the
Year” and dubbed him “our local Lorax.”I
n addition to prompting Mary Jane’s
lawsuit, the Orange County charter
amendment has inspired an art installa-
tion, and one day while I was in Florida
O’Neal took me to see it. It was being
exhibited in a ranch house turned gal-
lery, which was decorated on the outside
with wild swirls of tile. We knocked on
the front door, and the artist, Brooks
Dierdorff, answered.
In what had presumably once been
the dining room, a large white slab cov-
ered most of the floor. On it rested several
documents, including Ecuador’s consti-
tution, and several glasses of water. Dier-
dorff, who teaches photography at the
University of Central Florida, explained
that the water had been collected fromlakes and streams around Orange County.
Most of it was clear, but one glassful was
the color of strong tea. This turned out
to be a sample from Lake Mary Jane,
which is naturally high in tannins. O’Neal
bent over to peer into the glass. “Wow,
that’s really dark,” he said.
Dierdorff told us that his goal was
to visit every lake, river, and stream in
the county. Each time he went to a new
one, he would add another glass: “My
plan is to have things change and evolve
over time.”
What had once perhaps been the
house’s den was bathed in violet light
and outfitted with speakers. Dierdorff
told us that he was also collecting sound:
at each waterway he sampled, he stuck
a waterproof mike into the depths. He
had layered sixteen of these recordings
on top of one another, and the result-
ing track was playing on a loop. “I think
of it as kind of a chorus,” he said.
I said I couldn’t hear anything.
Dierdorff shrugged. “There are some
little blips once in a while,” he said.
As rights holders, natural objects have
an obvious deficit: they cannot speak
for themselves. Even if granted stand-
ing, they have to rely on people to plead
their cause. And since it’s hard to pull
together a jury of, say, jungles, it’s peo-
ple who also have to decide their inter-
ests. Animals may in some way be ableto convey their desires—or at least allow
humans to believe that they can. But,
apart from “some little blips,” a swamp
doesn’t communicate much. Who can
really claim to know its will?
“It is far from clear that it feels like
anything to be an oak tree,” Mauricio
Guim and Michael Livermore, both law
professors, argue in “Where Nature’s
Rights Go Wrong,” an article that ap-
peared recently in the Virginia Law Re-
view. “Nor does it feel like anything to
be a rainforest ecosystem, even if it is
teeming with birds who have some form
of subjective experience.”
The objection that streams and for-
ests cannot have standing because streams
and forests cannot speak was, in Stone’s
view, easily addressed. “Corporations can-
not speak either,” he observed. “Nor can
states, estates, infants, incompetents, mu-
nicipalities or universities.” And yet these
entities were amply represented—some
might say overrepresented—in the courts.
“We make decisions on behalf of,
and in the purported interests of, oth-
ers every day,” Stone wrote. “These ‘oth-
ers’ are often creatures whose wants are
far less verifiable, and even far more
metaphysical in conception, than the
wants of rivers, trees, and land.” He en-
visaged a system of guardianships by
which “a friend of a natural object,” per-
ceiving it to be endangered, could apply“How much could your mother bench?”••