20 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022
to a court to represent it. The guardian
could try to prevent, or demand redress
for, injuries that had no quantifiable
human cost, such as “the loss from the
face of the earth of species of commer-
cially valueless birds” or “the disappear-
ance of a wilderness area.”
Start taking Stone seriously and it’s
hard to stop. From a certain point of
view, granting nature a say isn’t radical
or new at all. For most of history, peo-
ple saw themselves as dependent on their
surroundings, and “rivers, trees, and land”
enjoyed the last word. Only in the past
few hundred years has it become possi-
ble—and come to seem normal—for
people to mow down forests, fill in wet-
lands, and blast away mountains because
it suits them. This way of operating has
resulted in unprecedented, if unequally
distributed, human prosperity. It has also
brought melting ice sheets, marine dead
zones, soaring extinction rates, and the
prospect of global ecological collapse. As
António Guterres, the Secretary-General
of the United Nations, put it last week,
when the latest international climate re-
port was released, we are “firmly on track
towards an unlivable world.”
T
here’s no way to get back to Eden,
but it’s easy to get to Eden Bar,
which advertises itself as “Central Flor-
ida’s most unique outdoor restaurant.” I
arranged to meet up there one evening
with Steven Meyers, the attorney work-
ing on Mary Jane’s lawsuit. He was nurs-
ing a glass of red wine when I arrived.
He had just filed an eighty-page brief
on behalf of the lakes and streams, a copy
of which lay on the table.
“I’m a personal-injury lawyer,” he told
me as soon as I sat down. Mostly he
filed workers’-comp cases. He had got
involved with O’Neal, he explained, be-
cause of a dead bear.
In 2015, Rick Scott, then Florida’s
governor, had reinstituted bear hunting
in the state. One night, while Meyers
was working late, he came across a video
of a black bear being shot in Canada.
The gruesomeness of the images—the
bear did not immediately die, but kept
getting up and falling down again—
shook him. He had read that O’Neal,
whom he’d never met, had filed a law-
suit to try to prevent bear hunting in
Florida. Suddenly, Meyers felt moved
to get in touch with him.
“That night, I e-mailed Chuck,” Mey-
ers recalled, “and I said, ‘I’m not an en-
vironmental lawyer or an animal-rights
lawyer, but here’s a donation, and if I can
help I’d love to.’ I thought I probably
would never hear anything. Twenty min-
utes later, he sends me all the pleadings.
He’s, like, ‘Welcome to the team.’”
Meyers ended up working, pro bono,
on the bear-hunting case. He couldn’t
get a judge to stop the hunt, though
O’Neal did manage to persuade state
wildlife officials to put an end to the
shooting after three hundred and four
bears were killed in two days. Meyers
and O’Neal then worked together on an
effort to block a hundred-and-twenty-
acre warehouse development planned for
a site near the headwaters of the Little
Wekiva River. They lost that case and,
as a part of the legal settlement, may
have to pay three thousand dollars to
help defray their opponents’ legal costs.
Their latest case, on behalf of Mary
Jane et al., also seems likely to fail. As
soon as the Orange County charter com-
mission decided, in early June, 2020, to
put the bill of rights for waterways on
the ballot, business lobbyists in Talla-
hassee sprang into action. In a bill that
mostly had to do with regulating sep-
tic systems, an amendment suddenly
appeared prohibiting local governments
from granting legal rights to any “part
of the natural environment.” The state
legislature passed the bill in mid-June,
and it went into effect in July, meaning
that by the time Orange County voted
to approve the charter amendment, in
November, it had already been preëmpted.
The developer, Beachline South Res-
idential, is pushing to have Mary Jane’s
case dismissed, arguing that the rights
the lake is invoking do not—and can-
not—exist. The state legislature could not
have been “clearer in its intention to nul-
lify” the Orange County charter amend-
ment, papers filed by Beachline’s legal
team note. For their part, the bodies of
water, which is to say, Meyers and O’Neal,
argue that the preëmption is itself in-
valid. In the words of the brief that Mey-
ers brought to Eden Bar, it is “unconsti-
tutional, unlawful, and inapplicable.”
“We’re realistic,” Meyers told me.
“We’re trying to make new law, and
that’s always hard. But it’s like Michael
Jordan said: You miss a hundred per
cent of the shots you don’t take.”I had invited O’Neal to join us, and
after a while he showed up at the bar.
The conversation turned from Mary
Jane’s lawsuit to infighting among her
allies. The Florida Rights of Nature Net-
work, a group founded in O’Neal’s liv-
ing room, wanted to try to pass another
amendment, this one to the Florida state
constitution. The hope was to preëmpt
the preëmption of laws like Orange
County’s. O’Neal had one idea about
how to word the proposed amendment;
other members of the group had a dif-
ferent idea. The argument had become
so heated that O’Neal had broken with
the group and resigned as its president,
chairman, and director-at-large, and also
as chair of its political committee.
“One thing about Chuck is he gets
along with everyone,” Meyers teased,
rolling his eyes. It was impossible for
me to know whether O’Neal’s pique
was justified, but it occurred to me, and
not for the first time, that a nature de-
pendent on human collegiality was in
deep trouble.
The next day, I got up early. It was
my last day in Florida, and I wanted to
pay Mary Jane another visit before I
headed home. When I arrived at the park
on her western shore, I had the place
pretty much to myself. It was a lovely
morning, with a blue sky and a light
breeze. Mary Jane doesn’t really have a
beach, so I sat down on a patch of more
or less dry ground. Sticking out of the
soggy grass was a sign that read “Alliga-
tors and snakes are common in this area”
and, beneath that, “KEEP YOUR DISTANCE.”
A wood stork arrived and started pok-
ing its beak into the muck at the lake’s
edge. More storks swooped down and
similarly began poking. One of them bent
its legs, dipped its white-and-black wings
into the water, and then held them out,
as if airing a blanket. Another stork did
the same, and soon they were all rolling
around in the water and stretching their
wings. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, they
were doing, but it looked like fun. I took
off my shoes and waded in. As I ap-
proached, most of the storks flew away.
The water, around my ankles, was the
golden brown I had seen in Dierdorff ’s
exhibit. I spent a while listening. I didn’t
hear any blips from Mary Jane; still, it
seemed to me, the lake’s wishes were pretty
clear, as were the wood storks’. What they
really wanted was to be left alone.