Creation Moment 11/4/2023 - Mental Illness of a Darwiniain Worldview

I have seen the foolish taking root: Job 5:3

"Should trees be given equal rights to people?

A dangerous trend is rooted in Darwinism.

‘Killing’ trees: How true environmental protection requires a revolution in how we talk about, and with, our forests (The Conversation, 30 Oct 2023). Sarah Abbott, an art professor at the University of Regina (not a scientist), gets the stage at this soapbox for academic nuts and flakes. Abbott loves trees (as most people do). But she thinks we need to talk to them:

Behind all discourse are systems of language, behavior and belief.

Contemporary discourse reflects and shapes people’s belief that trees are living community members or inanimate materials to be used for human well-being.

This binary gets complicated when people understand the aliveness of trees and their relations with non-human life while prioritizing human economic value and need of trees.

Beyond talking to our local trees, do we need to give them equal rights?

In 1972, American legal and environmental scholar Christopher Stone called for the rights and moral standing of trees, stating it is neither inevitable nor wise that beings of nature should have no rights, standing or voice in human society.

Rather than assume and impose that non-humans have no voice, we humans need to recognize the limitations in our capacity to listen. Discourse is not only human.

Trees have standing (they grow upright) but not in the legal sense. We don’t hear them making arguments for their existence. What motivates Abbott’s sermon to give rights to trees? Guess:

The ongoing controversy around plant intelligence links to the perception that “intelligence” cannot apply to organisms lacking organs responsible for intelligent functioning, or movement.

Conversely, renowned Italian botanist and scholar Stefano Mancuso argues that it is impossible and evolutionarily unrealistic to consider any form of life as lacking intelligence. This includes “plants, which being unable to move, must necessarily solve their problems.”

Ah yes, Darwin: the prophet for the modern pantheistic religion of emergence “gives rise to” another misanthropic Darwin Effect." CEH