> We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living. So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?

If this is an attempt to demonstrate the stupidity of that law, great. If it's an honest attempt to build more stupid laws on top of that already stupid law, these people are awful.

We probably need to plant more trees or be diligent about ones we remove, but this seems to proceed from an erroneous worldview

> "We know corporations have legal personhood and rights and they are definitely not living," she said in a phone interview. "So if some nonliving things can have legal personhood, what's stopping living beings from equally getting legal personhood?"

Let’s take one dumb idea and use it to justify another dumb idea!

Inbefore extreme NIMBY

This might seem silly on the face of it, but I live in a town where native forest is regularly leveled to bare earth, built on, and non-native trees planted in its stead. It's dumb and ugly. But profitable!

If you don't know anything about the difference between civil law and common law in Quebec, you should be reading wikipedia articles on the topic and such rather than asserting nonsense in comments on hn.

Who represents the trees and what are they able to do with these rights?

> the town will ... ensure that trees are ... replaced if they must be cut down.

I'd hate to speculate about what this means for people that might stand in their way.

Corn, soybeans, and wheat would like a word… that is, unless this isn’t actually about “plant rights” and is really about faux-environmental NIMBYism.

Calling a sentient living thing "a common good of humanity" is pretty dark. Putting those concepts together like that is an oversight.