Lawyers and law firms are now eager to advance radical environmentalism.

The question of whether nature should own stock is ridiculous on its face. But that doesn’t stop environmental radicals from furthering that cause. Indeed, at least one privately held company has put “nature” on its board of directors.

Now, a leading New Zealand law firm Parry Field — which represents nonprofit organizations — has published a paper urging that “nature” become an owner of companies. The author, one of the partners, named Steven Moe, goes wrong right off the bat. From “Nature as a Shareholder“:

When speaking, I often hold up an apple and ask what the potential is — maybe an apple pie, sliced into a salad, or perhaps some apple cider? No — the true potential are the seeds inside which might become a tree that produces thousands of apples. We just need a paradigm shift of thinking to see in a new way.

Please. Is Moe saying we should not make good use of the apple for human benefit? It sure seems that way. I mean, the “thousands of trees” wouldn’t do much good if we didn’t harvest them and extract the goodness to be found in the fruit. Moreover, we can harvest the apple, extract the juice, and plant the seeds.

Moe’s approach is explicitly anti–Milton Friedman and somehow pro–Dr. Seuss.

Milton Friedman, an economist who in September 1970 wrote the essay, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”. This would go on to influence a generation of thinkers and is credited with justifying a “greed is good” mindset. . . .

In the parable of The Lorax the title character “speaks for the trees” by opposing “the Once-ler”. In this parable, a faceless business owner is destroying nature for profit and the creation of unnecessary and needless “thneeds” by cutting down all the Truffula trees in a paradise for birds, bears and fish.

In Dr. Seuss, Moe finds anti-capitalist inspiration (as if Seuss didn’t make a mint from his stunning creativity in the capitalist system):

How might we do this without continuing a colonisation mindset of adopting our preferred aspects of a cosmology that are taken from indigenous worldviews? What is the seed of this idea of listening to nature? Well if a capitalist mindset fueled by the smell of greed and profits have led us to the climate change flood and drought driven era we now live in, then why don’t we change that narrative.

Has Moe ever been to a communist country? Shoddier environmental practices he would never see. You can literally smell soot in China’s air, even indoors. When I visited St. Petersburg, Russia, I was appalled to see heavy-industry factories literally adjoining housing from the old Soviet days.

Also, has Moe ever been to destitute areas of the world? Those people need the kind of prosperity that free-market capitalism, mitigated by reasonable environmental regulations under the rule of law, generates. In other words, if one cares about freedom and human thriving, we need capitalism, not collectivism.

Then comes the pitch for nature rights:

What if Mother Earth stepped in and was the owner of companies instead of human flesh flakes like you and me that will be returned to dust in one blink of her eye? Surely that would help to solve the excesses that a misguided belief in Milton Friedman and shareholder primacy has led us stumbling towards, bowing to a golden calf and drinking its bitter water.

This is irrational nonsense. Nature can’t “own” anything. That’s a human construct. Moreover, nature would be represented by environmental “flesh flake” radicals like Moe, who would hire law firms like Parry Field to represent the nonhuman owner.

Moe notes, accurately, that the New Zealand Parliament has granted legal personhood to a river, a rainforest, and a mountain. (I hope you found that notion as ridiculous to read as I did to write.) And he foresees four different scenarios for nature — meaning radical environmentalists — to participate in “nature-inclusive” corporate governance:

Nature can certainly inspire, but it doesn’t have views! Nature can’t advise. Besides, which aspect of nature would be in control? Flora? Fauna? Geological features? Mosquitoes? The whole idea is ridiculous, but then, environmentalism is becoming increasingly irrational.

Moe concludes with the now common paean to “indigenous” wisdom as a guiding approach to law and environmental governance:

Perhaps this lateral thinking about the role of nature might encourage less of a reliance on dominant expressions of legal personhood such as companies, trusts, societies and partnerships. If all these legal entity types are made up then what would it look like to reimagine other forms of legal entity that were not grounded in Western individualism and instead took their guiding principles from indigenous conceptions of the world where the community was placed first and we as humans were one extension of nature itself — not separate but part of the ecosystems in which we live.

Indigenous thinking is preindustrial and can’t support modernity. Indigenous people had short life expectancies and lived difficult lives of struggle precisely because they were premodern. Good environmental practices in a world with nearly 8 billion people require wealth and the investment of tremendous resources that indigenous ways could never produce.

Radical environmentalism, including the nature-rights movement, is advancing. We shouldn’t just roll our eyes but take it as seriously as the activists do and resist it at every turn. As this essay shows, there are lawyers and law firms — which will be backed by NGOs funded by the left-wing wealthy — willing and eager to further the cause.