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Trees have the right to leave their leaves where they want them to be left  - so that they nourish trees and all that depend on trees - And the mulch helps to keep the soil around the roots damp through drought. Leave our leaves where we leave them - Leaves are ours! Free the leaves!

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Trees have the right to leave their leaves where they want them to be left  - so that they nourish trees and all that depend on trees - And the mulch helps to keep the soil around the roots damp through drought. Leave our leaves where we leave them - Leaves are ours! Free the leaves!

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I have the right to grow to my full potential. In return, I will shade you from the sun, purify your air and fill your heart with joy.

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The ancients woods of Graigwen Pontypridd have lost a lot of trees over the years, replanting would be a good idea for the local community and for future generations

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trees sustain us with their generosity - we cannot survive in a treeless world, they are part of our history & help us keep track of seasons.
we need more knowledge of trees & their gifts
lets look at what people and trees have in common

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Modify designs to accommodate existing trees
use trees to reduce stormwater run off
incorporate paved areas with structural soil
take extra steps to protect trees during construction
consider the value of trees when evaluating options
protect trees from being felled for utilitarian or commercial motives
during changes to its environment a tree should not be reduced to a mere object
trees have the right to airspace, under ground space that they need to reach adulthood

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we need a radical re-storying of human and non human relations to shape a future worth living
let's celebrate our neighbours and co-citizens of the non human world in the Ponty community!
celebrate with stories & songs
trees are community members
lets speak the names of trees

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Companies & ships have rights so why shouldn't trees? Example of tree rights attached

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people have special relationships with specific trees, especially mature trees which act as landmarks
trees have historic significance
a tree is a living organism whose average lifespan is far longer than that of humans
trees should be respected throughout their lives - have the right to develop & reproduce from birth to natural death whether they be a town or a country tree

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“I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues. And I am asking you, sir, at the top of my lungs. Oh please do not cut down another one.” – Dr. Seuss

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Return To My Trees is my new book, inspired by a walking adventure through Wales exploring how we lost our connection to nature and how we go about rebuilding it. Back in the spring of 2020, when all of the UK was in lockdown, I read about the newly proposed National Forest for Wales.

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The £2.2 billion 'Streets Ahead' Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract was signed by Sheffield City Council (SCC), Amey plc and the Department for Transport. It was planned to be a 25 year contract between 20 August 2012 and 19 August 2037 for highway, pavement and street light renewal, and included the management of Sheffield's highway trees. SCC indicated that up to 10,000 trees would be felled and replaced although wording in the PFI contract indicated a target of 17,500. SCC initially denied that 17,500 was an actual target, however, evidence from an SCC Cabinet Meeting found that in 2010 that SCC planned to remove and replant 17,500 trees as part of the PFI contract.

At the start of the PFI contract, Acorn Environmental Management Group (AEMG) were sub-contracted by Amey to re-survey Sheffield's highway trees. A 2012 survey by Acorn stated that around 1,000 trees (dead, dying, diseased, dangerous) would be felled along with raising 6,300 other pruning and maintenance jobs. Steve Robinson, SCC's Head of Highway Maintenance, stated in an interview by The Chartered Institution of Highways & Transportation that half of the city's 36,000 highway trees would be felled and replaced with saplings.

Highway officials in February 2013, stated in an interview with the Sheffield Star that 1,250 trees across the city would be felled and replaced, with more than hundred street trees being considered for felling if they were considered to be damaging road surfaces or causing a hazard.

In January 2014, controversy flared in Stocksbridge around the felling of a 450-year-old Melbourne Oak. Despite local protests and an expert survey showing that the tree was 'uncompromised' the tree was felled anyway. In September 2014, residents of Heeley campaigned to prevent the felling of 189 mature trees that were to make way for a bus-lane, resulting in those trees being saved.

In May, The first tree campaign group for the city Save Our Rustlings Trees was formed before being later renamed 'Save Our Roadside Trees'. This was then followed by the formation of Sheffield Tree Action Groups (S.T.A.G.) in August. Later in the year, local tree campaign groups were formed in Crookes, Dore, Gleadless Valley, Nether Edge and Rivelin Valley.

SCC launched the Independent Tree Panel in November, whose members would provide advice over whether a tree should be saved or not. Over time, the majority of the Independent Tree Panel's recommendations to save trees were ignored by Amey and the Council.

In November 2015, SCC launched public 'consultations' which were hand-delivered to local residents on a street-by-street basis, called 'The Independent Tree Panel Household Survey'. Emeritus Professor Greg Brooks, of The University of Sheffield, criticised the validity of the survey method in an expert analysis showing why the 'Household Survey' is unrepresentative and undemocratic. STAG carried out door-to-door surveys by speaking to residents, with those figures differing from those carried out by Amey. Some have labelled the 'Household Survey' 'divisive' and a threat to the strong community bonds of the city.

By the end of 2015, 3,068 trees had been felled across the city.

In February 2016, the High Court issued an interim injunction, ordering the council to halt felling from February to April 2016. In June 2016, once the three-month injunction came to an end, felling recommenced on trees on Bannerdale Road and South Yorkshire Police (SYP) were involved for the first time.

In November 2016, during a peaceful campaign to protect a tree on Marden Road, involving five residents and members of STAG, two people were arrested under Section 241 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act (1992), designed to deal with 'Flying Pickets.' The validity of these charges against people exercising their right to peaceful protest was hotly disputed by STAG.

On 17 November 2016, under Julie Dore's leadership, a felling of eight trees took place around 4am at the Rustlings Road area of Sheffield, leading to the arrest of two peaceful protesters, under section 241 of Trade Union Relation Act. The tree felling programme sparked the sign-up of over 9,900 members to Sheffield Tree Action Groups (STAG) Facebook group against the mass removal of Sheffield's street trees.

A Green Party councillor and six other protesters were arrested in February 2017, during a protest to prevent a tree from being felled in Chippinghouse Road, Nether Edge.

In August 2017, about 5000 trees had been felled since 2012 and Sheffield City Council won a court battle in order to bring injunctions against protesters considered to take unlawful action to prevent trees from being felled.

In January 2018, a man was arrested for allegedly attacking a police officer during a felling protest at Meersbrook Park Road before another man was arrested five days later for another felling at the same location. Three people were arrested in February 2018 during a protest to stop trees from being felled at Thornsett Road, Nether Edge. In March 2018, two men were arrested for protesting against the tree felling at Kenwood Road, Nether Edge, with one of the campaigners being forcibly removed from under a vehicle. Two women were arrested later in March for protesting against the felling of lime trees in Chatsworth Road, Dore.

Following the controversy, there was a halt to the tree felling since March 2018. The pause lasted throughout the year whilst representatives from Sheffield City Council, Amey and Sheffield Tree Action Group held extended talks, mediated independently by the Bishop of Sheffield. Following this, about 200 trees which were due to be felled were retained. Following the mediated talks an action plan, which supports a new approach to managing the city's street trees, was agreed between the council and Sheffield Trees Action Groups (STAG). The plan claims to identify practical solutions for retaining more street trees as part of a new approach adopted by the council and its wider partners. There have been no widespread protests on this issue since.

Under Dore's leadership, SCC committed to a 15-year Woodlands Strategy which will see the planting of least 100,000 additional trees, and replace trees on a 2-for-1 basis in the city's green spaces and woodlands. It was also mentioned in January 2018 that 1,200 new highway trees would be planted during winter 2018, including trees historically felled and not replanted.

In February 2019, seven campaigners who were arrested between November 2016 and February 2017 were awarded a wrongful arrest payout of £24,300 along with a drop of criminal charges. A year-long investigation found that the council deliberately misled residents over the tree felling programme. In December 2019, SCC apologised for the initial strategy admitting that they 'got things wrong', and argued they had a renewed commitment to the city's trees and highway network, whilst promising to continue the collaboration with STAG, which was warmly welcomed by the group's co-chair.

In 2020, it was reported that a peace deal had been drawn up between the protesters and SCC based on a shared vision for the city's trees, helping to shape a final plan which was due for Spring 2021, potentially ending the eight-year unrest.

In 2021, a pledge to deliver the Sheffield Street Tree Partnership Strategy was signed jointly by representatives of Sheffield City Council, Amey, the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust, the Woodland Trust and the anti-felling campaigners in STAG to ensure the continued maintenance of the street trees around the city. Investigations into the tree felling programme are however still continuing due to the volume of documents involved, despite it being expected to be completed in May.

In May 2022, Sheffield was named a " Tree City of the World" in recognition of its work to sustainably manage and maintain urban forests and trees.

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Sheffield tree felling protests - Wikipedia

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The £2.2 billion 'Streets Ahead' Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract was signed by Sheffield City Council (SCC), Amey plc and the Department for Transport. It was planned to be a 25 year contract between 20 August 2012 and 19 August 2037 for highway, pavement and street light renewal, and included the management of Sheffield's highway trees.

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On 26 February 2019, a lake became human. For years, Lake Erie - the southernmost of the Great Lakes - has been in ecological crisis. Invasive species are rampant. Biodiversity is crashing. Each summer, blue-green algae blooms in volumes visible from space, creating toxic "dead zones"; the algae is nourished by fertiliser and slurry pollution from surrounding farms. In August 2014, phosphorus run-off so fouled Erie that the city of Toledo, at the lake's western tip in Ohio, lost drinking water for three days in the hottest part of the year.

Appalled by the lake's degradation, and exhausted by state and federal failures to improve Erie's health, in December 2018 Toledo residents drew up an extraordinary document: an emergency "bill of rights" for Lake Erie. At the bill's heart was a radical proposition: that the "Lake Erie ecosystem" should be granted legal personhood, and accorded the consequent rights in law - including the right "to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve".

The Erie Bill of Rights is a brief, passionate, urgent text; reminiscent to me of a scene from a Greek tragedy or an Ibsen play. "We, the people of the City of Toledo ... " runs the italicised choral refrain; a "recital", in legalese. The bill's phrasing rings with love and rage. It dreams beautifully of an equitable land ethic. "It has become necessary," the bill declares, "that we ... extend legal rights to our natural environment to ensure that the natural world [is] no longer subordinated to the accumulation of surplus wealth and unaccountable political power."

In 1970, JG Ballard coined the phrase "invisible literature" to mean "the vast majority of published documents - from market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines [to] US government reports and medical textbooks". I take the Erie Bill of Rights to be exemplary of the "invisible literature" of our Anthropocene moment. At once hopeful and desperate, it is a late-hour attempt to prevent a slow-motion ecocide.

Embedded in the bill is a bold ontological claim - that Lake Erie is a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services. The bill is, really, a work of what might be called "new animism" (the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning spirit, breath, life). By reassigning both liveliness and vulnerability to the lake, it displaces Erie from its instrumentalised roles as sump and source. As such, the bill forms part of a broader set of comparable recent legal moves in jurisdictions around the world - all seeking to recognise interdependence and animacy in the living world, and often advanced by indigenous groups - which have together come to be known as the "natural rights" or "rights of nature" movement.

The Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights came before Toledo citizens in a referendum on 26 February; 61% voted for it, and Lake Erie became - symbolically, temporarily - a "legal person". It joined other more-than-human entities accorded various versions of legal personhood, including the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India (though this decision was later overturned by India's supreme court), the Whanganui River in New Zealand (designated by parliamentary declaration "an indivisible and living whole"), the Colombian Amazon, and all nature in Ecuador, which in 2008 famously enshrined the rights of "Pachamama" ("Mother Nature") in its constitution (though the subsequent benefit of this enshrining for both indigenous Ecuadorians and nature is highly debatable).

At first sight, the rights of nature movement appears potentially forceful as well as intellectually fascinating. To many lawyers and philosophers, however, the assigning of legal personhood to a more than human entity is a profound category error, which can create more problems than it solves. Critics observe that corporations also have standing as legal persons; is it desirable that the Niger Delta might exist in legal affinity with Shell? The plaintiff power of personhood also becomes a liability risk. If a river may bring an action against a factory for polluting it, may a developer in turn sue that river when flood water damages the housing stock? Legal recourses - in tort, criminal and public law - already exist to protect nature, and may be thought more robust than rights-based moves, which are often subject to swift challenge or reversal.

Campaigners want kinship across species divides to be recognised, and ecocide made a crime

There is also the problem of defining "being". Where does a forest begin and end? Is a mountain made of the rain it draws down from the clouds as well as the bedrock that gives it altitude? More political criticisms find the idea of a lake as rights bearer objectionable, given the scant rights extended to many subjugated human groups, or note that when cramming indigenous worldviews into western rights-law frameworks, a colonial distortion is inevitable, however well intentioned the undertaking. Anthropomorphism is also awkwardly central to the natural rights movement. Lakes and forests must undergo transformation into "legal persons", rather than being recognised as "legal lakes" or "legal forests". Because a river is unable to stand up in court, a human proxy must inevitably bring an action, determine optimal outcome, and do the river's talking for it.

"We risk only having respect for things insofar as they resemble human experience and characteristics," writes Anna Grear, among the best analysts of this movement. "The law [instead] needs to develop a new framework in which the human is entangled and thrown in the midst of a lively materiality - rather than assumed to be the masterful, knowing centre." Or as Thomas Berry puts it in The Great Work, "Trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights, and mountains have mountain rights".

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Pastaza Valley in the Andes. In 2008, Ecuador enshrined the rights of 'Mother Nature' in its constitution. Photograph: Ammit/Alamy

These are all good criticisms. Nevertheless, there is value to be salvaged from - and encouraged in - the natural rights movement. Its messy idealism is a function of desperation; a grapple with David Abrams's stricken question: "How can a culture as educated as ours be so oblivious, so reckless, in its relations to the animate earth?" I am sympathetic with the movement's wish to recognise the more-than-human world as animistically, entanglingly alive, rather than as an inert "standing reserve". Like Grear, I find that at its best this young legal movement presses vital questions concerning "justice to the nonhuman" and requires us to "re-imagine our own state of being in a richer and more open way". It is one aspect of what she memorably calls the "radical re-storying" of human-nonhuman relations that is now needed to shape "a future worth living".
* * *
Such "radical re-storying" is presently under way across culture, theory, politics and literature, as well as law. It is visible, for example, in the creative protests of Extinction Rebellion; in the "new animist" scholarship of Isabelle Stengers, Abram and Eduardo Kohn; in Robin Wall Kimmerer's long-term project - drawing on her dual identity as plant scientist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation - of recovering a "grammar of animacy" by means of which kinship across species divides can be honoured in language; in forest ecology's recent revelations concerning the underground mycorrhizal networks that connect individual trees into intercommunicating forests; and in campaigner and barrister Polly Higgins's work, before her cruelly early death, to realise ecocide as a crime within international law. All these efforts, as Amitav Ghosh puts it, "seek to recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors".

A turning back towards "nonhuman interlocutors" has also occurred in recent fiction where "land" is encountered as sensate, memorious and even intentful, rather than a static stage set for human actions. From Australia there is the towering body of work - both novels and essays - by the lands-rights activist and indigenous writer Alexis Wright, which explore "special acts" of rights-giving to nature in both modern law and "ancestral stories". In Britain, I think of Daisy Johnson's dazzling and Everything Under, Max Porter's Lanny, Fiona Mozley's Elmet, Zoe Gilbert's Folk, Richard Skelton's Beyond the Fell Wall, and Laura Beatty's quietly brilliant Pollard and , in which trees grow through human lives in shaping ways.

In recent fiction 'land' is encountered as memorious even intentful, rather than a static stage set for human actions

Place, in these works, is not a regressive repository for nativist truths or buried treasures; it is volatile and commotion causing. Land - to borrow Nan Shepherd's wonderful verb - "bristles"; it morphs and causes metamorphosis. "The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted," Mozley writes in Elmet, "then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives." Johnson's Fen is a book of jinking prose, in which no sentence or story ends as one might expect from its beginning, and place is the source of shift and transition. Porter's landscapes remember, utter, worm into and through human bodies. These writers dispute what Stengers, in her essay "Rethinking Animism", calls "the acceptance [of the] hard truth that we are alone in a mute, blind, yet knowable world - one that is our task to appropriate".

A new-old animism is also advanced in Richard Powers's magnificent novel The Overstory. The US environmentalist and author Bill McKibben said that he could not put The Overstory down because it was "a novel that took protest seriously"; it is also a novel that takes trees seriously. It is, really, a vast forest of a novel, with animism its sap. Powers has said that he was "trying to resurrect a very old form of tree-consciousness, a religion of attention and accommodation ... that credits other forms of life - indeed, the life-process as a whole - with wanting something". Some of the book's finest scenes occur "two hundred feet above the surface of the planet", in the crown of a California giant redwood nicknamed "Mimas". Living up in the canopy for weeks, the protesters trying to prevent Mimas's logging come to know the tree as a living community, a sky city. Animism is the driving force of their activism; a belief in the rights of more-than-human beings "to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve".

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Candlelit vigil at Vernon Oak ... a protest against tree felling in Sheffield. Photograph: David Holmes

Reading Powers's masterpiece, I was reminded of the Sheffield tree protests, ongoing since 2013, when communities mobilised to prevent their city's deforestation when it emerged that up to 17,000 street trees might be felled under the blind logic of a Private Finance Initiative contract. The city's trees were defended legally but also imaginatively. They gained names - "Vernon Oak", "Duchess Lime" - and were studied, storied and sung to, becoming newly apprised as neighbours and co-citizens with human inhabitants of the city.

The Sheffield tree protesters and Powers are reacting in different ways to what Ghosh in The Great Derangement identifies as the doubled unsettlement of the Anthropocene; an epoch in which Earth is revealing itself as both acutely vulnerable and restlessly lively. "The uncanny and improbable events that are beating at our doors," Ghosh writes, "seem to have stirred a sense of recognition ... that humans were never alone, that we have always been surrounded by beings who share elements of that which we thought most distinctively our own: the capacities of will, thought and consciousness."
* * *
The most restlessly lively place I know is Orford Ness, a 10-mile-long shingle spit that curves south along the Suffolk coast like a bracket. The Ness is an offshore desert, an untrue island. Shaped by storm, tide and longshore drift, it is startlingly dynamic. Between 1812 and 1821 alone its length shifted by nearly two miles. If you could view the Ness as an aerial stop-motion film shot over several centuries, you would see its long stone tail whipping around in the North Sea. Because of its isolation, for 70 years (1913-83) the Ness was used by the Ministry of Defence for secret weapons testing; from air-gunnery and bombing during the first world war, to the environmental testing of British nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 60s. It is, therefore, a landscape produced by a collision of the human death drive and natural life. Now it is a conservation site like no other, unnerving in its juxtapositions, where decaying ferroconcrete test laboratories are recolonised by moss, bracken and elder to become "green chapels", black-backed gulls build their nests in broken control panels, brown hares big as deer lope across shingle expanses cratered by explosions, and the wind sings in the wires of abandoned perimeter fences.

I have returned to Orford Ness dozens of times since my first visit some 15 years ago. There is no English landscape that has haunted me more deeply, or drawn me back more often. And for three years I wrote about it, making - with the artist Stanley Donwood - a 96‑page book called Ness. I don't know quite how to describe it: a novella-length prose-poem written to be spoken aloud, perhaps - or a futile attempt to retell Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the Anthropocene.

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A former military building in Orford Ness, Suffolk. Photograph: Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Ness takes place on an unnamed shingle island, inside a dilapidating concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, where a brutal male figure called The Armourer is leading a nuclear ritual with catastrophic intent. Converging on The Green Chapel are five more-than-human beings, traversing land, sea and time to prevent the ritual's fulfilment: "She nears Ness. Her skin is lichen & her flesh is moss & her bones are fungi & she breathes spores. She is wired into the world. There are miles of her in each pinch of soil ... "

The figure of The Armourer inevitably echoes certain male autocrats currently occupying seats of power, and Ness is surfacing into a contemporary moment of protest against the living world's systemic annihilation. But its form was influenced by ancient precedents, including medieval mystery play cycles and the early Irish bardic poem "Buile Suibhne" (translated as "Sweeney Astray" by Seamus Heaney). It also has origins in my surprise, rereading and the Epic of Gilgamesh, at how central natural destruction is to both these founding texts of literature. Gilgamesh travels to the Cedar Forest where he sets about felling the great trees. Beowulf leaves the mead hall to wage war on the "wildeór" (wild creatures) of marsh and moor. In Ness, this order is reversed. It wonders instead what happens when land itself comes alive and seeks to thwart human rapacity. Ness is eerie in the sense Skelton uses that word; "engaging with 'the eerie' is fundamentally an acknowledgement of life beyond our own species ... about probing that complex, troubling relationship between humans and others."

Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?

A recurring object in Ness is the "hagstone"; a pebble with a hole worn naturally through it. Many hagstones are cast up on the foreshore of Orford Ness. In folklore across Europe, to look through such a stone is to see into the future, the past or the afterlife. In Ness, the hagstone is an optic through which one can see nature come alive in its own right, with its own powers.

The biologist EO Wilson has warned that, as the extinction rate climbs, humans are entering "The Eremocene" - the Age of Loneliness. The most recent State of Nature report, published last month, found one in seven UK species to be at risk of disappearance. Research released in September showed North America to have lost 3 billion birds - 29% of total population - in 50 years. The dryads and naiads of classical myth, those lively spirits of trees and streams, have long since been driven out. Now birds, mammals, plants and insects are vanishing too, leaving humans increasingly alone in the world. The new animism, if we can call it that, of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, of The Overstory, of Ness, of Fen, of Sheffield, may be heard as a cry into - and against - such desolating solitude.

* This article was amended on 15 November 2019 because an earlier version incorrectly said that Toledo city councillors drew up the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. That document was drawn up by residents of Toledo.

* Ness by Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
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Should this tree have the same rights as you?

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On 26 February 2019, a lake became human. For years, Lake Erie - the southernmost of the Great Lakes - has been in ecological crisis. Invasive species are rampant. Biodiversity is crashing.

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Stone Revisits "Should Trees Have Standing?"