I stood looking at an old tree recently and found myself considering a question that, until quite recently, might have sounded rather peculiar. Does that tree have any rights?
I don’t mean whether I have the right to cut it down, whether the council can protect it, whether it stores enough carbon to make it valuable or whether something rare happens to live among its branches. Those are all questions about what the tree means to us. I mean something much simpler and, once you begin thinking about it, considerably more difficult.
Does the tree have value simply because it is a tree?
That question has suddenly become particularly relevant here in Sussex. Lewes Town Council has adopted a Tree Charter recognising ten rights for the trees of the town, including the right to life and intrinsic value, to flourish, to clean air, healthy soil and fungal networks, sufficient unpolluted water, restoration where trees have been lost, representation when decisions affect them and, where it can safely happen, the opportunity to complete their natural life cycle.
At first glance, the idea of giving trees rights might sound slightly eccentric. We might imagine an oak employing a solicitor or a row of beeches appearing at a planning inquiry to object to a housing development. But that isn’t what Lewes has done.
The charter does not give trees the same legally enforceable rights that humans possess, nor does it suddenly turn every tree in Lewes into a legal person. Instead, it creates a framework through which the Town Council can consider trees when managing its own land and make representations when trees are affected by planning and development.
It introduces something deceptively simple into the conversation: the interests of the tree itself.
The idea did not simply appear one evening in the council chamber. Behind it is the Rights of Our Trees group, ROOTs, bringing together people and organisations concerned with the local environment, while the wider work has been informed by the Rights of Trees, Woodlands and Forests Toolkit developed through the University of Sussex Environmental Justice Law Clinic.
At its heart is a subtle change in perspective
Instead of regarding trees primarily as property or resources that human beings may decide to protect, we begin by considering whether they possess an intrinsic value of their own.
We already protect trees in Britain. Tree Preservation Orders, conservation areas, planning conditions and environmental legislation can all affect what we are allowed to do to them. Yet the conversation usually begins with us. We decide whether a tree is important enough to keep, weigh its ecological or amenity value against development and, sometimes, decide how many young trees should be planted elsewhere if an established one disappears.
Imagine a mature oak standing where somebody wants to build. We might ask whether it is protected, whether bats are using it, how much carbon it stores or whether its loss can be compensated for by planting several saplings somewhere else.
All reasonable questions, but an old oak is not simply a large version of a sapling.
Within the fissures of its bark, its hollowing branches, spreading roots and the soil beneath it exists a community that may have taken centuries to form. Fungi connect with its roots. Beetles inhabit decaying timber. Birds and bats use cavities that can take generations to appear. Mosses and lichens occupy its bark, while fallen leaves return their substance to the soil.
Plant ten saplings after removing one ancient tree and the spreadsheet might eventually tell us that we have gained nine trees. The living world tells a rather different story.
Even dead trees have value
Even death looks different when viewed this way. Where safety allows, a dead or dying tree continues to support life. Standing deadwood, fallen limbs and decaying timber become habitat and food, eventually returning themselves to the soil. What looks finished to us is still participating in the life around it.
Lewes is not exploring these ideas in isolation. Work has already taken place locally around recognising rights for the River Ouse, and the wider Rights of Nature movement has gone considerably further elsewhere.
In New Zealand, the Whanganui River was recognised in law in 2017 as a legal person possessing the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person. The legislation grew from the relationship of Whanganui Māori with the river and recognises the idea expressed as Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au: I am the River and the River is me. Human representatives act on behalf of the river within the legal framework.
Spain has taken another approach. In 2022, the Mar Menor lagoon and its basin were granted legal personality and recognised as a subject of rights. Similar Rights of Nature ideas have appeared in different forms elsewhere, including constitutional recognition in Ecuador.
These examples are not identical, and declaring that nature possesses rights does not make the difficult questions disappear.
Who speaks for a river? Who represents an oak? What happens when woodland stands where people desperately need housing? What happens when an ancient tree becomes genuinely dangerous to those living beneath it? If restoring the natural behaviour of a river threatens farmland, roads or homes, whose rights take precedence?
Those questions matter because Rights of Nature will ultimately be tested not where everybody agrees that a beautiful ancient tree should remain standing, but where protecting nature costs us something.
Language matters
There is also something interesting in the language we already use.
Forests provide timber and carbon storage. Wetlands provide flood protection. Trees cool our towns. Rivers provide water. Meadows support pollinators. The countryside provides recreation and improves our wellbeing. We increasingly describe these benefits as “ecosystem services”, and understanding their economic value can undoubtedly help protect places that might otherwise disappear.
But listen carefully to the words.
Nature is still providing the service.
We are still the customer.
Spend enough time among trees and that idea begins to feel rather strange. An oak does not stand in a Sussex field to store carbon for me. An earthworm does not move through the soil for my benefit. Fungi do not connect beneath my boots because humanity requires an ecosystem service.
They are simply living their lives, as we are living ours, within the same extraordinary web of relationships.
Perhaps that is where the Lewes Tree Charter becomes more interesting than the headline about “giving trees rights”. Its immediate legal power may be limited, but its greater significance could lie in changing the question we ask before decisions are made.
Instead of beginning with, “Can we remove this tree?”
We might begin with, “What responsibility do we have towards it?”
For a long time humanity has placed itself at the centre of the living world and drawn a circle around everything else. Forest, river, animal, soil and tree became resources, property or commodities whose value was largely determined by their usefulness to us.
Rights of Nature asks whether that circle should be drawn differently. Not by removing humanity from it, because we belong there too, but by recognising that we were never standing at its centre in the first place.
I don’t know whether future generations will look back upon ideas such as the Lewes Tree Charter as an interesting environmental experiment or as an early sign of something much larger. There are difficult questions about law, development, ownership, representation and accountability still to be answered, and those questions should not be avoided.
But I keep returning to that old tree.
Imagine it standing quietly while generations pass beneath its branches. Children become parents and grandparents. Houses appear, roads change and governments come and go. Birds nest, insects hatch, fungi spread beneath the soil, storms tear branches away and new growth reaches towards the light. Thousands upon thousands of lives begin and end within and around it.
Then one day we arrive and ask what that tree is worth. Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question.
Perhaps it is not what the tree is worth to us, but what, after everything the living world has given us, we owe to the tree.
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