Nonsense upon Stilts

 'Natural rights is simple nonsense,' declared Jeremy Bentham: 'natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.' He was right: rights are not 'natural', they are prescribed, i.e. created, by human societies (those human societies that like the idea). The notion of 'natural rights' is simply a carry-over from 'natural theology'.
  Unfortunately, the general idea of rights has proved highly seductive, at the expense of its proper concomitant, duties. Most rights would be better framed as duties: our duties towards our fellow humans – or, indeed, animals, who are now seen as having 'rights' of their own. But it gets worse: trees now have 'rights' too. Believe it or not, there exists a Universal Declaration of Tree Rights – it seems you don't even need a pulse or a central nervous system to have rights now. Mercifully, the Declaration does not confer 'legal personhood' on trees, which must surely mean that these 'rights' are not legal but 'natural'. They are indeed 'nonsense upon stilts'.
   As such, they have of course proved attractive to certain flaky councillors in such redoubts of New Age thinking as Lewes in Sussex, which has just become the first English town to recognise trees' 'right to flourish and to maintain their natural life cycles, ecological functions and evolutionary processes' across the whole town. I suppose it will do no harm... Anyway, I am irresistibly reminded of this poem, by George Pope Morris: 

WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I'll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather's hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
    Thy axe shall harm it not!

That old familiar tree,
Whose glory and renown
Are spread o'er land and sea,
And wouldst thou hew it down?
Woodman, forbear thy stroke!
Cut not its earth-bound ties;
O, spare that aged oak,
    Now towering to the skies!

When but an idle boy
I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy
Here too my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand —
Forgive this foolish tear,
    But let that old oak stand!

My heart-strings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree! the storm still brave!
And, woodman, leave the spot;
While I've a hand to save,
Thy axe shall hurt it not.