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Author Topic: You can NOT make this crap up!
rcmann
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Recognizing The Right Of Plants To Evolve
http://www.npr.org/2012/10/26/160940869/recognizing-the-right-of-plants-to-evolve

If one of us dared to write a story with a premise like this, we would be laughed to scorn. But this is actually making NPR's international distribution.

quote:

If proposals calling for rights for animals are on the table, why not rights for other living things? Plants, for instance....

...Writing in The New York Times recently, Michael Marder, author of the forthcoming Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, calls for "plant liberation."...he continues, "the commendable desire to ameliorate the condition of animals, currently treated as though they were meat-generating machines, does not justify strategic argumentation in favor of the indiscriminate consumption of plants. The same logic ultimately submits to total instrumentalization the bodies of plants, animals and humans by setting them over and against an abstract and rational mind."

Therefore, he concludes, "the struggles for the emancipation of all instrumentalized living beings should be fought on a common front."

In other words, what is good for the goose is good for the gooseberry...

...The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund argues that greenery does have interests — and rights. The Pennsylvania-based nonprofit works with communities around the world to "craft and adopt new laws that change the status of natural communities and ecosystems from being regarded as property under the law to being recognized as rights-bearing entities."

Establishing a legal system in which natural communities and ecosystems have an inalienable right to exist and flourish, says Mari Margil of CELDF, "places the highest societal value on those natural systems and communities."

Under such a rights-based system of law, Margil says, "a river may be recognized as having the right to flow, fish and other species in a river may be recognized as having the right to exist and evolve, and the flora and fauna that depend on a river may be recognized as having the right to thrive. This legal framework seeks to protect the natural ecological balance of that habitat."

In the past few years there has been a flurry of international interest in a plant rights movement. The New York Times reported in 2008 that Ecuador became the first country to provide constitutional rights to plants, granting nature "the right to the maintenance and regeneration of its vital cycles, structure, functions and evolutionary processes." That same year, a Swiss ethics panel advocated protecting plants' "reproductive ability."...

My beloved spouse summed it up rather neatly. 'Send them a tub of poison ivy and see how long that lasts."

*THEY WILL TAKE MY SALAD FORK WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD HANDS!*

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LDWriter2
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That is not surprising...some people have too much time on their hands.


But along those lines one guy went hyper when one of the Mars probes vomited out some water on Martian soil. It probably killed a bunch of microbes.

But I don't think they mean we should stop eating plants. After all they probably cut down on if not stop eating meat. That leaves plants to eat and if we cut them out of our diet we won't have much to eat. Lichens? Or are they plants too,


But my comment reminded me of the old Muppet TV show. One year the Swedish chef- no one could understand-had problems deciding on what to serve for Thanksgiving dinner. Everything including the plants talked back to him. He ended up serving Vitamins .

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Robert Nowall
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One important point about establishing the "rights" of this kind of "constituency"---the plants will never, ever, ever talk back, object, take over, contradict, or set goals on their own. Those who presume to speak for, and demand rights for, these things know this to be so. It's about power again, getting it and keeping it.
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Natej11
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I could see this being used by bioengineering companies to state that their genetically modified organisms, being created, have no rights. Therefore consumption of naturally occurring organisms is outlawed and we're obliged to eat GMO products.
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MartinV
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Well, technically speaking, only fruit is meant to be food. Eating anything else means being a predator, eating parts of a living thing.

Newsflash: that's something living things do - eat one another. You eat others or they eat you. Welcome to Earth.

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Pyre Dynasty
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I really like plants. I think industrialization of vegetables is a major problem that has given us nearly tasteless tomatoes, hyperallergenic corn, and an increasingly shrinking gene pool. That's what this person should be talking about. Personally I think this is an anti-vegetarian ploy.

I can understand the Swedish Chef, he mostly talks about cooking chickens.

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