What do people think about giving legal rights of personhood to inanimate elements of nature as a conservation strategy?<p>"The movement began in the 1970s with an essay titled “Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,” by American law professor Christopher Stone. Stone wrote that the history of law has followed the arc of human moral development, described by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man. “Originally each man had regard only for himself and those of a very narrow circle about him … then ‘his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused.’” The rights-of-nature philosophy shifts the value of nature away from its ability to provide resources for extraction to its capacity to sustain life."