Lessons from the tree that owns itself: Implications for education

After taking seriously the idea that nature should have human rights argued by Cormac
Cullinan in Orion Magazine (January/February 2008), we examined the lessons that could
be learned from the tree that owns itself in Athens, Georgia. The point is to engage others in
environmental and science education in a critical conversation about how school would
have to prepare students to deal with rights for plants, as distinct from sentient animals and
inanimate objects. As discussions of rights often neglects the interests and inference rights
of non-sentient plants in the school curriculum and these nonhuman species are objectified
for human needs, there is very little written about plant rights in science education. This essay
is an imagined question of what science education would look like if rights for plants
were adopted by humans. We address the idea of rights for the Tree that Owns Itself in
Athens, Georgia, United States, and what science educators and their students can and
should learn from addressing these rights. We explore rights for plants more specifically
through consequentialist and nonconsequentialist reasoning and the nurturing relationship
between humans and nonhuman species. We connect with scholars who argue for
biocentric pluralism as a guiding philosophy, while using this theory to develop some educational
implications of rights for nature within science education respectively.