Few law review articles can be said to be provocative, challenging and joyously readable. Fewer still will have that effect forty years after they were written. Professor Christopher Stone’s ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’ is therefore a rare creature, an article that is as fresh and relevant as the occasion on which it first appeared in 1972. It dealt with an issue that is of even greater importance today than when Professor Stone first put pen to paper: the ability of an existing, anthropocentric legal order fully to protect and conserve our planet’s natural objects. Whilst Professor Stone was concerned with local needs, the ideas resonated for those like me who were concerned with matters international, and with whether a legal order constructed around the fiction of the state could truly safeguard a planet whose natural being pays no regard to the concept of a national boundary. The article was a rare treasure. No other has been recommended more often – to law students, academic colleagues or acquaintances unconnected to the law – or with greater enthusiasm. Nor is there any article that I have ever referred to in class that provokes a greater (or more passionate) range of reactions, across a wider spectrum of views, from disparagement to adulation. It is not that one necessarily agrees with the thesis or the ideas and assumptions around which it is wrapped, in particular the view that allowing natural objects to have legal rights of their own would necessarily (or even possibly) bring about a greater degree of ecological consciousness and well-being. MaryWarnock makes the point with characteristic force, inviting Professor Stone to ‘prove’ his arguments and assumptions (a tall order, it should be said, for any new or revolutionary legal idea). ‘Paths in the Lake District, the very origin of our romantic love of wilderness, are becoming eroded and ruined by the numbers of those who tramp their way up and down them’, she writes. ‘I would truly like Professor Stone to prove to me that granting standing to the mountains would give a way out of this dilemma.’ What is it about the piece that leaves a mark, causing such excitement or irritation in so many of its readers? Four characteristics are prominent. First, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’ recognises and states the dilemma identified by Warnock, and does so early in the emergence of eco-legal consciousness. That alone justifies a high degree of interest. Second, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’ provokes. It causes the reader to challenge the unstated (and usually unchallenged) assumption that the human person is necessarily and naturally at the centre of any legal order, be it national or international. That we are forced to reflect on the existing order is surely a useful thing. Third, ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’ sets a benchmark. It provides a means of measuring the extent to which nature and natural objects have achieved some degree of respect and protection, in particular in circumstances in which the losses and the threats to nature are greater today than at any point in human history. Lorraine Code implicitly Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 3 Special Issue, 2012, pp. 2–3