Mary Jane’s Last Dance

“Mary Jane is shallow … but she’s well connected. She makes her home in central Florida, in an area that was once given over to wetlands … Like most of the rest of central Florida, Mary Jane is under pressure from development … In an effort to protect herself, Mary Jane is suing.” Mary Jane is not a person. She’s a lake. And she’s suing in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit that asks whether nature should have legal rights. That might sound crazy (not exactly a shock when it comes to stories about Florida), but we live in a whole new world, one that — and this is critical — we seem determined to ruin. “Only in the past few hundred years has it become possible—and come to seem normal—for people to mow down forests, fill in wetlands, and blast away mountains because it suits them. This way of operating has resulted in unprecedented, if unequally distributed, human prosperity. It has also brought melting ice sheets, marine dead zones, soaring extinction rates, and the prospect of global ecological collapse.” The way things are going in Florida, if Mary Jane wins her case, lakes may end up having more rights than humans. Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker: A Lake in Florida Suing to Protect Itself. (While many observers assumed Lake Superior would be the greatest choice to advance such a case, or that Mono Lake would be the one, my money was on Lake Havasu.)

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