In Defence of the Trees: Presenting the Case for Ancient Forest Rights
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article examines the important role old growth forests play in mitigating climate change and argues there now exists both a social imperative and legal basis for our courts to recognize legal rights for these precious few remaining ancient ecosystems. The Article is written from a unique perspective. Using as context first person accounts from one of the authors’ two months living in an old growth forest and the events leading to her arrest during the largest civil disobedience protest in the history of Canada, the Article examines the disconnect between the current state of the law and science-based concerns about climate change. The Article describes one land defender’s thoughts and feelings as she contemplates the ancient ecosystem she seeks to protect, learns from First Nations’ Elders and encounters the Royal Canadian Mounted Police forces and frustrated loggers. The authors then present a legal analysis that addresses the science of old growth forests’ crucial role in mitigating future climate change, considers failed international commitments to protect and restore these vital ecosystems and draws guidance from court decisions in other jurisdictions that have recognized legal rights for nature. The Article then builds on concepts from the ancient traditions and customs of First Nations, academic writings and concepts from Aboriginal rights and title litigation in Canada to present a rationale for Canadian courts to apply ecocentric-based principles in the future development of the law. Ultimately, the authors propose the recognition of “Ancient Forest Rights” to provide a voice for old growth forests in the courts of Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".