ARCADIA
of the earth and the material resources over which we exercise dominion. But downstream, as it were, of that question
is a legal one which is getting a purchase on legislatures around the world – and has been doing so ever since the excellently titled 1972 legal paper ‘Should Trees Have Standing?’ (which originated from a legal academic in California trying to perk up an inattentive class by asking: ‘What if nature had rights?’). The question is one which tends, in the first instance, to invite ridicule from a certain cast of mind. ‘Well, duh, obviously not! Why do you even need to ask the question, you idiot?’ Trees may stand, runs this line of thought – you may, indeed, encounter a stand of trees – but they cannot have standing. And yet and yet. Here’s the ingenious bit.
The idea that we might extend the legal fic- tion of personhood to a tree, or a river, or (for that matter) a rare, thumbnail-sized species of brown frog, and with it the con- comitant idea that these things can have rights, doesn’t seem so completely absurd when you consider another legal fiction of personhood that we extend quite uncontro- versially – indeed, on which much of the global economy rests. As Macfarlane puts it: ‘It is normalised that a corporation, in the eyes of the law, is an entity with legal standing and a suite of rights, including the right to sue – but that a river who has flowed for thousands of years has no rights at all.’ And he has, there, doesn’t he, a point? What’s source for the abstract goose is sauce, as it were, for the concrete gander. And the ‘rights of nature’ movement has by pressing this point gained something of a toehold – even in the United States, where laws have been passed to protect the rights of (among other things) Pacific salm- on, wild rice and Lake Mary Jane in Florida. Are these two legal fictions of personhood destined always to be at loggerheads, their rights in competition? Is extractive capital always going to be at odds with the resources that it needs to extract to do its wealth-creat- ing thing? The optimist in me likes to think not. If we’d given a bit more thought to the rights of Atlantic cod, for instance, the cata- strophic population collapse around the end of the 20th century might not have happened – and, indeed, the fishing industry would be in better shape as a result. ‘Sustainability’, smart investors are realising, is in the long- term interests of both industry and the natu- ral world. Maybe the hippies have a point.
CIGAR AFICIONADOS
STICK OR TWIST?
Simon Usborne
LONDON REAL ESTATE doesn’t get much more prime than the glass box that tops out the Emory, the new suite-only hotel at the eastern end of Knightsbridge. The 10th-floor eyrie is divided into two spaces, their floor- to-ceiling windows offering views across Green Park to the City of London. That one of these rooms contains a swanky rooſtop bar is no surprise; loſty cocktails are a
no-brainer for any urban hotel developer worth their margarita salt. More striking is what lies next door. ‘Welcome to the Emory Cigar Merchants,’ says Blue Curran, the hotel’s 28-year-old head of cigars, a smoking sommelier who wears a generous beard and a slim-fitting suit. He commands a very modern space – light, airy, outward-looking. Even the central humidor, a drum of lockers with a glazed carousel of Cuban sticks, looks like it has been delivered from the future. The Emory’s cigar lounge, which also in-
cludes classic cigar aesthetics (tan leather wingbacks, acres of burl veneer), is a mod- ern monument to a historic pastime. For centuries, London has been a hub for cigar aficionados to buy, store and smoke their fa- voured sticks in lounges that have been ex- empt from the UK’s 2007 indoor smoking
The rooftop lounge at Emory Cigar Merchants
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