Up only. How DAOs and NFTs Can Expand Personhood For Trees

"I haven’t been able to escape the idea of how one could confer rights to a natural resource on Ethereum. Not as collateral. Not as property. But confer rights to, say, a tree itself. For anyone that has lived in a dense city, it is hard not to appreciate the importance of trees. Their leaves pull carbon directly from the air, their roots capture storm runoff, and they increase property values and even lower crime. Several years ago, I discovered one of the greatest digital public goods: The New York City Street Tree Map. After several tree censuses, each of the 700,000 street trees was given an ID with data such as its age, trunk diameter, and health in order to determine it’s dollar value. A 200 year old Pin Oak may be valued at $17,000, a newly planted gingko, $4000. The estimated total value of annual benefits to NYC is $102 million USD. Despite value being ascribed to each tree, what rights do they have and how could their benefits be collectively governed? In this talk I will discuss: The growing movement to confer rights to non-humans. In 2019, Bangladesh became the first country to grant all of its rivers the same legal status as humans. Ohio voters passed legislation to allow citizens to sue on behalf of Lake Erie when it’s being polluted. In 2017, New Zealand gave Mount Taranaki the same legal rights as a person. In the West, we deal in common law property rights: that humans have rights, and natural resources are property. Since its inception Ethereum has challenged notions of ownership and rights — whether NFTs, DAOs, or MEV bots. As companies begin using real world assets as collateral on DeFi, what are the best frameworks to represent a non-human among the addresses of Ethereum? Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons (1990) has been revived in Ethereum discourse. As a student of her teachings, I will apply her frameworks to propose how we can use Ethereum primitives of ownership to govern common resources. If we believe it is possible for DAOs to distribute power and create collective ownership, how could humans organize a collective trust for trees, granting them economic power? What would they optimize for? How would we humans benefit? I will survey successes and failures in Ethereum to represent natural resources on-chain, such as TreeDAO, NFTree, Crypto Trees, and propose a new way of thinking about funding and governance of these common natural resources. "