Page 10 - Unlikely Stories 5

At the Palm Court

The palm court stood swaying quietly, considering the force of this
argument coming from one of their own. But the king did not want
much time spent on such analysis. He rustled his fronds loudly.
“Bismarck: are you prepared to speak?”
“I am, Your Honor. My colleague has made an eloquent case for
the alleged rights of his clients to primacy in a contested space and
for the injustice of their obliteration from it. But in doing so, he has
opened the door to consideration of the part Homo sapiens plays in
this case. I submit that specious reasoning and invalid assumptions lie
behind the justification of the oaks’ suit. First, and foremost, is the
idea that plant life can be invasive. We do indeed circle the globe and
evolved before animals, but we cannot transport ourselves to foreign
lands. We are treated like passive slaves, to be planted and
transplanted—whether frivolously, as my colleague quite accurately
has it, or for production of useful goods—by humans. Of course,
they treat each other the same way. I call the court’s attention to
Israelites in Egypt and Africans in the Americas: no one blames the
slaves; the enslavers are the guilty party. Therefore palms cannot be
blamed for their presence in L.A. County. If the oaks can convince a
human court that they have standing in it, then that is where they
should seek relief.”
“Second, the oaks present a false dichotomy contrary to the known
processes of nature. In this, we may again take our cue from human
history. The principle both in property rights and in the endless
succession of species constituting the evolutionary record is the same:
might makes right, or possession is nine points of the law. The
ultimate recourse of living entities is to survive and thrive within their
environment; if they cannot do so, they disappear, to be replaced by
those better adapted. The error made by the plaintiff is to deny
humans as part of the environment, as if they were themselves the
product of a creator’s whimsy. No, they are natural creatures—we
must face the fact that they are part of the environment in which live.
Their exercise of power does resemble runaway selection, but that is
no different than a terrestrial cataclysm; a flood or fire or volcanic
eruption. This exculpates palms entirely in the oaks’ predicament. We
can offer them our sympathy, but not our self-destruction.”

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