"We form interspecies relationships with our pets. So why not plants?"
"RJ Laverne’s childhood home in Detroit had a big elm out front. In fact, the whole neighborhood was lined with them: great, graceful trees whose branches spread across the street to create a shady canopy. Elms were so widely planted in cities and suburbs in the 19th and 20th centuries that they became known as the “Main Street tree.” Then, in the 1930s, Dutch elm disease began to ravage them, and by 1989, most of America’s 77 million mature elms were dead.
Laverne’s elm and its demise remain seared into his memory decades later. “I was maybe 8,” he says, “and I remember standing at the front door next to my sister when the trucks came down the street and cut down the elm trees one by one. When they cut ours, it felt similar to losing a pet. I imagine I was not the only person that grieved to see our neighborhood transformed from this beautiful cathedral of trees to clear cut.”
It was the first tree he loved, but certainly not the last for Laverne, who is a master arborist, an adjunct associate professor of forestry at Michigan Tech, and manager of education and training for Davey Tree Expert Company.
Many of us have loved a tree. Maybe it’s the big sycamore that held a tree house behind your childhood home. Maybe it’s the spruce that waves outside the window of your office, or the maple on the corner near your town’s post office.
I adored a huge fir in the corner of my cousins’ yard in New Jersey, with lower boughs that bent all the way to the ground and formed a sticky, fragrant fort at the trunk. Every day, my daughter greets a trio of towering oaks in our front yard that she lovingly calls “the mama trees.”"
Kate Morgan reports for the Washington Post April 1, 2026.
SEE ALSO:
"Standing for Rivers, Mountains — and Trees — in the Anthropocene" (Southern California Law Review)
"Rights of Nature: The New Paradigm" (American Association of Geographers)
"Does Nature Have Rights?" (Common Home)
"Give Legal Rights To Animals, Trees And Rivers, Say Experts" (Guardian)
"The Water Remembers: A Story of the Klamath River" (Public Policy Institute of California)
