Democracy and the Person
The disturbing thing I brought home from Democracy School is the fact that, according to the U.S. Constitution, there are only two designations that anything can fall into: Persons and Property.
This means that if you are not a Person, you are property. There is no in-between, no other category. That is why an idea can be property just like a can of soda. See why an ‘invented’ genome is argueably property even tho it is life? Now, according to long-standing precedent, corporations - from small nonprofits like SEEDS to huge multinational conglomerates like Nestle - are considered Persons. We each have the exact same legal rights (though there are often obvious disparities between our ability to leverage resources including the legal and legislative systems - oh, and humans tend to die after 100 years give-or-take).
These rights of Persons include, with some minor limitations, the right to do what we will with our own property. What’s property? Everything else in the entire world that isn’t a 
Person. Slaves were property; property was arguably originally intended solely as a euphemism for ’slave’. To this day, property legally includes groundwater, soil and its intense microbiology, wetlands and their diverse animal inhabitants. There are no ‘commons’, there is only common property. Who owns the air?
Do you feel like property? No, you feel like a Person. I asked my (because she is legally my property) cat how she felt about the situation. She says of the two available options, she feels like a Person too. What a difference it would make if an intact, thriving ecosystem and all its inhabitants had some rights to exercise when a Person (or Corporation) submits a permit to destroy it. What if a wetland could say, “No,” and the courts had to listen?