How does our preoccupation with the present inhibit effective action to mitigate damage to the environment?

The debate over voicelessness in international environmental law centers on a profound moral question: how to ensure justice by defining and upholding responsibilities toward those - human and non-human - impacted by environmental decisions but unable to advocate for themselves.

Granting trees - or nature more broadly - would be revolutionary. It would shift the legal paradigm from viewing the environment as property to recognising it as a rights-bearing entity. But how feasible is it?