New Book on “Green Amendment” by Delaware Riverkeeper

“The Green Amendment” — Life, liberty … and a clean environment

Letter by Michele Byers, USA Today (North-Jersey.com), November 22, 2017

As Americans, we have the right to free speech, the right to practice our religion of choice and the right to peaceably assemble. But what if we had the same constitutional right to pure water, clean air and a healthy environment?

That’s the premise of a new book by Delaware Riverkeeper Maya K. van Rossum, “The Green Amendment: Securing our Right to a Healthy Environment.”

The book argues that our best hope for protecting water, air, land and natural resources is to give all citizens — including those of future generations — the constitutional right to a clean environment. As riverkeeper, Maya works to protect the Delaware River and its watershed: 13,539 square miles spanning parts of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. It’s a tough job made tougher by the fact that much of the watershed sits atop the Marcellus Shale, a formation rich in natural gas.

The book describes the terrible impacts of shale gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing: contaminated wells, polluted streams and wetlands, toxic air and damaged farms and communities. In 2012, the situation was made worse by Act 13, Pennsylvania legislation giving the shale gas industry the right to seize land by eminent domain.

Looking for a way to overturn Act 13, Maya and other activists turned to a 1971 amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution that explicitly protects the right of people to a healthy environment and establishes the government’s obligation to protect natural resources.

This amendment states, in part: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment.”

In December 2013, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court used this amendment to declare the fundamental provisions of Act 13 unconstitutional.

This convinced Maya that green constitutional amendments — “guaranteeing that the government has no more right to harm your environment than it does to deny you due process or overturn your right to free speech” — are a better way to protect water, air and land than legislation.

“Legislative environmentalism has had its day, and the environment is still on the brink of catastrophe — we need a new way forward,” she writes.

In the book’s foreword, actor and clean water activist Mark Ruffalo compares “The Green Amendment” to Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” credited with launching the modern environmental movement. “It is time to see a safe and clean environment not just as a preference or privilege, but as a fundamental right, to treat it with the same sanctity as the right of free speech,” Ruffalo wrote.

The vision of a Green Amendment can become a reality in New Jersey. Hopefully, that vision will be carried forward under Governor-elect Phil Murphy.

>>> Michele S. Byers, Far Hills, Nov. 22

NOTE: The writer is the executive director of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation.

Tagged as: Delaware Riverkeeper, drilling, eminent domain, fracking, Green Amendment, marcellus shale, PA Act 13, River Watershed, toxic chemicals, water pollution