America at 250: Celebrating PA’s Right to Clean Water
As America turns 250, a look at Pennsylvania's constitutional right to clean water, its history, and the local watershed advocates who defend it.
This year the United States turns 250, and it is a fine time to think about the rights we tend to take for granted. Here in Pennsylvania, one of them runs right through our back yards. It is the right to clean water, and it is written into the state constitution.
In 1971, Pennsylvania voters added the Environmental Rights Amendment to the constitution. Known as Article I, Section 27, it reads:
The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.
The amendment was the work of Franklin Kury, a young state representative from the coal country of Northumberland County who had grown up watching a stream run black past his grandparents’ house. He introduced it around the time of the first Earth Day, and it moved through both the House and the Senate with rare agreement. When it went to the voters in the spring of 1971, they approved it by about four to one. Pennsylvania became one of the first states in the country to make a clean environment a constitutional right.
For years the amendment did not get much use. That changed over the past decade, when a pair of state Supreme Court decisions, in 2013 and 2017, gave it real force and reminded everyone that clean air and pure water are not favors handed down by the government. They are rights.
Rights, though, do not defend themselves. That work falls to people, and this corner of Pennsylvania has no shortage of them. The Mountain Watershed Association, the Casselman River Watershed Association and the volunteers up and down every local creek and river spend their weekends pulling tires out of the Yough, raising trout, testing streams, clearing access points and keeping an eye on the water the rest of us drink and paddle and fish.
So on the country’s 250th birthday, a thank-you is in order. To everyone working in the local watersheds, quietly and without much fanfare, the pure water in Article I, Section 27 is not just a phrase in a document. It is the Yough on a summer morning, and you are the reason it stays that way.
Happy 250th, America. Here is to clean water, and to the people who keep it clean.