The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s June decision in Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation v. Wolf, 161 A.3d 911 (Pa. 2017) (PEDF), has sparked many conversations about how the newly interpreted Environmental Rights Amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution will be implemented. Resolving that question will take a long time, and even a first-cut set of suggestions would require more erudition and exposition than is available. However, in this column I hope to catalogue at least some of the issues to help move the conversation along.
The Environmental Rights Amendment, adopted in 1971, provides: 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; and as trustee of these resources, the commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people, Pa. Const., art. I, Section 27.
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