The Green Amendment: Taking Our Power Back

 

Maya K van Rossum

by Eric Diekhans

The Trump administration has hollowed out the EPA, laying off one-third of its employees and proposing to cut more than half its budget. He is threatening to use the current budget impasse to make even further cuts. Many states are also planning massive cuts in environmental protections. Americans who believe in Earth care feel like they are on the ropes, unable to stop the wholesale dismantling of environmental laws.

Maya K van Rossum offers a revolutionary way to empower communities to secure our environment that’s based on exercising one of our fundamental rights as Americans. Van Rossum is the founder of Green Amendments For The Generations, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to inspiring passage of Green Amendments to state constitutions and eventually, to our United States Constitution.

“Our current system of environmental protection laws fundamentally fails to protect us,” van Rossum shared during a September Presbyterians for Earth Care webinar. “The laws in the United States presuppose that pollution, degradation, and harm are necessary evils to be managed.”

Green amendments take a different approach. They enshrine in constitutions the fundamental rights of all people to clean water, air, and soil, as well as protection from climate change. Green amendments are intended to be transformational in the same way that the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery and the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote.

“We need to lift up our environmental rights,” said van Rossum, “and give them the same constitutional recognition, protection, and standing as free speech, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms.”

Constitutional rights are not easily changed or ignored by the government and are more difficult to repeal. Green amendments also empower advocates.

“In the United States, whether people agree or disagree with you, if you’re fighting for a constitutional right, people look at you differently,” van Rossum said. “They respect you because it is actually an enforceable entitlement, and that makes a difference when you’re advocating in the room.”

Currently, only two states, Montana and Pennsylvania, have green amendments enshrined in their constitutions, but proposals have been put forward in over twenty other states.

Language is crucial in an amendment, and Green Amendments for the Generations is dedicated to introducing the most effective language when advocating at the state level.

Pennsylvania is an excellent example of the power of a green amendment to protect the environment, but it didn’t start out that way. The state’s amendment, adopted in 1971, 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.”

Unfortunately, Pennsylvania courts declared the state’s Green Amendment to be merely a policy statement, rendering it mostly toothless and allowing fracking to spread across the state. When the fossil fuel industry wanted to expand fracking even further, legislators went behind closed doors and passed Act 13, which preempted local zoning authorities from banning fracking, and allowed it to be located as close as 300 feet from people’s homes.

However, Act 13 was so egregious that the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an organization headed by van Rossum that works to protect the Delaware River watershed, successfully sued to stop the implementation of the law, arguing that it violated Pennsylvania’s Green Amendment. That, says van Rossum, was the founding of the Green Amendment Movement.

Another victory came in Montana, where sixteen youth defeated a state law that prohibited the government from considering climate change when making policy. The courts agreed with Our Children’s Trust, which sued the state, that the law violated the state’s Green Amendment. 

With the federal and many state governments aligned against Mother Earth, the Green Amendment movement faces an uphill battle to change state and federal constitutions. But the same held true with every transformational amendment to our Constitution. Van Rossum says that this is the time to get involved and make real and lasting change to our system of environmental laws.

If you’re inspired to join this revolutionary movement, start by reading van Rossum’s book, The Green Amendment, which you can purchase from their website. All proceeds from sales go to The Green Amendment organization. You can then sign up to be part of this powerful movement for change.

During the webinar, van Rossum presented a call to action for faithful Christians who want to get involved in the Green Amendment Movement. “Let’s start by raising the bar when it comes to protecting nature by looking through the lens of the rights of people. When we get people thinking about environmental protection as an entitlement that belongs to them, not to the government, it transforms the conversation and the law.”

 

Eric Diekhans’ fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and the anthology Uncensored Ink. He is the recipient of a local Emmy for Children’s Television and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in screenwriting. He is a member of Lake View Presbyterian Church in Chicago. (www.ericdiekhans.com)