Time For A Green Amendment in Texas
Nearly 150 years after nation’s the first commercial oil well was drilled in Pennsylvania, the boom in extracting oil and gas from its rich shale deposits would soon disrupt lives and livelihoods in unforeseen ways. Its fault lines would stretch from dairy farmers to the west tempted by lucrative lease offers to environmentalists in the east who had spent decades cleaning up the toxic messes that Dupont and other polluters left behind in the Delaware River watershed.
How van Rossum responded to fracking and other environmental threats is the trailblazing journey she shares in her book, The Green Amendment: The People’s Fight For A Clean, Safe and Healthy Environment. A seasoned environmental attorney, she argues the need to enshrine environmental rights in our state and federal constitutions. Without these rights for clean air, water, and land, communities will remain powerless to challenge a legal system that favors environmental degradation at the expense of healthy people and places.
I learned about the Green Amendment when van Rossum presented at the Texas Book Festival in November 2022. She spoke so forcefully and with such conviction that I left emboldened to reclaim our rights to a healthy environment in Central Texas. The loss of those rights are the inevitable price of the Texas Miracle, we are told — told so often that many of us believe it, as if progress and growth are rights, not clean water and air.
Like leaders of other transformative movements in this country, van Rossum possesses the experience, focus, and willpower needed to carry her vision across today’s deep political fault lines. Her sense of urgency comes from traveling the long hard path to cleaning up the Delaware River. Fracking was not some distant threat; it came to her family’s property and the river she grew up on.
Nothing short of a Green Amendment, she argues, is the legal antidote needed to counteract the poisonous infiltration of corporate influence in government and judicial decision-making. To tilt the playing field in its favor, the fracking lobby was able to get sweetheart legislation passed by the Pennsylvania legislature that would remove existing constraints on where and how fracking is done. Among its most blatant wins were disallowing local governments to keep fracking out of their jurisdictions and giving the industry the power of eminent domain.
It was during this David-verse-Goliath contest that van Rossum stumbled upon a little known, largely forgotten victory in state environmental lawmaking. A forward-thinking legislator had managed to get the equivalent of a Green Amendment added to the constitution 50 years earlier. Surprisingly, it was never put to the test until her legal team challenged the new fracking law based on the amendment’s language that states up front: “People have a right to clean air, pure water, and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic, and aesthetic values of the environment.” The case reached the state supreme court, which ruled the new fracking law unconstitutional.
While congratulating van Rossum at her book signing, I reminded her that Texas is the birthplace of fracking. In addition, Texas officials woo and support businesses like Elon Musk’s that have proven adept at bypassing what little regulation the state does have. I shared how Bastrop County, which has some of the highest quality farmland in Texas, is suffering from the consequences of industries that been given the legislative green light to undermine local control: from poorly regulated gravel mining destroying prime farmland along the Colorado river to industrial solar farms seeking to cut down our forests.
Farmers and rural residents, van Rossum shared, are not the only ones concerned at the unprecedented scope and pace at which their quality of life is being compromised, especially in unincorporated counties.
"A couple of older women approached me after my talk to ask about starting a Grandmothers for the Texas Green Amendment,” she wrote. "The first step always involves outreach in order to educate, make connections, and see what group of folks — whether individuals or organizations — would like to step forward and work together to get the ball rolling.”
Friends of the Land Fights Back
Our immediate response to these threats to our river and fertile farmland was to create Friends of the Land, an alliance of concerned neighbors and organizations focused on community education, connection and action.
The resulting community outcry has been effective. By partnering with Central Texas Interfaith, Friends was able to stop taxpayer subsidies from subsidizing a solar farm start-up, financed by the oil industry, that planned to clear 2,000-acre of trees in Elgin while only providing one permanent job.
As Friends moves forward, our members will continue to shine a spotlight on the dirty tricks and sleight of hand fueling the “Texas Miracle” that is paving the best farmland and fouling the clean water and air Central Texans are entitled to. Our goal is to look beyond the predictable boosterism of “jobs” and “economic development” to tally the long-term costs of growth that stand to benefit few while exacting a permanent loss on all.
Achieving that level of truth and transparency can be daunting. When fracking came looking for land in the Delaware River’s watershed, van Rossum got a crash-course on the political maneuvering that laid out the welcome map for the industry. She discovered that the deck is so stacked in favor of extraction and exploitation that even the best legal strategies and most organized communities often fail to change the status quo.
Even more alarming is to discover that many local communities can no longer depend upon state environmental agencies for basic protections. In Texas, regulatory agencies have been weakened to the point that communities must appeal to the EPA. Van Rossum devotes a chapter on the impact of oil refineries and flooding in Port Arthur and how environmental activists like John Beard have been confined by concessions that are “too little, too late” especially for the increased threats that climate change is bringing to the Gulf Coast.
A Movement Gains Momentum
Imagine if Central Texans who sought to protect their prime farmland, pristine waterways and natural beauty could rely on their local leaders. Instead of having to appeal to the courts or to the EPA for protection, we could challenge our local government to uphold their rights written into the state constitution. Given that enacting a federal Green Amendment is a far reach these days, reform at the state level is all the more critical.
Van Rossum adds that “pursuing a Green Amendment at the state level affords a unique opportunity to hold public conversations about a state’s unique values, goals and needs. Because these are local charters, each state’s constitutional provision about the environment reflects local values.”
The good news is that momentum is building. Montana is no longer the only other state that has comparable language in its state constitution to Pennsylvania’s. Two years ago, 70 percent of New Yorkers voted to add a Green Amendment; similar efforts are under way in other states, including New Mexico and Maine.
“It’s time to see a safe and clean environment not just as a preference or a privilege, but as a fundamental right, to treat it with the same sanctity as the right of free speech,” writes the actor and water activist Mark Ruffalo in the book’s introduction.
In van Rossum’s vision, citizens empowered and protected by green amendments “are standing up at every hearing quoting their environmental rights before demanding their government do better.”
Even in states that rely heavily on an extraction economy, van Rossum says there are benefits in campaigning for a Green Amendment. When the environment is put in the framework of individual rights, people begin to change how they think about not only the environment but whether those they elect are helping to protect or thwart their rights.
“It will never happen if we don’t try. The key is to get started and work our way up.”
