In Pennsylvania, clean air and pure water are not just goals. They are constitutional rights. That is true because of one man, Franklin Kury, who died this August at the age of 89. Every clean-water fight in this state still stands on the words he wrote.
Kury was born in Sunbury, along the Susquehanna, in 1936, and grew up seeing what unchecked industry did to central Pennsylvania’s streams. The coal era left rivers running orange and communities living with the consequences. That childhood stayed with him.
In 1966, a young lawyer with no political machine behind him, Kury ran for the state House against a Republican incumbent who had held the seat for three decades. He ran on clean streams. His wife, Beth, suggested the image that would define the campaign: Kury holding two jars of water, one clear and labeled clean, the other filled with black water and labeled polluted. He won the upset, served in the House from 1967 to 1972, and moved to the state Senate from 1973 to 1980.
Writing a right into the constitution
In 1968, Kury read about a provision in New York’s constitution protecting state forest land and asked a simple question: why should Pennsylvania treat environmental protection as anything less than a fundamental right, on par with political rights? He set out to answer it. In 1971, Pennsylvania voters ratified what became Article I, Section 27 of the state constitution, the Environmental Rights Amendment.
“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.”
Read it again and notice what it does. It grants every Pennsylvanian a right to clean air and pure water. It declares our public natural resources the common property of all the people, including those not yet born. And it makes the Commonwealth the trustee, legally bound to protect them. It is a short paragraph carrying an enormous idea.
The amendment that waited
For its first four decades, the amendment did far less than Kury intended. Courts read it narrowly and it was rarely a deciding factor in environmental cases. That began to change through the scholarship of legal experts who returned to the plain meaning of the text. In 2013, in a case challenging portions of Act 13, the oil and gas law, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court gave Section 27 real force for the first time, with the court pointing to the state’s long history of shortsighted exploitation of its own environment as the very reason the amendment exists. A 2017 decision on the leasing of state forest land for drilling reinforced that stronger reading.
Those rulings turned Kury’s paragraph from a statement of values into a tool with teeth, one that citizens and watershed groups can actually point to when they defend a stream, a forest, or an aquifer.
A statute can be repealed. A constitutional right endures.
That was the heart of Kury’s insight. Laws come and go with each legislative session. A right written into the constitution belongs to the people and to every generation that follows. His model has since rippled outward. New York adopted its own environmental rights amendment in 2021, and a similar provision in Montana’s constitution helped young plaintiffs win a landmark climate case in 2024. Advocates have placed his legacy alongside Rachel Carson’s in the story of American environmental protection.
Why it matters to us
For everyone in the H2O network, this is not distant history. When a community challenges a mine that threatens a trout stream, when residents question the water demands of a new data center, when a watershed group presses the state to protect a headwater, the ground they stand on is the right Franklin Kury put into words. Pure water is not a favor the government grants us. In Pennsylvania, it is ours by constitutional right.
Kury started with two jars of water and a question about what we owe the future. He leaves behind a sentence that will keep working for our rivers long after all of us are gone. That is a legacy worth honoring, and worth living up to.
Franklin Kury, 1936 to 2026. The text of Article I, Section 27 is from the Pennsylvania Constitution. Biographical details drawn from reporting by The Allegheny Front, Spotlight PA, and Inside Climate News.
