{"id":272111,"date":"2026-08-25T20:40:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/272111\/"},"modified":"2026-08-25T20:40:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T20:40:09","slug":"remembering-the-visionary-author-of-pennsylvanias-environmental-rights-amendment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/272111\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering the \u2018visionary\u2019 author of Pennsylvania\u2019s environmental rights amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

A monumental figure in Pennsylvania\u2019s environmental movement passed away last week. Former state legislator Franklin Kury, who was 89, led Pennsylvania to become one of the first governments in the world to adopt a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a healthy environment as a basic right.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is a true icon, and a historic leader,\u201d said Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum. \u201cWhen people start writing the history of the environmental movement, they will not just be looking to people like Rachel Carson; they will be talking about Senator Franklin Kury.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Kury authored Article 1, Section 27\u2014better known as the environmental rights amendment\u2014 which was approved by voters and added to Pennsylvania\u2019s constitution in 1971. Today, dozens of countries and several states have similar provisions in their constitutions. In some places, they\u2019ve formed\u00a0a legal basis<\/a>\u00a0for an argument that governments have a responsibility to act on climate change.\n <\/p>\n

Kury had the idea for the amendment in 1968 after reading a\u00a0news article about a New York state constitutional provision to protect its forests. That inspired him to attempt something even bigger in Pennsylvania, he recalled in his 2011 memoir, \u201cClean Politics, Clean Streams: A Legislative Autobiography and Reflections.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy not give our natural environment the same kind of constitutional protection that has been given to our political rights?\u201d he wrote.\n<\/p>\n

Pennsylvania\u2019s environmental rights amendment has three parts. The first section declares people have a right to \u201cclean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.\u201d Secondly, it states that Pennsylvania\u2019s \u201cpublic natural resources are the common property of all the people\u201d including future generations. Finally, it requires the Commonwealth to act as a trustee to \u201cconserve and maintain\u201d these resources for the \u201cbenefit of all the people.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the 1960s when the environmental movement was cresting [Kury] saw it wouldn\u2019t last forever,\u201d said John Dernbach, emeritus professor at Widener University Law School. \u201cHe knew the statutes being passed in the legislature could always be repealed. To see beyond the top of the hill like he did\u2014\u2013that\u2019s visionary.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Growing Up in the Shadow of the Coal Industry<\/p>\n

Kury was deeply influenced by his upbringing in central Pennsylvania, both in terms of politics and the environmental degradation the coal industry left behind. Born in Sunbury, Northumberland County, in 1936, Kury wrote in his memoir that his family\u2019s shoe business was his political incubator and a \u201cDemocratic island in a sea of Republicanism,\u201d where his father enjoyed political banter with everyone who came in.\n<\/p>\n

As a child, Kury visited his grandparents in Shenandoah and remembered seeing a huge culm bank near their home and a stream nearby. The polluted water from the coal waste was \u201cblack as the ace of spades. I never quite got over that,\u201d he recalled in a 2018 interview for\u00a0a documentary<\/a>\u00a0by WITF, the Harrisburg PBS station. \u201cFor a hundred years after the Civil War, the state government of Pennsylvania was pretty much controlled by the railroad industry, the steel industry and the coal industry. They were accomplices to all this exploitation.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

After graduating from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and earning a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Kury ran for the state house in 1966 as a Democrat. He centered his campaign on clean streams. He credited his wife Elizabeth (Beth) Kury with the idea for what became his defining campaign image. The photograph shows him, eyebrows raised, with the message \u201cThe Choice is Yours.\u201d In each hand he holds a jar of water. One is transparent and labeled \u201cclean,\u201d and the other is filled with black water with the label \u201cpolluted.\u201d His simple message worked, and he scored a major upset\u2014defeating a powerful Republican incumbent who had held the seat for nearly 30 years.\n<\/p>\n

Kury and his wife, a fellow attorney, raised three sons together. He later served in the state senate from 1973 to 1980. After his time in the legislature, he continued his career in law at several firms, including the Kury and Kury law firm with Beth,\u00a0who died in 2024<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

Michael Aumiller was Kury\u2019s administrative aide in the Senate, and the two men became lifelong friends.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cFrank was driven,\u201d Aumiller said. \u201cThat\u2019s the way he\u2019s been all through his life.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

Aumiller recalled working with Kury to get legislation passed to address floodplain management following the devastating flooding that hit Pennsylvania in 1972 from Hurricane Agnes.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you start telling townships, boroughs, and counties what to do with their land, it\u2019s not easy stuff to get through,\u201d Aumiller remembered. \u201cBut he worked at it. What he really wanted to do was save lives and property. When he had a passion for something, he stayed with it until the job was done.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

David Hess spent more than 40 years working on environmental issues in the state, including as former secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection and credits Kury with creating the foundation of environmental protection in the state.\n<\/p>\n

\u201cHis accomplishments made life better for Pennsylvanians impacted by the environmental insults of industry, something we need to again focus on today,\u201d Hess wrote in an email.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News. A monumental figure in Pennsylvania\u2019s environmental movement passed away last…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[18318,22847,28,30,29,5206],"class_list":["post-272111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-environmental-regulations","tag-inside-climate-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-whyy-news-climate-desk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}