Green Amendments are self executing provisions added to the bill of rights section of a constitution that recognize and protect the rights of all people, including future generations, regardless of race, ethnicity, tribal membership status, socioeconomics or geography, to pure water, clean air, a stable climate, and healthy environments
News
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.”
We can’t keep undermining rural life to grow the Texas Miracle
One year ago next month, a dozen Bastrop County landowners gathered at a hill-top home overlooking the green pastoral beauty of Wilbarger Bend in late spring. No one was smiling. One irony of rural life in modern America is that your neighbors often remain strangers until some disaster brings them together. Bastrop has had more than its share lately — drought, fire, flood, rise and repeat. The disaster this time was less widespread but just as destructive: their new neighbor, the richest man in the world, was digging a tunnel toward their beloved river. No one was required to tell them.
Today, only three of those neighbors still own their land. The rest, including a well-known filmmaker, a legendary veterinarian, and a sixth-generation Bastrop family have chosen the path of least resistance — take the money and run before things really get bad.
And just how bad have things gotten in the unincorporated areas of Bastrop and dozens of other counties around the fast-growing cities in Texas? Bad enough that our newly elected state representative, Stan Gerdes, a staunch Republican, has introduced a bill this session that calls for what was once unthinkable in this state: give unincorporated counties some of the same tools employed by cities to control and shape their future. Zoning, that bane of urban developers, is suddenly on everyone’s lips out here, although you probably can’t hear them repeat it for all the noise from bulldozers and 18-wheelers tearing up this fertile land.
Since those distraught landowners organized and descended on the Bastrop County courthouse to protest a massive warehouse for Elon Musk’s Boring Company, similar gatherings of quiet desperation have been playing out across the county. Residents of upscale Colovista subdivision have been regular speakers at the commissioners court, too, seeking help in stopping a proposed sand and gravel mine from spilling dust and diesel fumes into their neighborhood. In Elgin, it was the school board that faced the wrath of blindsided landowners besieged by an Austin renewable energy company wanting to level an adjoining 2000-acre forest for a solar factory that would create only one full-time job.
More recently and more threatening, it is the white-knuckled residents along FM 969 who are pleading for help. An 18-mile stretch of treacherous curves that mimic the river it follows, this farm-to-market road has become a trucking thoroughfare for the gravel mines and concrete batch plants that provide the foundations, literally, of our homes and highways. A three-mile stretch of this road has seen three fatal accidents in two months — more than in the past five years.
Gerdes’ attempt to create county planning commissions that have some of the same smart growth tools as their city counterparts would address, albeit it too late, the Wild West land grab that has made Wilbarger Bend ground zero for stupid growth. In less than two years, more than 2000 acres of prime farmland and unspoiled river frontage has gone from farming and recreation to mining, tunneling and manufacturing.
Green Gate Farms moved to Wilbarger Bend not just for its beauty but those two essentials for sustainable farming — good soil and reliable water. This Bend was destined to follow the lead of innovative food hubs like Vermont’s Intervale and Tennessee’s Bell’s Bend. The owners of the six farms and ranches who moved here to grow clean healthy food for surrounding cities are now watching their investments and dreams undermined for lack of regulatory protections these cities take for granted.
All it took was one landowner, an Austin businessman now deceased, who sold the 70 acres that gave the Boring Company its foothold here. Three months later, he sold his remaining 530 acres to Tex Mix Concrete Company. The same domino-like transfer of land across the river has been mirrored inside our bend as the sand and gravel mining footprint has now grown to nearly 900 acres. A similar collapse is happening on the opposite side of 969 now that Travis Materials has moved in, too, forcing the county’s premier agrotourism venue, Barton Hill Farm, to look for a new home.
In less than two years, this nine-mile stretch of the river has been degraded into something that was never planned nor wanted — a full-blown industrial site. Not only farmers and ranchers are devastated but the owners and investors of other established businesses and attractions here, including the Lost Pines Hyatt, LCRA’s McKinney Roughs Park, actor Zachary Levi’s glamping and movie studio, and Sharaz Gardens wedding venue. The Capital Area of Council Governments land-use plans identified Wilbarger Bend as a high priority for recreation and agrotourism. Its designation as having highest quality water protections is what has attracted so many anglers, kayakers and birders out here. Those plans may as well be tossed out while county officials watch in dismay at what this open-arms invitation to unregulated growth has wrought.
Texas is the only state where the vast majority of its land remains a blank slate for industries and developers to carve up and parcel out with such limited restrictions. Wilbarger Bend is only the latest of countless rural “ecological paradises” sacrificed for the Texas Miracle. Gerdes’ bill would allow voters to approve seven-member planning commissions that could create districts and design rules to preserve their character, promote their general welfare, and ensure growth that is planned rather pushed down our throats. Bills similar to HB 3398 have failed over the past two decades for being too broad or heavy handed. These zoning powers would be limited to counties next to cities with populations of 1 million or more. Without a more sane approach to land use, out-of-control development and rural living will keep colliding like the vehicles on this long and winding road.
Sooner or later, life imposes limits, even for the world’s richest man. Let’s make it sooner while we still have time to shape our future and offer a more hopeful and deserving legacy for these beautiful yet vulnerable places we call home.
Skip Connett is co-founder of Green Gate Farms and Friends of the Land.