In 1971, a young Pennsylvania legislator named Franklin Kury did something vitally important for his state and the Chesapeake Bay to which it drains. He would wait 42 years to see its potential realized.

I visited Kury, now 89, at his retirement home in Hershey to talk about how he got Pennsylvania’s constitution amended to make environmental protection a fundamental right, along with freedom of speech and free elections.

Only two other states, Montana and New York, have since enacted similarly robust constitutional amendments. The U.S. Constitution, amended 27 times, remains silent on the topic.

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 …

The language, which friends from local sportsmen clubs helped write, is almost Gettysburg Address caliber, profound and succinct.

It is inscribed on a monument at Kury Point, a promontory where the mighty Susquehanna’s West and North Branches join near Sunbury to form the river that delivers close to half the Chesapeake’s fresh water. The views there at Shikellamy State Park are among the finest in the Bay’s six-state watershed.

When Kury was growing up on nearby Shamokin Creek, darkened by coal fines, he said the running joke was, “Don’t worry about falling in. You’ll dissolve before you drown.”

“Coal, steel and railroads ran Pennsylvania from the Civil War through World War II,” he said. “Significant pushback finally came, and in 1968 I watched this wave of environmental legislation passing through the House of Representatives.

“And I thought, this could all be changed back. We need something permanent. So, the amendment was born out of that.”

Pennsylvania voters approved the amendment by a 4-1 margin. A women’s rights amendment the same year passed on a 2-1 vote.

“I was there at the right time in the right circumstances. A year later and I’m not sure it would have happened,” Kury said.

But any great expectations would have to wait — even though a lawsuit soon after it passed, while unsuccessful, affirmed the right under the amendment for citizens to seek redress in court.

For decades thereafter, Pennsylvania courts mostly ignored the amendment, deciding environmental issues with a “three-part test” that favored development and industries, requiring only a “reasonable effort” to reduce environmental harm.

John Dernbach, a professor at Widener Commonwealth Law School in Harrisburg, had long thought the environmental amendment had potential that was overlooked. In 1999, he published a law review paper that envisioned what it could be like if Pennsylvania actually enforced its constitution.

“They say no one reads law review articles,” Dernbach told me. And for another 15 years that seemed the case.

Then came Dec. 19, 2013. If you were an environmentalist in Pennsylvania, you probably remember where you were that day. Cindy Adams Dunn, now Pennsylvania’s longest serving secretary of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, remembers crossing the street in Philadelphia when her phone started lighting up. “It was like an earthquake.”

A ruling had come down, written by the chief justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court: a ringing declaration that impacts from fracking natural gas were illegal under the state environmental amendment.

Chief Justice Ronald Castille was an improbable savior. A former U.S. Marine, a Republican and an elite skier, he was never considered an environmentalist.

But he had done something no other state court had. He had researched the amendment back to its roots and concluded that its language was simple and clear: It should be the rule in such cases, not the old, industry-friendly three-part test.

And he cited John Dernbach’s 1999 law review article four times. “It was a revolution,” Dernbach said. “It forced lawyers and courts to actually look at the text for the first time.”

A case that came along a few years later would lay to rest the three-part test for good and reaffirm the Castille ruling.

“It gave new power to DCNR and [the Department of Environmental Protection],” Dunn said. “It guides us on everything from climate change to investments of state money.”

Dunn’s agency is the largest landholder in the Chesapeake watershed with more than 2 million acres.

“When I’m being grilled in this or that hearing as to just what the state’s interest is, I cite the amendment and say, ‘The people have an interest here.’”

“[Some ask] why, after all these years, more states don’t have this,” said Dernbach, now a professor emeritus. “A handful of other states do have something but not such a guarantee of environment as a basic right … One [answer] is that since the 1970s there are many more and stronger environmental laws, state and federal, so there’s not as much need.”

But there’s no question that a constitutional amendment would nevertheless add value to any state’s protections for nature, he said, “and allow challenges to laws that aren’t working or aren’t good enough.”

The views expressed by opinion columnists are not necessarily those of the Bay Journal.