On July 29, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court returned to Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation v. Commonwealth, a leading case on the Environmental Rights Amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution. The court appears to have decided that the commonwealth is free to allow use of Pennsylvania’s public natural resources and to apply the income however it chooses. Only proceeds from the sale of public natural resources must be returned to the public trust corpus.

As is by now familiar, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court plurality in Robinson Township v. Commonwealth, 83 A.3d 901 (Pa. 2013), opined that the second and third sentences of the Environmental Rights Amendment create a trust. The corpus of the trust is all the public natural resources of Pennsylvania. The trustee is the commonwealth. The beneficiary is “all the people, including generations yet to come.” The full text of the amendment is: “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.”