On Nov. 5, the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation filed a new petition in the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court against the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) challenging the DCNR’s state forest resource management plan, adopted in 2016, see Docket 609 MD 2019. The basis for the lawsuit stems from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s earlier decision in Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation v. Commonwealth, 161 A.3d 911, 930 (Pa. 2017), where the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that the commonwealth had a duty as a trustee with respect to the management of public natural resources. Since the issuance of the PEDF decision in 2017, the foundation has been actively litigating the contours of the commonwealth’s trustee duty recognized in that decision, and this latest petition represents the most effort by the foundation to define the commonwealth’s ongoing duties with respect to the management of state forest lands as it relates to potentially lucrative oil and gas development.

The latest petition filed by the foundation requests that the Commonwealth Court direct DCNR to manage state forest lands consistent with its trustee responsibilities under the environmental rights amendment to protect the state forest lands from drilling impacts. Specifically, the foundation alleges that the lawsuit was filed because the DCNR’s state forest resource management plan, adopted in 2016 (the 2016 management plan), altered the focus and purpose of the management plan away from the science of ecosystem management. The petition alleges that prior to the adoption of the 2016 management plan, DCNR managed oil and gas sales, as well as other resource sales like timber, and also recreational uses, to be consistent with an overarching goal to maintain the vitality and health of the state forest ecosystem. The petition alleges that after the adoption of the 2016 management plan, DCNR altered the focus of the management to place oil and gas economic “values” on par with the value of forest ecosystem itself, requiring that the DCNR balance economic value of oil and gas resources with the ecosystem values of state forest resources, including the people’s rights to “clean air, pure water, and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values” of the state forests, all of which are values protected under the environmental rights amendment at Article 1, Section 27 of the Pennsylvania state Constitution.