Water is sacred. I write as someone guided by peace, reverence for sacred life giving and sustaining water, and the spiritual conviction that nature is not ours to pillage but ours to protect. Clean air, pure water, a stable climate and healthy environments are not luxuries-they are the right of every neighbor and every child across the state. New Jersey’s proposed Green Amendment (SCR43/ACR119) would enshrine those rights in our constitution. Think of it as a protection.
Take the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission (PVSC) dirty methane gas/hydrogen plant proposed for Newark’s Ironbound. Despite widespread community outcry, clear concerns of cumulative impacts of pollution and viable clean energy alternatives, like solar and battery storage, NJ Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) has issued air permits for this fossil fuel burning plant in an overburdened neighborhood by the Department’s own definition. While this decision now faces lawsuits brought on by the community, should it continue to move forward, it will worsen air quality, exacerbate respiratory and mental health diseases and undermine expressed climate related goals.
The NJ Green Amendment would constitutionally recognize and protect our right, as people, to clean air and pure water, and provide community members legal standing to challenge permits violating those inalienable human rights. It would impose a duty on the State of New Jersey to protect nature for present and future generations. The Green Amendment would empower – even obligate – courts to invalidate government approvals for projects that failed to ensure full, fair and generational protection of environmental rights and natural resources – and this would now include ensuring a safe climate. If NJ had a Green Amendment, agencies could no longer ignore climate and cumulative impacts of injustice as PVSC and NJDEP arguably have done in this instance. Pope Francis, in his encyclical Laudato Si’, states “There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy.”
Right now, environmental protections in this state largely depend upon legislation and regulation—both of which can be rolled back or undermined by political or economic pressures. When we pollute rivers or drain wetlands, we are not simply harming ecosystems—we are wounding the living body that sustains us. The laws of nature do not bend to political cycles; they respond solely to balance, respect and reciprocity. A Green Amendment would recognize this sacred responsibility, ensuring no law, no agency, no administration could turn away from the truth that water must remain pure for life to flourish.
Water flows like a gift through landscapes, like blood through the veins and arteries of our bodies. To vote to enshrine in our constitution a powerful Green Amendment is to recognize that right: not only the right to drink and breathe, but the right to communion with Earth’s waters as our relative. When runoff poisons Earth’s waters, when wetlands are drained and rivers and creeks dry up, there is a rupture in the holy current of life.
If NJ had a strong Green Amendment now, we might have been able to prevent this permit from being issued in the first place. The robust pre-action review the constitutional right would have been required, and it would surely have demonstrated that issuing this permit, in this location, as proposed—both on its own and also when pre-existing cumulative impacts were considered – would result in a violation of the environmental rights of impacted communities. This would have failed to fulfill the constitutional duty of equitable environmental rights and natural resources protection. If our state government still saw fit to ignore the devastating ramifications of this project for communities, the people harmed would be on stronger footing to challenge and defeat the permit. We would no longer be debating regulatory limits and standards; now the question would be whether or not this project protects environmental rights for impacted communities and also for future generations. NJ residents deserve the opportunity to vote for a Green Amendment, starting with a hearing of ACR119 in the Assembly, led by Speaker Craig Coughlin.
Join us at the Newark, NJ Green Amendment Town Hall Friday, December 12, 2025, from 11AM-1PM ET. Register HERE.