Press Contacts:

Julia Olson, 415-786-4825, julia@ourchildrenstrust.org

Victoria Loorz, 805-200-8747, victoria@kvgw.org

Kelly Matheson, 718-344-7480, kelly@witness.org

Pennsylvania Youth Petition Five State Agencies to Protect the Atmosphere for Future Generations

Mount Pleasant, PA – Last week one young woman, and the non-profit organization Kids v. Global Warming filed a petition for rulemaking to five Pennsylvania agencies in an attempt to get the State to develop an emissions reduction plan and recognize the atmosphere as a public trust resource, as part of a national youth-led climate effort. Petitioner Ashley Funk, an 18-year-old climate change activist from Mount Pleasant, PA, a small community nestled within the Appalachian Mountains, hopes that the state of Pennsylvania will choose to live up to its Constitutional duty to protect the public’s right to a healthy atmosphere and a stable climate. Pennsylvania is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the nation.

Section 27 of the Pennsylvania Constitution states:

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 to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

”We must recognize that the destruction of our atmosphere is the destruction of human health,“ says Ashley. ”The right to clean air is explicitly stated in Pennsylvania’s Constitution, and if these state agencies fail to live up to their duty to protect our right to clean air, they are failing my generation and generations to come.“

After the recent unprecedented decision in the Texas Atmospheric Trust Litigation (ATL) lawsuit, declaring the atmosphere to be a public trust resource, and a Judge denying defendants motion to dismiss a similar New Mexico ATL case, Ashley is hopeful a strong decision to protect public trust resources will emerge in Pennsylvania and around the nation.

Growing up in a poor community dependent on the coal industry, Ashley has devoted her attention to environmental justice. After kick-starting the first recycling program and anti-litter campaign in her town, Ashley began to educate her community about the health hazards of practices like hydro-fracking and mountain top removal coal mining. She also has an active role in the Sierra Student Coalition. In TRUST Pennsylvania, the seventh film of the Stories of TRUST: Calling for Climate Recovery, released last week, Ashley shares her story of how climate change is directly impacting her community and why she chose to take action by petitioning the government to take action on climate change. The award-winning film series is co-produced by WITNESS, Our Children’s Trust and the iMatter Campaign.

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Our Children's Trust is a nonprofit focused on protecting earth’s natural systems for current and future generations. We are here to empower and support youth as they stand up for their lawful inheritance: a healthy planet. We are mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers. We are adults, part of the ruling generation, and we care about the future of our children—and their children's children. www.ourchildrenstrust.org/

iMatter is a youth-led campaign of the nonprofit group, Kids vs Global Warming, that is focused on mobilizing and empowering youth to lead the way to a sustainable and just world. Using multiple platforms at the local, state, and national level, we are committed to raising the voices of the youngest generation to issue a wake-up call to live, lead and govern as if our future matters. www.imattermarch.org/

WITNESS is the global pioneer in the use of video to promote human rights. We empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change. In partnership with the iMatter TRUST Campaign we seek to bring visibility to the challenges our youth already face because of the changing climate and call for a massive assault on fossil fuel emissions. Without an all-out assault, effects will range from drought to disease; from food shortages to tainted water supplies; from the loss of homes due to floods, erosion and fire to massive relocations. The human rights challenge is most succinctly summarized by Mary Robinson,“Climate change will, in short, have immense human consequences.” WITNESS partnered on this campaign in hopes that predictions will not become realities. To view the stories from our youth included in the TRUST Series go to www.witness.org/campaigns/all-campaigns/imatter or www.ourchildrenstrust.org.