Our Work
All of our work is informed and directed by people who live in Washington and Greene Counties. We work with people around the issues that are impacting them, which typically fall into four pillars: Coal, Oil/Gas & Petrochemical, Economic Justice, and Democracy. Through our work in these categories, our focus is to invest in the leadership of those who are most impacted and to help create communities of people that possess the skills and analysis to advocate for their basic rights to a healthy environment and thriving economy.
Directly below, you can access more information on the different facets of our work, and our blogs appear beneath, beginning with the most recent.
Updates on our Work
Whitehorn Run in Greene County, PA (Photo Credit: DEP) By Laura Legere by Post-Gazette HARRISBURG — A bill that will make it harder to challenge underground coal mining permits because […]
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Whitehorn Run, Greene County (Photo Credit: DEP) by Marie Cusack, StateImpact The state senate has advanced a bill that could upend an ongoing legal challenge by two environmental groups seeking to restrict […]
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Our allies Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC) and the Mountain Associations for Community Economic Development (MACED) and their supporters are doing powerful work to build a clean and just new […]
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Senator Joe Scarnati and Senator Gene Yaw introduced Senate Bill No. 624 (SB 624) last month, and it is now before the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee. SB 624 proposes […]
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Following U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt’s visit to a local coal mine, the Center for Coalfield Justice and Sierra Club Beyond Coal hosted a press conference where […]
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by Kirk Jalbert, Manager of Community-Based Research & Engagement, Fractracker Alliance
and Veronica Coptis, Executive Director
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) will be hosting a nine-stop “listening tour” to hear residents’ perspectives on environmental justice (EJ). These sessions begin in the western part of the state on April 12th and 13th. The dates and locations of these meetings can be found here. The DEP will also be accepting written comments, which can be either mailed or emailed to DEP-OEJ@pa.gov.
The EJ listening tour follows on the heels of events in May 2016, when environmental advocacy groups questioned the well pad siting practices oil and gas drilling company Range Resources, causing the DEP to announce it would revisit its EJ policies. Such changes would include reassessing how EJ zones are designated and what kinds of development triggers additional scrutiny by the DEP’s Office of Environmental Justice. We wrote about this story, and detailed how present EJ rules fail to account for oil and gas development in June 2016.
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