Data centers are proliferating across the United States during a time when there are a lack of laws, regulations, ordinances, and zoning protections to defend our communities from these hyperscale development proposals. Green Amendments offer a pathway of protection by creating a constitutional obligation on government officials to undertake a full and fair review of the environmental consequences of actions and decisions AND upholding your substantive right to clean, safe, and healthy environments. Every time a data center needs a special approval, change, or exception, it is an opportunity to raise your concerns and your constitutionally protected environmental rights.
Striving for a Green Amendment In Your State? Help Communities Understand How It Will Help Take on the Threat of Data Centers.
- How Can Green Amendments Help Communities Threatened by Hyperscale Data Centers?, a handout for how – once secured in your state — Green Amendments can help take on the threat and impact of Data Centers.
From Pennsylvania? You have a Green Amendment.
The key is to effectively use it. Let us help you.
Download our new guide, Pennsylvania Green Amendment & Data Centers: How to Exercise Your Constitutional Environmental Rights, where we walk you through exactly how the PA Green Amendment can support your data center advocacy and provides tools to craft data center comments for your community efforts. Get the guide here.
Download our guide, Including the Pennsylvania Green Amendment in Municipal Ordinances to Protect & Empower, to learn how to incorporate the Pennsylvania Green Amendment in to municipal ordinances in a way that empowers and ensures greater protections (does not undermine them) and gives good government officials and the public the constitutional strength to ensure they are empowered and obligated to protect environmental rights. Get the guide here.
Download our handbook, The Pennsylvania Green Amendment – Both Opportunity & Obligation, A Guide For Municipalities, to help your community and municipal officials understand how and why the Pennsylvania Green Amendment requires them to do better when it comes to environmental protection. Get the guide here.
- Want an in person or on zoom training or meeting to help you fully understand how the Pennsylvania Green Amendment can and does help and to discuss other ways we can provide hands on support? send an email to maya@forthegenerations.org. Subject Line: Data Center Help.
One example where Pennsylvania’s Green Amendment is being used to challenge data centers is in the case of a data center proposal just outside of Philadelphia, on the Schuylkill River. View our joint comment here.
Webinar: Questions, Constitutional Rights, and Ordinances – Taking on Pennsylvania Data Centers
In PA, you have a constitutional right to clean air, pure water, a healthy environment, and the preservation of our natural resources for current and future generations. Maya K. van Rossum, Founder of Green Amendments For The Generations, will take you through what the Green Amendment is and how you can use it in your data center advocacy.
Not from PA? But facing a data center in your state? This webinar provides info that can be broadly applied, including helping you to understand how a well-crafted Green Amendment can make a difference.
Additional Resources
- Stop Bad Data Centers, Halt the Harm Website with Resources
- The Urgent Case Against Data Centers, Food & Water Watch Report
- DRN Data Center web page
- The People Say No: Resisting Data Centers in the South, Media Justice Resource
- The Costs of Data Centers To Our Communities, Media Justice Resource
- Food and Water Watch model data center ordinance
- AI Now Institute, Data Center organizing and policymaking guides
