Our annual joint meeting with Trout Unlimited and the Pine Creek Headwaters Protection Group will take place on November 14 at the Gmeiner Art and Cultural Center in Wellsboro. The presentation will be preceded by a social hour at 6:00 pm (with refreshments); the presentation will begin at 7:00 PM. Please join us for the social hour followed by a brief update on what our groups have been up to. Then our speaker, John Childe, will give his presentation. His topic: should Pennsylvania's State forests be wilderness areas for the benefit of the people or opportunities for the development of commodities such as oil, gas and timber for a few select industries? Should the revenue derived from our State forests go to Harrisburg to benefit the politicians or should the revenue be put back into the State forests and into the Pennsylvania Wilds?
In adopting Article I Section 27 of our Constitution, Pennsylvanians voted overwhelmingly to protect "the clean air and pure water and to preserve the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of our forests". That is what the Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundations is working to make clear in the courts.
About John Childe: John Childe started his legal career in 1974 as Chief Counsel for Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, and afterwards he worked as counsel for the State Bureau of Parks and Forestry. In 1982 he started his own practice in public interest environmental law. He has worked extensively in both Pennsylvania and Florida, where he worked for twenty years on Everglades protection litigation. He returned to Pennsylvania in 2009 specifically to work on challenging the oil and gas leases in our state forests here in the north central region of Pennsylvania.
