Protect Our Parks

The best of Pennsylvania

From Valley Forge to the rolling fields of Gettysburg; from Pennsylvania’s portion of the Appalachian Trail and the Delaware Water Gap to Pennsylvania’s awe-inspiring state parks like Ohiopyle and Ricketts Glen. These are our greatest places—for Pennsylvanian's and the nation—where we take our families to hike, camp, fish and teach our kids about Pennsylvania's incredible natural history and the values we share to protect these outdoor wonders.

Constant threats

Unfortunately, our parks, forests, and other public lands face a barrage of threats. These threats include ongoing pollution, fracking and Marcellus Shale drilling, encroaching development, and coal mining. At the same time, politicians in Harrisburg and Washington DC threaten to slash funding for protecting our state and federal parks and forests, and even press to privatize these lands and sell them off to the highest bidder.  

These activities would do irreparable harm to these places we love, threaten the wildlife that make the parks their home, and diminish the natural heritage that we’ll leave for our children and future generations.

Politicians are moving in the wrong direction

In both Harrisburg and Washington DC, our elected officials are pushing a set of policies that will decimate Pennsylvania's-- and the nation's-- public lands.  

This includes:

• Moving forward with policies that would strip funding from successful program that protects our parks and other open spaces from development and drilling like the Land and Water Conservation Fund, Growing Greener and the Keystone Fund.
• Slashing budgets for the agencies charged with protecting, maintaining and overseeing our parks and forests;
• Allowing harmful practices like fracking in our treasured state and federal parks and forests; 
• And even taking our parks away from the public and privatizing them.

Together, we can protect Pennsylvania’s parks, forests, and public lands

At PennEnvironment, we’re making sure that the people who value and enjoy our public lands, the places we love, the programs and agencies that protect them have a voice in Harrisburg and Washington DC. We are talking to Pennsylvanians about what’s at stake, testifying in our nation’s and state’s capitol, educating lawmakers, and shining a spotlight in the media on the need to protect our parks, forests and other critical public lands.