Franklin Kury

Franklin Leo Kury was born on 15 October 1936 in Sunbury, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, the son of Barney and Helen (Witkowski) Kury, who were originally from the coal town of Shenandoah. A family story held that he was first named after his father, but that after Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign train stopped in Sunbury on 29 October 1936, his father changed the baby's name to Franklin.

He later wrote that the family shoe business was his political incubator. As a child visiting his grandparents in Shenandoah, he saw a large culm bank and a stream running black with coal waste, a sight he said he never got over. He graduated from Sunbury High School in 1954, from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, with Phi Beta Kappa honours in 1958, and from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1961.

Kury served in the United States Army and the Army Reserve. He was a staff assistant to Governor George M. Leader, state co-chair of Students for Kennedy-Johnson in 1960, a deputy attorney general in the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General in 1962, and an aide to Congressman George M. Rhodes from 1963 to 1966.

In 1966 he ran as a Democrat for the Pennsylvania House of Representatives from Sunbury on a clean streams platform. His campaign image, which he credited to his wife, showed him holding a jar of clean water and a jar of polluted water under the words The Choice is Yours. He won in an upset over a Republican incumbent of nearly 30 years and served three terms, from 1967 to 1972. He was then elected to the State Senate for the 27th District, covering Columbia, Juniata, Montour, Northumberland, Snyder and Union counties, serving two terms from 1973 to 1980. He did not seek re-election in 1980 and ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer in 1996.

He introduced the environmental rights amendment on 22 April 1970, the first Earth Day. It declares that the people have a right to clean air, pure water and the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment, and makes the Commonwealth the trustee of public natural resources for all the people, including generations yet to come. Voters approved it on 18 May 1971 by 1,021,342 votes to 259,979. He also helped pass amendments to the Clean Streams Act, and in the Senate led a six year effort that produced the state's floodplain and stormwater management laws following the Hurricane Agnes floods of 1972, as well as helping to modernise the Public Utility Commission.

After leaving office he practised law, as a partner at Reed Smith from 1983 to 2003, later at Malady and Wooten, and in the firm Kury and Kury with his wife. He wrote Clean Politics, Clean Streams: A Legislative Autobiography and Reflections, published by Lehigh University Press in 2011, and in 2021 marked the amendment's 50th anniversary with a book proposing a federal constitutional amendment on environmental rights.

Kury married Elizabeth (Beth) Heazlett, a fellow attorney, and they raised three sons, Steven, David and James. The couple practised law together at Kury and Kury. Beth Kury died in 2024. In later years he lived in the Hershey area.

Franklin Kury died on Sunday, 16 August 2026, in hospice care at the Country Meadows Retirement Community in Hershey, Pennsylvania, at the age of 89. No specific cause of death was made public.

He was survived by his sons Steven, David and James, his grandson Hunter, his sister Gloria and his brothers Bernard and Channing. He was predeceased by his wife and by his brothers Wilson and Wendell. Arrangements were handled by Hoover Funeral Home in Hershey, and the family suggested memorial contributions to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. State senators announced plans for a condolence resolution in the Pennsylvania Senate, and environmental leaders paid tribute to his work.

Kury's amendment was one of the first in the world to make a healthy environment a constitutional right, and similar provisions have since been adopted by dozens of countries and by states including Montana, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts and New York. In Robinson Township v. Commonwealth (2013) and Pennsylvania Environmental Defense Foundation v. Commonwealth (2017), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court read the amendment as placing a binding duty on the state and local governments to conserve natural resources as a trustee.

Delaware Riverkeeper Maya van Rossum called him a true icon and a historic leader, saying that histories of the environmental movement would talk not only about people like Rachel Carson but about Senator Franklin Kury. John Dernbach, emeritus professor of law at Widener University, described him as a visionary who saw that the most enduring environmental protection must come from the constitution.