The Amish and the Environmental State: A Developing Recognition of Third-Party Harms

Abstract Since 2010, the Pennsylvania Sewer Authority has been involved in a lengthy legal dispute with members of the Sugar Grove Old Order Amish community. As part of a proposal to increase sanitation and prevent toxic runoff, several municipalities passed ordinances that required rural landowners to tie into municipal sewer systems. Members of the Amish community pushed back against the regulation because having the electric pump on their property violates their religious beliefs, their Ordnung. Challenges to the sewer ordinance have been unsuccessful in district and appellate courts, and neither the Pennsylvania nor the U.S. Supreme Court has chosen to review the issue. The Amish relationship to the state in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is the story of shifting societal values. Legislators and the courts in the twentieth century believed that there were few state prerogatives as important as to withstand the judicial strict scrutiny of violating the Free Exercise Clause. With the spread of environmental regulation into even the most rural of communities, however, policymakers are increasingly requiring even those on the fringes of society to comply with public health policies, as environmentalism has revealed the deep interconnectedness between humans and the natural world. Due to the perception of Amish civil liberties as a kind of “canary in a coal mine,” conclusions can be drawn that their experience regarding environmental regulation is illustrative of broader cultural and political shifts resulting from the development and spread of the environmental state.