Maya van Rossum Wants to Save the World

Clutching a sheaf of typed notes with one hand and the steering wheel of her electric car with the other, Maya van Rossum was driving west on I-276 and practicing the message she planned to deliver to Pennsylvania’s governor later that morning when she realized—belatedly—that she was going to need a cough drop. The plan for the protest depended on her ability to out-shout the governor’s microphone, derailing his speech, and now she couldn’t stop clearing her throat. 

For thirty years, van Rossum has been the Delaware Riverkeeper, the river’s environmental guardian and the leader of the nonprofit Delaware Riverkeeper Network, which advocates for the health of the river and its ecosystem in the entire watershed, from New York to Delaware. Admired for her passion, courage and dedication by her adversaries and allies alike, she is used to charging through any and all obstacles she encounters, tapping into what appears to be a bottomless reservoir of willpower. On this March morning, she had to admit to one human limitation: she had a cold. 

Governor Shapiro was scheduled to address a meeting about building a hub called MACH2 for producing, transporting and storing hydrogen fuel in the mid-Atlantic region. The event would begin at 8:15, and it was almost 8. A few miles from the Philadelphia union hall hosting the meeting, van Rossum stopped at a Wawa convenience store. She ran inside, but there were no lozenges to be found, so she settled for a package of Life Savers, popping one into her mouth as she pulled back into traffic. Hazy clouds scudded across the horizon, the sky paling as the sun rose. “Look how fast the clouds are going,” she said, turning to her daughter Anneke van Rossum, who also works for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network and was sitting in the passenger seat. “See, even the earth is angry at MACH2.”

This protest would be typical of van Rossum’s approach to her work, combining an abiding belief in the power of using her voice to amplify others’; a stubborn insistence on pursuing any injustice that crosses her desk; a calculated strategy to capture policy makers’ attention; and a willingness to do anything she can for the cause, whether that’s formulating a legal argument, coordinating bus transportation, stapling informational leaflets or risking arrest. 

Throughout her career, from pioneering victories to protect the Delaware River watershed from fracking, development and pollution to her current crusade to bring environmental rights amendments like Article 1 Section 27 of Pennsylvania’s Constitution to states across the country, she’s faced unfavorable odds. 

For every important battle she’s won, like overturning the pro-fracking Pennsylvania law Act 13, which limited municipalities’ ability to restrict drilling, there’s been a few bitterly lost, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ dredging of the Delaware in the mid 2000s or the expansion of Route 29 in New Jersey, which cut off access to Trenton’s riverfront. 

In 2014, van Rossum founded the Green Amendments for the Generations movement after the Delaware River Network was part of litigation that challenged Act 13 using Pennsylvania’s long-dormant environmental rights amendment as a legal basis. 

Passed in 1971, in an earlier era of environmentalism, the amendment states that “public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come,” and the state has an obligation to “conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.” It starts with a simple, clarifying sentence: “The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment.” 

Van Rossum wrote a book, “The Green Amendment,” as the movement’s manifesto, and she devotes considerable energy to explaining to policy makers why passing an amendment like Pennsylvania’s could change how their courts view claims made about climate change and environmental harms. In 2021, she helped shepherd a green amendment from proposal to passage in New York. Green amendments are part of a larger legal reckoning with climate change in the United States and around the world.  

As a conservationist, van Rossum’s success is measured by what hasn’t been built; she is an anti-Robert Moses, whose legacy will be defined by the absence of landscape-altering monuments rather than the raising of them. That means some of the biggest beneficiaries of her advocacy will never know who she is, and when she wins, her job is more likely to involve heckling than public adulation. 

“She’s one of the most effective advocates in the country. She’s one of the unsung heroes,” said Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Federation and the former cabinet secretary for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. (O’Mara is also chairman for the MACH2 project.)

“I think you’d see a much more industrialized river if it wasn’t for her leadership. The number of projects that in a status quo environment probably would have been approved–it’s almost hard to think about how many communities would have been affected,” he said. “One of the interesting things about Maya’s leadership is that folks in those communities don’t know her name because those things didn’t happen, right? They don’t know.” 

Because of that history, she’s undeterred by the prospect of a thankless, protracted struggle, and the hydrogen issue is no different. “It took a long time to tell people about fracking,” she said in the car on the way to the hydrogen meeting, comparing the challenges of educating Pennsylvanians about fracking when it first came to the state 20 years ago to raising awareness about the federal government’s push to build hydrogen infrastructure in 2024. 

“If you look back at fracking and fracked gas, it wasn’t just industry that was peddling the lie. President Obama said it,” she said. “All these government officials were out there saying, ‘It’s fine. It’s good. We should invest in it.’ And they were pouring money into it.” She sees a similar pattern of political hype, government investment and what she views as a lack of engagement with the science emerging around hydrogen.

Hydrogen is controversial because it is often made using fracked natural gas, which comes with a host of climate and environmental problems. MACH2’s leaders say their hub will not use natural gas but will make “zero-emission” green hydrogen, from water, and pink hydrogen, from nuclear power, and that the hub’s network of producers, consumers and distributors will create 20,000 jobs in the region.  

Van Rossum believes the project’s leaders and the politicians who support them, including Governor Shapiro, have not done enough to engage with the environmental justice communities in Pennsylvania and Delaware who are supposed to benefit from the project, which will be funded with $750 million from the Department of Energy through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. MACH2 is one of seven hydrogen hubs across the country supported by DOE, and the Biden administration sees the technology as a centerpiece of its climate strategy, lowering greenhouse gas emissions from hard-to-electrify sectors like heavy industry and long-haul trucking.

“It really is a situation of death by one thousand cuts.”

The project is required by the federal government to include a “community benefits plan” that emphasizes “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” and explains how the project will incorporate the Biden Administration’s Justice40 initiative’s directive that 40 percent of the benefits from specific federal investments be earmarked for “disadvantaged communities.” 

Like many residents and activists in these neighborhoods, whom she works with closely, van Rossum is skeptical of the government’s promises about hydrogen as a clean energy and climate solution and MACH2’s plans in the region in particular, including the intention to draw power from the Salem Nuclear Generating Station in New Jersey, which causes massive fish kills in the Delaware. 

“Their messaging and their marketing is, ‘it’s clean and green.’ No, it is not,” she said. “It will have devastating consequences for our climate, for our river, for our region, for our communities, for our health, for our safety and for future generations. It will have its own direct harmful impacts, and it will stave off true solutions.” Green hydrogen production, she said, requires an enormous amount of renewable energy that should be directed toward other needs. She is also concerned about the climate effects of hydrogen leaks, air pollution caused by hydrogen production and what the construction of new or retrofitted hydrogen infrastructure will mean for people living in environmental justice areas.

Hydrogen buildout is just one of many threats to the health of the Delaware River watershed, from warehouse development and PFAS contamination to the plight of the river’s endangered Atlantic sturgeon population, which has fallen to fewer than 250 individuals, to pending proposals for new Liquified Natural Gas export facilities and the worsening effects of climate change, which is contributing to increased flooding and erosion. “It really is a situation of death by one thousand cuts,” she said. “Just because one cut doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean that you save the living body.”

In many ways, protecting the Delaware—and the rights to clean air and pure water enshrined in Pennsylvania’s constitution—seems, from the outside, even more daunting now than when van Rossum became the Riverkeeper in 1994. And yet she remains both resolute and optimistic, and not only about her mission to defend her beloved river. “I have a goal to accomplish,” she told me, around the time of the hydrogen protest in March. “I’m going to save the world–or the part of the world I can.”

No Hydrogen Hub!

Back in the car on the way to the hydrogen hub meeting, van Rossum was going over the plan for the protest, which would involve herself, her daughter and three other activists stepping forward one by one to disrupt the governor’s speech with questions about the project. “Presumably every time someone interrupts with a question, they are going to get tossed,” she said. “And then the next person is going to go.” Van Rossum would go first.

Fifty-eight and petite, van Rossum wears her short blonde hair streaked with turquoise. She is literally hard to keep up with, walking almost as fast as she talks, a blur dressed in shades of teal, aqua and blue. She can be intimidating and intense–and unfailingly kind. She thanks security guards with a cheerful “appreciate you!” Instead of “Best” or “Sincerely,” she signs off her emails with “Smiling.” She insists on leading an enthusiastic rendition of “Happy Birthday” for every Delaware Riverkeeper Network staff member. When she passes over the Delaware, she blows a kiss to the river. In a newspaper profile from 2003, the writer called her “a cross between Jesse Ventura and Tinkerbell. A pixie with an attitude.” 

She’s perpetually in motion, spending her weekends making soup from scratch for sick coworkers and family members. She travels frequently for her green amendment work, speaking to legislators and activists about the movement in New Mexico, Washington, Michigan and elsewhere. She tells grocery store clerks in other states about environmental rights amendments when they ask if she needs a plastic bag.  

There is no just cause she won’t take on, no matter how unwinnable, unpopular or inconsequential it seems to others. “The big battles rely on the small battles, and you can’t have one without the other,” said Anneke, who calls her mom her hero and followed in her footsteps to law school and into environmental activism. “My friends always joke, she must drink so much coffee,” she said. “But it’s just something inside her. I’ve never seen her not push through.” 

She inspires fierce loyalty in her staff; many of them have worked with her for years, citing her generosity, positivity and tirelessness. “It seems that she has endless reserves of energy,” said Tracy Carluccio, the deputy director at the Riverkeeper Network, who has worked alongside van Rossum since the 1990s. “She demonstrates a remarkable ability to persist.” That tenacity is probably her greatest strength and might be her greatest flaw; she doesn’t seem to know how to stop. (It is not difficult to guess why she might be nursing a lingering cough.)

Van Rossum is deeply knowledgeable, quick on her feet and capable of rousing almost any kind of disinterested audience–whether graduate students, state senators or neighbors at a township meeting. In sleepy bureaucratic proceedings, hers tends to be the most spirited voice in the room. In a debate, she is incisive and witty. During a recent committee hearing at the State House Annex in Trenton, one of the critics of the pending green amendment bill there had to follow her testimony with his own. “Well, I just want to start by saying I pity the poor fool who has to go after Maya,” he said, to laughter.

Van Rossum is also unapologetically loud. A few days later, at a different meeting in the New Jersey capital, another political opponent came over to deliver a compliment. “You are the only person in Trenton who’s louder than me,” he said. “And I adore you for that.” 

Today, she would need to be louder than Governor Shapiro.

Three weeks earlier, in February, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network had joined more than 30 other organizations in sending a letter to the Department of Energy objecting to the meeting’s weekday morning timing and location, a union hall in the farthest reaches of Northeast Philadelphia, making it inaccessible for many people living in the areas south of the city where the hydrogen hub’s projects may eventually be built. 

In response, MACH2’s leadership said they were planning a “public event” and not a “community meeting.” “We believe this is an important distinction,” they wrote. “Our goal is to host a regional meeting where people from as many constituencies as possible are able to attend and learn about the MACH2 hub as a whole.” That explanation wasn’t enough to placate DRN and its coalition, who wanted the meeting rescheduled and relocated so more people could attend. They began planning the protest. 

Van Rossum and her colleagues volunteered to lead the protest because they expected to be escorted out. The community members who had managed to get to the meeting needed to be able to stay and hear the information being presented. “Nobody’s meeting with them about MACH2,” van Rossum said. “They’re frustrated by this process. They want to be in the room.” 

The Steamfitters Local Union 420 hall was located in a complex of office buildings and warehouses not far from the highway. At the entrance, a cluster of green and gold balloons was tied to the fence. Poster boards pinned with name tags in the lobby displayed the list of attendees: representatives from the oil and gas industry and the energy sector, some politicians and city officials and a lot of union members.

Protesters from the environmental justice group Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living wore purple t-shirts with the CRCQL logo and held homemade signs reading “No Hydrogen Hubs,” and “No LNG,” decorated with skulls and bones. Fifteen miles south of Philadelphia on the western bank of the Delaware, the city of Chester may be included in the future hydrogen hub, according to preliminary plans; it is also a birthplace of Pennsylvania’s environmental justice movement and the home of one of the largest trash incinerators in the United States. Looking around at the union hall crowd, Zulene Mayfield, CRCQL’s founder, summed up the scene. “This is a white organization,” she said. 

Once she learned about the meeting, Mayfield had done everything she could to make it there, going to “extraordinary lengths” given the time and distance from Chester. But others in Chester weren’t able to attend, and residents had a lot of questions and concerns about the project. “Nobody has done outreach in my community about hydrogen hubs,” she said. “If there is one iota of pollution, we don’t want it.” 

She felt her community had been deliberately excluded from the event, even though the program stated that one of the project’s goals was “the provision of economic opportunity and health improvements that will directly benefit disadvantaged communities.”

Ramona Rousseau-Reid, who was there as the vice president of the Eastwick Friends and Neighbors Coalition, a community group in Philadelphia, wanted to know who at this meeting was going to speak on behalf of her neighborhood, Eastwick. Eastwick is set along the Schuylkill River and deals with chronic flooding and pollution from legacy industrial sites. The Schuylkill is one of the Delaware’s largest tributaries. “Our voice is important,” she said. “Historically, we don’t find out until it’s over. Those days got to be over.”

The presentations began, and van Rossum pasted three anti-hydrogen stickers on the front of her blue sweater, choosing a seat in the middle of the hall to wait for Shapiro’s appearance, her opened tube of Life Savers on the table. She wasn’t worried about her cough; in the past, running on adrenaline, she has pushed through far more serious illness, pain and grief in order to do her job. (“It doesn’t matter how sick I am,” she told me later. “People often don’t even know I’m sick.”) 

She was worried, as she always is, about whether she would live up to her obligations to represent the needs of the river and its communities, whether her voice would be enough, whether she was doing everything she could in that moment to ensure success. When she was younger, she used to worry more about the reaction to speaking out, especially in a hostile room, as when she confronted Barack Obama over his stance on fracking in 2013. Now, in the union hall, she wasn’t thinking: Can I do this? She was thinking: Can I do this right?

She listened as O’Mara, the MACH2 chair, talked about how the hydrogen hub would create jobs and economic opportunities at the same time it reduced pollution from industry and transportation along the I-95 corridor, scribbling notes with characteristic intensity. When Shapiro was introduced to applause, she took a deep, steadying breath. The governor, in a clean-cut dark suit and no-nonsense glasses, paused at the microphone. “Good morning, everybody,” he said. “It’s good to be together today. It’s great to have this opportunity to kick off the next incredibly exciting chapter here in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”

As Shapiro praised “the hardworking women and men of the Philadelphia building trades,” van Rossum took another breath, her body twitching with nervous energy. “I want you to know we are all in when it comes to the hydrogen hubs here in the commonwealth,” he said. She leapt from her chair and advanced toward the stage. 

At Ithan Creek

The Delaware River is 330 miles long, stretching from New York to Delaware, where it empties into the Delaware Bay. Its watershed extends east into New Jersey and west into Pennsylvania, draining 13,539 square miles and providing drinking water for more than 17 million people in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton and New York City. It is the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi. One of the Delaware’s many tributaries is Ithan Creek, a meandering stream that passes through the area of suburban Philadelphia called the Main Line, where van Rossum grew up and where she lives now with her husband, a high school teacher, and teenage son, in Bryn Mawr. 

In the spring, I met van Rossum in a swim club parking lot in nearby Villanova to see the creek where she often played as a girl. “This used to be all forest,” she said as we marched along the narrow shoulder of a busy road, stepping into wet grass whenever a car whizzed past. “It’s a very different place than when I grew up.” Outside a wellness clinic, we left the driveway behind and walked into the trees, van Rossum carefully pushing vines and thorny branches aside as we approached the water. 

We could hear the interstate before we could see it. The rumble of speeding traffic drowned out snippets of birdsong and the burble of the creek. At a clearing, we squinted up at a concrete overpass for I-476, informally called the Blue Route and built starting in the 1970s. Eventually, it cut across the woods where she’d spent her childhood, an asphalt gash. 

Despite the noise, the spot held an unlikely beauty. Clover and violets grew underfoot, and the trees’ canopies were reflected in the creek’s shallow current, a gently shifting mirror. Van Rossum had a hard time recognizing the charms of what was left; she was too incensed by the destruction of what had once been. “I look at this, and all I see are the invasives,” she said. “And that goddamn highway.”

“Over there, just on the other side, there was a big meadow that went up to a big old house. It was up on the hill,” she said, pointing beyond the overpass. “I mean, this is better than full on development,” she sighed, frowning at a glossy patch of lesser celandine, an invasive flowering plant. She remembered playing in the water and an ancient tree with roots that tendrilled into the creekbed. 

When van Rossum was a child, the highway was already being constructed, though she didn’t understand then what that would mean for the woods behind her house. “The residents were fighting it very mightily. I didn’t know at the time. I was too young,” she said. “This section, that went through our forest, that was the last section to be built.” While she was away at law school at Pace University in New York in 1992, she came home to find everything changed. 

Van Rossum has often said she owes her love for nature and her fearlessness as an activist in part to her Dutch-born mother, a mathematics professor who used to drive around their neighborhood collecting bags of leaves from other people’s trash piles to use for compost, and who later tried to restore a little patch of the land in the highway’s shadow. “I just saw my mother’s joy and pride in doing what was right. Maybe she did feel a little embarrassed, but she never let that stop her,” she said. “I found in myself my own pride in doing what was right even when people were looking at me with disdain or disgust.”

Wherever it came from, van Rossum’s moral compass has guided her from an early age; she has always carried an unshakeable sense of right and wrong and an instinct to stand up for anything and anyone who might be suffering. 

Large windows at her elementary school created a hazard for birds, who couldn’t see the glass and flew straight into it, ending up heaped and broken on the ground below. “I would get very upset, and I would always cry. And I always wanted to bury the bird,” van Rossum said. One day, in first or second grade, van Rossum saw that a cardinal had been killed by the window. She wanted to bury this bird, too, but her teachers wouldn’t let her, telling her she needed to go to class. The principal was called and admonished her because she wasn’t listening to her teachers. 

Van Rossum stared at his shiny, black shoes. “I was adamant that I had to bury that bird. He was adamant that I had to go into the classroom. But in the end he gave me my shovel, and I buried the bird.” She hadn’t been able to save the bird’s life, but she had realized something valuable. “I learned, even from that young age, if you continue to stand firm for what you believe in, even when you’re very afraid, even in the face of that much stronger power, if you stand firm, you can win.”

We Are Here to Listen

“Governor Shapiro!” van Rossum shouted. “What about the community members? The Department of Energy says that community engagement is supposed to be a highest priority.” She strode to the podium holding her notepad and gesturing toward him with her pen, punctuating each point. “When are you going to have a meeting with those community members? You have clearly had plenty of time to have meetings with those who are making money off of this deal. What about those who are going to be host to the hydrogen hub and bear the burdens? Please answer the question!” 

A smattering of clapping followed as Shapiro attempted to cut her off. “Let’s understand,” he said. “This is a meeting where we are here to engage. This is a meeting where we are here to listen. This is the beginning of our planning process. And I’m happy to have people voice their thoughts constructively through this process. But yelling and shouting does nothing other than disrespecting the people who are here to listen.”

Several men, some of them clearly security, descended toward van Rossum. “Shut up!” someone in the audience snapped. “Let him speak!” She looked suddenly small, surrounded by men who towered over her. “Don’t touch her,” one of the other protestors said, moving toward van Rossum as the men got closer. Shapiro’s initial calm curdled into irritation as he tried to continue with his remarks.

One by one, Carluccio, Anneke, Ginny Marcille-Kerslake with Food & Water Watch and Frank Fortino of Extinction Rebellion Philadelphia joined van Rossum on the floor, asking their own prepared questions. Their voices became a chorus of indignation. “This just became an official shitshow,” an attendee sitting at van Rossum’s table said to his neighbor, leaning over. 

“Shame!” van Rossum yelled at Shapiro, and the crowd hurled the word back at her. “Shame on you!” they chanted. “Shame on you!” For a few tense moments it seemed like the hovering police officers were going to escort her outside, prompting cheering, but instead the governor gave up on his speech and left the stage. 

The audience grumbled, and Jim Snell, the business manager for Steamfitters Local 420, took control from the dais. “At this point, hopefully, we get no more interruptions. Let’s just hear it out,” he said. “And if you have a question, I would suggest instead of yelling out just randomly, there’s index cards with pencils on each table.”

In the end, during a four-hour long event, only a handful of index card questions were answered on stage in five minutes at the end of a panel called “Community Benefits, Workforce, Public Health, and Equity.” A powerpoint slide sat frozen on the main screen reading, “Audience Questions (Time Permitting).”

When I spoke to O’Mara after the event, he said frontline communities’ concerns about the hydrogen hub were “understandable and warranted,” given the past and present reality of environmental injustice in those places. While he didn’t agree with the method of van Rossum’s protest, he seemed to have genuinely listened to her questions. 

“There needs to be more community meetings,” said O’Mara, who is a Democratic candidate for governor of Delaware in addition to his work on MACH2 and for the NWF. “I think the point about communication was completely fair.” The team was planning upcoming in-person events for community members in Chester and Delaware City, Delaware. Since the protest, the Department of Energy has hosted a virtual listening session about MACH2 “for impacted communities to voice their questions and concerns,” with a second session planned for May 15. 

O’Mara said there is a lot of “misinformation” out there about MACH2, and he feels more outreach can help to correct this. He believes the project, which is only in the opening phase of what is likely to be a years-long planning and construction process, could be realized in a way that benefits places like Chester, lowers pollution and helps combat climate change. “I have more confidence that we can do green hydrogen the right way” than van Rossum does, he said. “But I think it’s a legitimate conversation to have about how to do it right.” 

For the Benefit of All the People

Three days after the hydrogen protest, I accompanied van Rossum to Trenton to witness a pivotal vote on the bill to add a green amendment to New Jersey’s constitution. 

As the state senators voted and the bill was released from committee, taking a small but important step toward becoming law, van Rossum recorded the celebratory scene on her phone, a beaming smile on her face. Afterward, she hugged and shook hands with her colleagues and supporters and posed for a photo with Senator Bob Smith, the chair of the Senate Environment and Energy committee. 

“If not for her, there would not be a modern green amendment movement,” said David Pringle, an environmental advocate for Clean Water Action in New Jersey who has worked with van Rossum for decades, including on New Jersey’s amendment, and who was present at the vote. 

“It’s not a cure all. It’s not a magic bullet. It’s not like things are perfect in Pennsylvania or New York, but they’re better in each of those states” because of the green amendments, Pringle said. Unlike Pennsylvania’s amendment, New Jersey’s includes specific wording about the right to a safe climate, and van Rossum’s organization has recommended it also include explicit language about environmental justice.

Senator Andrew Zwicker, co-sponsor of the bill, said van Rossum had been instrumental in fighting for New Jersey’s proposal, which was first introduced in 2017. “The green amendment in New Jersey doesn’t exist without Maya,” he said. “That’s just an absolute fact, and we’d have no chance of moving forward without Maya either. She is the force behind it.”

Driving back to Pennsylvania from Trenton, she reflected on the win. “It is always a little deflating,” she said, after the excitement of the vote. There was still so much work to be done, in New Jersey and elsewhere, including the challenges of fundraising. “It is so transformational and so useful,” and yet getting financial support for the work had proven difficult. With better funding, she said, “you could have that victory everywhere.”

Van Rossum has a visionary’s gift for imagining a future that looks very different from the present. In the world she envisions, the guarantees in Pennsylvania’s green amendment are manifestly true, not just in her home state but across the country. She doesn’t dwell on the impossibilities of her goals because she never loses sight of what she’s working toward, something much bigger even than the mighty Delaware.

She’s trained herself to see setbacks as opportunities to hone her strategy, and she is calibrating constantly how her time would be best spent. “You don’t have the luxury of your upset,” she said. “If you are too busy getting upset, you aren’t solving your problem.” It is not that she is never discouraged, hurt or afraid. She’s just learned how to alchemize those feelings into action.