For the Sake of our Children

[Guest guest]

For the Sake of Our Children

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

EarthLight Magazine #52, Winter 2005

URL:  www.earthlight.org/2005/essay52_kennedy.html

 

Editor's Introduction:  Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has a passionate desire

for a sustainable future. The economic, the political, and the personal

worlds are all part of this evolving vision. So too, is our spiritual

life. Kennedy views the corporate assault on the environment as " a moral

assault on future generations. " And he has worked tirelessly to defend

and preserve the common ecological birthright of our children.

In the 1990s, Kennedy helped lead the fight to turn back the

anti-environmental legislation during the 104th Congress. The New York

Watershed Agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists

and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international

model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development.

Currently, he acts as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeepers,

Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, and is

President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. In addition to work on

environmental issues across the continent, Kennedy has assisted several

indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada in successfully

negotiating treaties protecting traditional homelands.

In this article, the author warns us of the attack underway on our

natural heritage, of the dangers of domination of the government by

large corporations, and of the spiritual implications of our plunder of

the Earth.

— K. Lauren de Boer   

 

I have been an environmental advocate for twenty years, and I’ve been

disciplined during that period about being nonpartisan in my approach to

this issue. The worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it

becomes the province of a single political party. Most of the

environmental leaders in our country agree with me. Five years ago, if

you asked the leaders of the major environmental groups in America,

What’s the gravest threat to the global environment?, they would have

given you a range of answers: overpopulation, habitat destruction,

global warming. Today, they will all tell you one thing: it’s George W.

Bush. This is the worst environmental president that we have ever had.

You simply cannot speak honestly about the environment in any context

today without speaking critically about this president. If you go to the

Natural Resources Defense Council’s web site you will see over 400 major

environmental rollbacks that have been promoted by this administration

over the last three and half years. It is a concerted, deliberate

attempt to eviscerate thirty years of environmental law. It is a stealth

attack, one that’s been hidden from the public.

We found, in 2003, a memo from Frank Luntz, the president’s pollster, to

the president saying that if you go through with the evisceration of

America’s environmental law, you are going to alienate not just

Democrats but the Republican rank and file. Eighty-one percent in both

parties want clean air, they want stronger environmental laws and they

want them strictly enforced. Luntz said that to the president, and he

said, if we do this we have to do a stealth attack. He recommended using

Orwellian rhetoric to mask this radical agenda: They want to destroy the

forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act, they want to destroy the

air they call it the Clear Skies Act. Most insidiously, they have

installed the worst, most irresponsible polluters in America, and the

lobbyists from those companies, as the heads of virtually all the

agencies and sub-secretariats and even Cabinet positions that regulate

or oversee our environment. The head of the Forest Service is a timber

industry lobbyist who is probably the most rapacious timber industry

lobbyist in American history. The head of public lands is a mining

industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional.

The head of the Air Division at the EPA is a utility lobbyist who has

represented the worst polluters in America for twenty years. The head of

Superfund is a woman whose former job was advising companies how to

evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto

lobbyist—these are not exceptions, these are the rules across the

agencies. I think it’s a good idea to bring business people into

government, to bring that experience and expertise. These individuals

did not enter government service for the purpose of promoting the public

interest, but in each of these cases, rather to subvert the very laws

that they are now charged with enforcing. We are seeing the impacts of

this already. This year, for the first year on record, the EPA announced

that the dead zone in Lake Erie—you remember Lake Erie was declared dead

prior to Earth Day 1970—is growing. Our water in this country, according

to EPA, is getting dirty for the first time since the Clean Water Act

was passed.

The rollbacks from the Bush administration have affected the lives of

millions and millions of Americans adversely. Consider just one

industry: the coal-burning utilities. One out of every four black

children in New York now has asthma. I have three sons who have asthma.

We don’t know why we have this epidemic of pediatric asthma, but we do

know that asthma attacks are caused primarily by two components of air

pollution: ozone and particulates. In the Los Angeles Times recently

there was a description of a study that’s about to be published in the

New England Journal of Medicine that shows that even small amounts of

ozone pollution do permanent damage to children’s lungs. In San

Bernardino, for example, ten percent of the children have lungs that are

permanently damaged, that will never recover; and that lung injury

precipitates in human beings a whole host of other diseases throughout

their lifetime.

We know that the principal source of ozone and particulates in our air

is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal

illegally. They were supposed to install controls over fifteen years

ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those

plants. But this industry gave $48 million to President Bush during the

2000 campaign, and they’ve contributed $58 million since. One of the

first things that President Bush did when he came to office was to order

the Justice Department to drop all 75 of those suits. The Justice

Department lawyers were shocked. This has never happened in our history

before, where somebody running as a presidential candidate accepts money

from a criminal and then lets that criminal off the hook. Many of you

remember what happened when President Clinton pardoned Mark Rich and how

indignant the press and the public was at that action. But Mark Rich was

one person, and he never killed anybody. According to EPA, these 75

plants, just the criminal exceedences from these plants, kill 5,500

Americans every year. After letting these criminals off the hook, the

president then went and rewrote the Clean Air Act, illegally we believe.

We’re suing him, we’ll win the suit, but it may take ten years, and in

the meantime they’ll discharge what they want.

I live in New York State. Most of the fish in New York are now unsafe to

eat from mercury contamination. I live two miles from the state of

Connecticut; in Connecticut every freshwater fish is now unsafe to eat.

Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that in 19 states it

is unsafe to regularly eat any freshwater fish, and in 48 states at

least some fish are unsafe to eat. The mercury is coming, largely, from

those same 1,100 coal-burning power plants. We know a lot about mercury

that we didn’t know five or ten years ago. We know that one out of every

six American women of childbearing years now has so much mercury in her

womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases:

cognitive impairment; mental retardation; autism; blindness; kidney,

liver or heart disease. I have so much mercury in my body, I was told by

Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury

contamination, that if I were a woman of childbearing years and produced

a child, that the child would have cognitive impairment, and, he

estimated, a permanent IQ loss of five to seven points. There are

630,000 children born in this country every year who have been exposed

to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.

Recognizing this threat to the American public, the Clinton

administration reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the

Clean Air Act; that triggered the requirement that those companies

remove 90 percent of that mercury within three and a half years. It

would have cost, according to EPA, less than one percent of the revenues

of those plants for them to do that. That’s a great deal for the

American people, but it’s still billions of dollars for that industry.

Eight weeks ago, Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era

rules and substituting, instead, rules that were written by the

industry’s lobbying firm Latham and Watkins. On their face, they say

that they have to clean up, within fifteen years, 50 percent of the

mercury. But they’ve woven so many loopholes into the new rule that they

will literally never have to clean up. The chief lobbyist for the firm

who wrote it is now the head of the Air Division at EPA.

We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a world where,

because somebody gave money to a politician, our children are brought

into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. This is

a world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, my children

and the children of millions of other Americans can no longer enjoy the

seminal, primal activities of their youth—which is to go fishing with

their father or mother and come home and eat the fish. I live two hours

south of the Adirondack Mountains. This is the oldest protected

wilderness area on the face of the Earth; it’s been protected since the

1880s. Today, one-fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized

from acid rain which is coming from those same coal-burning power

plants, and this president has put the brakes on the statutory

requirement that those companies remove the materials that are causing

the acid rain. [. . .]

 

Read the remainder of this article at the following link:

URL: www.earthlight.org/2005/essay52_kennedy.html