For The Sake Of Our Children
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
EarthLight Magazine
3-5-5
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.
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.
I flew recently over the coalfields of the Appalachians. I saw
something that if the American people could see there would be a
revolution in this country. We are cutting down the mountains,
literally cutting them down. The coal companies blow off the tops of
the mountains, using 2,500 tons of dynamite in West Virginia alone
every year. They fire the workers: When my father was fighting strip
mining in West Virginia in 1968 there were 114,000 coal miners digging
coal out of West Virginia. He told me that strip mining was not only
going to destroy the economy of West Virginia in the long term but it
was designed to destroy the jobs so that they didn't have to employ
union labor. Now, there are only 12,000 miners left to get the same
amount of coal. They do it by blowing off the tops of the mountains,
and they take that rubble and they dump it into the adjacent river
valley. They've already covered up 1,200 miles of our streams. We are
destroying, flattening this landscape that is a part of American
history. It's the source of our values, our virtues, our character as
a people; the landscapes, the mountains where Davy Crockett and Daniel
Boone roamed, and we are cutting them to the ground. Of course it's
illegal, you cannot take rubble and debris and toxic waste and dump it
into a river without a Clean Water Act permit, and the Clean Water Act
could never let you get a permit to do that. So we sued. Joe Lovett,
the attorney from West Virginia, sued the Bush administration and the
Army Corps of Engineers for allowing this practice to happen. We won
the lawsuit, and the judge enjoined all mountain top mining. Two days
from that victory, the Bush administration rewrote the Clean Water Act
to allow mountain top mining to continue forever; not only that, but
changed the structure of the act so that anybody can dump rubble and
debris simply by getting a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of
Engineers.
If you ask the people in the White House who are promoting this
legislation, Why are you doing this?, what they'll say is: We have to
choose between economic prosperity and environmental protection - that
is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good
environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. We want to
measure our economy based upon how it produces jobs and how it
preserves the value of the assets of our community. If, on the other
hand, we want to do what the Bush administration has been urging us to
do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in
liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as
possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can
generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous
economy. But our children are going to pay for our joy ride. They are
going to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge
cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time and that they are
never going to be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit
spending. It's a way of loading the costs of our generation's
prosperity onto the backs of our children.
There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself.
The free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the
elimination of waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market
economy you would eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a
true free-market economy you can't make yourself rich without making
your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. Polluters
make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise
standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for
everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the
free market and forcing the public to pay their production cost. You
show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy. Corporations are
externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to figure out a way
to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.
I'll give you an example. When the coal companies, the utilities,
discharge mercury into the air they are avoiding one of the costs of
bringing their products to market, which is the cost of properly
disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. When they avoid the costs
they can out-compete their competitors, they can out-compete gas and
oil and wind power. But the costs don't disappear. They go into the
fish, they make children sick, they permanently injure children's
lungs, they put people out of work, they acidify the lakes in the
Adirondacks and they've destroyed the forest cover of the Appalachian
Mountains all the way from Georgia up into Quebec. Those impacts
impose costs on the rest of us that should be reflected in the price
of that product. All of the federal environmental laws are meant to
restore free-market capitalism in America. I don't even consider
myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free marketeer. I go out
into the marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them, We
are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that
you're internalizing your profits. Americans have to understand that
there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which
democratizes our country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency,
and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to
democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.
I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat
production, which is not only one of the primary threats to the
American environment but also one of the primary threats to the
American worker. It's allowing a few monopolies to control our food
supply and to put farmers out of business. Fifteen years ago there
were 27,000 independent hog farmers in North Carolina, today there are
none. They have been replaced completely by 2,200 hog factories, 1,600
owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one large corporation. They
produce such huge amounts of waste they have to dispose of it
illegally, and so they have to corrupt political officials in order to
continue operating.
I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I
said that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am
of Osama bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in
the room, but I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand
by what I said. It's the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that
our country was too strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a
foreign enemy, but our democratic institutions would be subverted by
what he called "malefactors of great wealth," who would destroy them
from within. Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the
heat of the Civil War in 1863, said, I have the South in front of me,
and the bankers behind me and for my country, I fear the bankers more.
From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders
- Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson -
have warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate
our political systems and our lives. Another Republican, Dwight
Eisenhower, the most famous speech he made was warning America against
the domination by the military-industrial complex. Franklin Roosevelt
said that the domination of our nation by large corporations is the
definition of fascism. I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the
definition, if you look up fascism, says, "the domination of
government by large corporations driven by right-wing ideology and
bellicose nationalism" - that's getting to look pretty familiar. The
problem with letting large corporations dominate our government is
that it erodes democracy, it erodes our capacity to participate in
public life, our capacity for dignity, and it allows these entities to
squander resources that belong to our children. But the thing that
we've squandered worst of all is our natural heritage: the air that we
breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands - all these
things that make us proud to be American. This administration has
taken the conserve out of conservatism. They claim to like the free
market, but what they are really embracing is corporate welfare
capitalism, socialism for the rich. They claim to love property
rights, but only when it's the right of a polluter to use his property
to destroy his neighbor's property or to destroy the public property.
They claim to like law and order, but they are the first ones to let
the large corporations and their corporate contributors violate the
law at public expense. They claim to love local control and states'
rights, but it's only in those instances when they're taking down the
barriers to large corporations.
They claim to embrace Christianity while violating the manifold
mandates of Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and that
we are meant to care for nature. They have embraced this Christian
heresy of dominion theology, which James Watt was the first to
enunciate when he told the Senate, I don't think that there is any
point in protecting the public lands because we don't how long the
world is going to last before the Lord returns. The woman he mentored
for twenty years, Gale Norton, is running the Department of the
Interior.
The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches us. It
enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore
that at our peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and
recreationally, culturally and historically, and spiritually. Human
beings have other appetites besides money, and if we don't feed them
we're not going to become the kind of beings that our Creator
intended. When we destroy nature we impoverish ourselves, we diminish
ourselves and we impoverish our children. We're not protecting those
ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to
say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We are protecting those forests
because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing
than they would have if we cut them down. I'm not fighting for the
Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the stripped bass
but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my
community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad
and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the
Hudson is 350 years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families
that learned the same fishing methods that they're using today from
the Algonquin Indians during the Dutch colonial period. I want my
children to be able to touch them when they come to shore to repair
their nets or wait out the tides, and in doing that, connect
themselves to New York history and understand that they are part of
something larger than themselves. I don't want my children to grow up
in a world where it's all Unilever and 400-ton factory trolleys 100
miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no interface with humanity,
and where we have no family farmers left in America; where we've
driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson's vision of
an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of freeholds owned
by family farmers, each with a stake in our democracy. I don't want a
world where we've lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the
things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of human beings
that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us
ultimately to God.
I don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping
it as God, but I do believe that it's the way that God talks to us
most clearly. God talks to human beings through many vectors: through
each other, through organized religion, through the great books of
those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music
and poetry - but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace and joy as
through Creation. We don't know Michelangelo by looking at his
biography, we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel. We know our Creator best by studying Creation, which all of
the religious texts mandate us to do. If you look at all of the great,
central epiphany in every religious tradition in mankind's history,
the revelation always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go into
the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had to go to
the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the middle
of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to go
onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews
had to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400
years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to spend 40 days in the
wilderness to discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist,
a man of the wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and
dressed in the skins of wild animals. All of Christ's parables are
taken from nature: I am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard
Seed; the little swallows the scattering, the seeds on fallow ground.
He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a
shepherd. That's how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying
things to them that contradicted everything that they had heard from
the literate, sophisticated people of their time. They would have
dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of
his parables about the fishes and the birds through their own
observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He's not
telling us something new, he's simply illuminating something that's
very, very old.
When we destroy these things, we're cutting ourselves off from the
very things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life. And for
these people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following the
mandate of Christ by liquidating our public assets, what they are
really doing is a moral affront to the next generation. That's why we
preserve nature. Not for our sake, but for the sake of the future.
That obligation is expressed by the term sustainability. All that word
means is that God wants us to use the things we've been given, to
enrich ourselves, to improve our quality of life, to serve others -
but we can't use them up. We can't sell the farm piece by piece in
order to pay for the groceries; we can't drain the pond to catch the
fish. We can't cut down the mountain to get at the coal. We can live
off the interest; we can't go into the capital that belongs to our
children.
What you can do: To track the Bush record on the environment, go to
www.nrdc.org/bushrecord at the website for the Natural Resources
Defense Council, where you will also find alerts, updates on
victories, and opportunities for action.
- Published in EarthLight Magazine #52, Winter 2005
http://www.earthlight.org/2005/essay52_kennedy_pff.html
"Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one,some bigger than others"
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