Kennedy urges protection of environment

Kennedy
urges protection of environment
…………………………………………………………………

BY DANA BENSON
Rice News Staff

As a young boy
visiting Washington, D.C., Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was more
fascinated by the Eastern peregrine falcons that perched
atop an old post office on Pennsylvania Avenue than he was
by seeing his uncle at the White House.

Kennedy has
transformed his love of nature into a career as an environmental
lawyer and lobbyist, but he pointed out at his March 21
campus lecture that protecting the environment is about
a lot more than protecting birds and fish.

“The kind
of environmental advocacy that I do is not about protecting
nature for nature’s sake,” he said. “It’s
not about protecting the fish and the birds, but recognizing
that we protect those things because they’re critical
to our own enrichment and that if we want to create communities
for our children that have the same opportunities for dignity
and enrichment as the communities and the environment that
our parents gave to us, nature is a critical underpinning
to that.”

Kennedy’s
talk, “A Contract With Our Future,” was delivered
as part of the 2000-2001 President’s Lecture Series.

Sadly, Kennedy
noted that today in Washington, his own children can’t
watch the peregrine falcons, predatory birds that could
fly 200 miles per hour. They became nearly extinct in North
America in the 1960s from DDT poisoning.

While the story
of the falcons does not have a positive outcome, Kennedy
pointed to environmental success stories that are the result
of community-based grassroots efforts and strong environmental
legislation passed during the 1970s.

An attorney
for the Hudson Riverkeeper, the 47-year-old son of Robert
and Ethel Kennedy used the riverkeeper organization as an
example of how members of a community can take control of
their own environment.

Formed in 1966,
the Hudson Riverkeeper group was created out of concern
among citizens in Croton, a community on the Hudson River
in New York, that their river was being polluted. It was
organized by a blue-collar coalition of commercial and residential
fishermen who had no hopes of visiting American environmental
treasures like Yosemite and Yellowstone parks. To them,
the environment was the river in their backyards.

The group uncovered
and began to enforce an old law called the 1888 Rivers and
Harbors Act that mandates that it is illegal to pollute
any waterway in the United States and that polluters are
required to pay a steep penalty. Further, the law also includes
a bounty provision that allows anyone who turns in a polluter
to keep half the fine.

Soon, the Hudson
Riverkeeper had collected its first bounty from Penn Central
Railroad, which had dumped oil into the Hudson. More bounties
led to the purchase of boats to patrol the river and the
hiring of a full-time keeper and Kennedy as attorney. Later,
the riverkeeper initiated a partnership with a local law
school, which each year provides 10 third-year law students
who are given special license to practice law and who each
file four lawsuits against polluters.

The Hudson Riverkeeper
has brought more than 250 successful legal actions and forced
polluters to spend well over $2 billion on mediation. Kennedy
said, “Today, it is the richest water body in the North
Atlantic. There’s more pounds of fish per acre than
any other river in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the last
river system left in the North Atlantic … that still
has strong spawning stocks of all its historic species of
migratory fish. It’s Noah’s Ark; it’s the
species warehouse.”

The Hudson effort
has inspired the creation of 63 licensed, locally based
riverkeepers across North America with more than 130 applications
pending for new keepers.

“I look
forward to the day when we have keepers on every significant
waterway across North America, including the bayous here
in Houston, the Ship Channel and Galveston Bay,” Kennedy
said.

Along with grassroots
efforts, strong legislation passed in the 1970s, initiated
by Earth Day in 1970, has led to environmental improvements.
Kennedy recalled that before the legislation passed, he
wasn’t allowed to swim in the Potomac or Charles rivers,
that Lake Erie was pronounced “dead” and that
Washington literally smelled from the pollutants.

If the United
States had not approved such legislation, the country could
be in the same environmental situation as others around
the globe, Kennedy noted. He cited Thailand, where there
is no clean-air legislation and people wear gas masks, and
Mexico City, where citizens are only permitted to drive
their cars three and half days of the week. In Russia, the
Aral Sea, once the largest freshwater body on Earth after
America’s Great Lakes, is now a desert, and the Sea
of Azov, which was the richest fishery after Chesapeake
Bay, is a biological wasteland.

“In those
nations and many others, environmental injury has ensured
economic catastrophe,” Kennedy said. “That’s
what would happen here if we hadn’t passed this legislation
and made these investments in our environment back in the
’70s, and that’s what will happen if we allow
this foolhardy Congress and a reckless administration to
dismantle the investments that we’ve already made.”

Kennedy explained
that if anti-environmental laws passed by Congress since
1995 had actually been signed into law by the president,
there would be no significant federal environmental law
left in this country. When asked why they support such legislation,
Kennedy said that congressmen often say, “The time
has come in our nation’s history when we have to choose
between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental
protection on the other.”

“But that
is a false choice,” Kennedy said. “In 100 percent
of the situations, good environmental policy is identical
to good economic policy. He added that a few years of pollution-based
prosperity can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the
illusion of a prosperous economy, but “our children
are going to pay for our joy ride.”

Kennedy also
counters some legislators’ view that environmental
control should be returned to the states. The real outcome
of that, he said, will not be state control, but corporate
control, with companies pitting states against one another
by offering economic prosperity in return for relaxation
of environmental regulations, and then threatening to locate
elsewhere if they don’t get it.

The environment
is an important aspect of the American experience, Kennedy
explained. Nature enriches people through various means,
including recreationally, spiritually and historically.
America is not like other countries, he said, in that its
citizens don’t share a common race or culture. What
binds Americans, he said, is the common commitment to a
constitutional democracy and the land.

He reminded
the audience that “we don’t inherit the planet
from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”