For The Sake Of Our Children
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Earthlight
The biggest threat to our children, our environment and our markets is George W. Bush.
http://www.earthlight.org/2005/essay52_kennedy_pff.htmlEditor'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.
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