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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense Council; Professor, Pace University School of Law
The tradition of environmental advocacy I come from says we're not protecting the fish and birds so much for their own sake, but because nature enriches us. Our challenge is to create communities to hand down to our children that have the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as those our parents gave to us. Environmental advocacy is about recognizing that we have to preserve the basic infrastructure of the natural systems; they connect us to the lands that remind us of our history.
The group that I work for was founded by people who probably never used the label "environmentalists." They were fighting for their community. The Riverkeeper was started by a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who mobilized on the Hudson River in 1966 to reclaim the river from polluters. I represent commercial fishermen, some of whom come from families that have been fishing the river since Dutch colonial times. They use the same fishing methods – ash poles, gill nets and small open boats – that were taught by the Algonquin Indians to the original Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam.
One of the enclaves of commercial fishery on the Hudson is a little village called Crotonville, 30 miles north of New York City on the east bank of the river. The people there in 1966 were not your prototypical tweed-jacketed, affluent environmentalists trying to preserve distant wilderness areas in the Rockies or Montana. They were factory workers, carpenters, electricians. Half the people in Crotonville made at least some of their living crabbing or fishing the Hudson River. For them, the environment was their backyard and the bathing beaches, swimming and fishing holes of the Hudson River. Richie Garrett, the first president of Riverkeeper, then called the Hudson River Fishermen's Association, used to say about the Hudson, "It's our Riviera. It's our Monte Carlo."
In 1964, Penn Central Railroad began vomiting oil from a four-and-a-half-foot pipe in the Croton Harmen rail yard. Oil came up the river on the tides, blackened beaches and made the shad taste of diesel, so that it couldn't be sold at the Fulton fish market in the city. Three hundred people in Crotonville came together one night in the Parker-Bale American Legion Hall. Almost all the original founders, board members and officers of Riverkeeper were former Marines – combat veterans from World War II and Korea. These weren't radicals or militants, but people whose patriotism was rooted in the bedrock of our country. That night they started talking about violence because they saw something that they thought they owned – the abundant fisheries that many families had exploited for generations – and the purity of the Hudson's waters being robbed from them by large corporate entities over which they had no control.
They had been to the government agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution and were given the bum's rush. By this evening in March 1966, virtually everybody in Crotonville had come to the conclusion that the government was in cahoots with the polluters, and the only way that they were going to reclaim the river was if they confronted the polluters directly. People variously suggested that they put a match to the oil slick coming out of the Penn Central pipe and blow it up or float a raft of dynamite into the intake of the Indian Point power plant, which at that time was killing a million fish a day.
Bob Boyle was the outdoor editor of Sports Illustratedand a Korean War veteran. Two years before he had written an article about angling in the Hudson and in his research had come across an ancient navigational statute called the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act, which said that it was illegal to pollute any waterway in the United States. There was also a bounty provision that said that anybody who turned in the polluter got to keep half the fine. He sent a copy of this law over to the libel lawyers at Time, Inc., asking if it was still good. They told him that it hadn't been enforced in 80 years but it was still on the books. That evening, when these men were talking about violence, he stood up before them with a copy of the law and said, "We shouldn't be talking about breaking the law. We should be talking about enforcing it." They resolved that they were going to start the Fishermen's Association and that they were going to go out and track down and prosecute every polluter on the Hudson.
Eighteen months later they collected the first bounty in U.S. history under this 19th-century statute. They shut down the Penn Central pipe and got to keep $2000, which was a huge amount in Crotonville in 1968. For two weeks they celebrated, and they used what was left over to go after Ciba Geigy, Tuck Tape Standard Brand and American Cyanamide, the largest corporations in America, and the government agencies that are also the worst polluters on the Hudson. In 1973 they collected the highest penalty in U.S. history against a corporate polluter: $200,000 from Anaconda Wire and Cable for dumping toxics at Hastings, New York. They used that money to construct a boat called The Riverkeeper, which today patrols the river. They hired in 1983 a former commercial fisherman named John Cronin as their first full-time Riverkeeper and he hired me a year later as their prosecuting attorney.
About a year after that at Pace Law School in White Plains, New York, we started a litigation clinic, where we have ten third-year law students who, by a special court order, are permitted to practice law under our supervision as if they're attorneys. We give them each four polluters to sue at the beginning of the semester. If they don't win, they don't pass the course. We've brought over 300 successful legal actions against Hudson River polluters, forcing them to spend over $2 billion on remediation of the river. Today the Hudson River is an international model for ecosystem protection. It was a national joke in 1966 – an open sewer, turning color sometimes three times a week, depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the G.M. plant in Tarrytown. The miraculous resurrection of the Hudson has inspired the creation of Riverkeepers on waterways across North America, including San Francisco Bay. Each one of them has a patrol boat, a full-time paid Riverkeeper and attorneys prepared to litigate.
A couple of years ago my clients asked me to do something that I never wanted to do: spend a lot of time in Washington, D.C. lobbying Congress. The anti-environmental provisions that came in with the Gingrich Congress in 1995 are now extant with the new administration in the White House. I represent fishermen, who run the range of the political spectrum from right-wing Republican to left-wing Democrat and everything in between. They saw what was happening on Capitol Hill over the past seven years as the gravest threat not only to their livelihood but also to their sense of values, community and citizenship. If the bills that have passed Congress since 1995 had been signed into law by the president, we would have no significant federal environmental law left in this county. Many of our laws would have remained on the books in one form or another, but they would have been unenforceable, as is the case in Mexico.
The administration is now saying 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 if we want to measure our economy based upon how it produces jobs over the long term. If we treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, converting our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, to have 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 with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup costs. Environmental injury is deficit spending.
I believe the free market is the most efficient, democratic way to distribute the goods of the land and benefits of our nation. In a true free-market system you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich, and without enriching your community. But polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. You show me pollution and I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you somebody who's cheating in the free market; somebody who's devised a way, usually using political clout, to force the public to pay the costs of production.
If you don't believe that environmental injury is deficit spending, look at the nations that didn't invest in the environment in the 1970s the way we did in this country. Our environmental investment began on Earth Day, 1970. I remember what it was like before Earth Day: The Cuyahoga River burned for a week and nobody was able to put it out; Lake Erie was declared dead; we couldn't swim in the Potomac, the Hudson or the Charles growing up; and some days you couldn't see down the block for the smog. We had thousands of Americans dying in our cities every year from smog events. Young congressmen on Capitol Hill don't remember these days. They only see the cost of environmental regulations, not the benefits that this nation has gotten through investments in our environmental infrastructure.
Whenever I went to the White House as a child, I'd always look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the old Post Office Building, where generations of Eastern and Adams peregrine falcons have nested since Abraham Lincoln was president. All the birdwatchers and falconers knew about them. This was the most spectacular predatory bird in North America. It was salmon pink, with a beautiful white coverlet on its nair; it could fly over 200 miles an hour. To me, seeing them was far more exciting than visiting my uncle at the White House. But my children will never see them, because that bird became extinct in 1963 from DDT poisoning, the same year that my uncle was killed. We have peregrines back on the East Coast again, but it's a different bird – the hybridized progeny of 15 different subspecies that were bred in captivity, and nowhere near as spectacular as this creature that took a million years to evolve and then disappeared in the blink of an eye because of ignorance and greed.
The accumulation of insults drove 20 million Americans out onto the street in 1970 – the largest public demonstration in U.S. history – demanding that our political leaders return to the American people the ancient environmental rights that had been taken from them over the previous 80 years. The political system responded. Nixon created the EPA and signed 28 laws and statutes into effect that protect our air, water, endangered species, food safety and wetlands. Those laws became the model for over 100 nations that had started making their own investments in the environment. But some nations didn't – invariably the ones that didn't have democracies or strong democracies, because democracy and the environment are intertwined. Fish, birds and the next generation cannot participate in the political process; their interests are only represented in strong, locally-based democracies where individuals who feel strongly about those values can inject them into the political process. That's why there's a direct correlation between the level of tyranny in various governments and the level of environmental degradation, whether it's right-wing tyrannies like Brazil in the 1970s or Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s and 1990s, or the left-wing tyrannies in Eastern Europe and China and the Soviet Union where they're now dealing with these science-fiction catastrophes.
In many nations, environmental injury has matured into economic catastrophe. It would have happened here if we hadn't made that investment back in the 1970s, and that's what will happen if we allow this reckless Congress or this foolhardy administration to dismantle 30 years of environmental law. An investment in the environment is not a diminishment of our nation's wealth; it's an investment in infrastructure, like investing in telecommunications and road construction. We hear a lot from the Bush administration that they are going to get rid of federal environmental laws and return control to the states. But the real outcome of that devolution will not be local or community control because large corporations can so easily dominate the state and local political landscapes. We remember in the Hudson Valley the 1960s version of "community control," when the most profitable company on earth, General Electric, came to these poverty-stricken towns in upstate New York that were devastated by the collapse of the lumber industry in the Adirondacks. They said to the town fathers, "We're going to bring you a spanking new factory, with 1,500 new jobs and we're going to raise your tax base, and all you have to do is waive your environmental laws and let us dump our toxic PCBs into the Hudson and persuade the state of New York to write us a permit to do it. If you don't, we'll move to New Jersey and you'll still get the pollution but they'll get the taxes and the jobs." The towns took the bait, and two decades later G.E. closed the doors on those factories and left town with their pockets stuffed with cash. They left behind a $2 billion cleanup bill that nobody in the Hudson Valley can afford.
When G.E. dumped its PCBs into the Hudson River it was avoiding one of the costs of bringing its product to market: the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. It out-competed its competitors, it raised its profits, but the costs didn't go away. They went into the fish, made the people sick and put the men out of work, imposing costs on the rest of us that should, in a true free market economy, be reflected in the price of G.E.'s product in the marketplace. But G.E., like all polluters, used chemical ingenuity and political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and forced the public to pay its cleanup costs. Environmental laws are meant to re-impose the free market economy in this country and stop the cheaters, forcing people to internalize their costs the same way as they internalize their profits. As environmental advocates, we are free-market patrolmen.
If we treat the land with contempt we're saying, "This isn't really about community. This is just a commodity." America means more than that, and I think that we have a much more important and exciting mission to create communities that are cities on a hill, paradigms of what human beings can accomplish if we all work together and maintain our focus on a spiritual mission.
We're not fighting to preserve these ancient forests, these redwoods in California and the other rainforests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, "for the sake of a spotted owl." We're preserving those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing than they will have if we cut them down. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where there are no commercial fishermen in the Hudson, where we've lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the 10, 000 generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us ultimately to God.
As environmental advocates in the Riverkeeper movement we elbow our way into those courtrooms with big oil, big timber and big agriculture. They are cutting up the pie that belongs to you and me and to our children: the fresh air that our children need to breathe without asthma, the clean water, the abundant fisheries, the wandering animals, those public trust assets that belong to all of us. We say, "We are emissaries for the future and we demand an accounting. We want to know what you're doing with things that don't belong to you, with things that belong to our children." There is a proverb from the Lakota people that's been expropriated to some extent by the environmental movement: "We did not inherit this planet from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children." I would add that if we don't return to them something that is roughly the equivalent of what we receive, that they'll have the right to ask us some very difficult questions.
Marwan Muasher
Arianna Huffington
Ben Stein