Westheimer Peace Symposium Archives

RFK Jr. Keynotes 13th Annual Westheimer Peace Symposium,
"Pollution, Politics and Peace,"
October 29, 2003 

RFK Jr. answers a reporter's question at Wilmington College, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2003.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recalls being nine years old in 1961 and looking forward to family trips to Washington DC to visit his father at the Justice Department and, on occasion, his uncle at The White House. His sense of excitement was heightened not by the stately porticos of the Executive Mansion or the uniformed soldiers stationed at the wrought iron entrances, but by the chance of seeing Eastern peregrine falcons swooping among the city's granite monuments dedicated to the great American experiment in self-government.

"Whenever I went to the White House, I always looked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the old post office building. On the roof was a pair of peregrines, which were the most spectacular predatory birds in North America," he said, noting that, at top speeds of 240 miles an hour, they were the fastest birds on earth.

"I could watch those birds come down Pennsylvania Avenue at those speeds and pick pigeons out of the air 40 feet above the heads of pedestrians directly in front of the White House and then bring them back to the cupola of the post office," he said.

"Seeing a sight like those peregrines was far more exciting than visiting my Uncle Jack at the White House, but that's a sight my children will never see because the bird became extinct from DDT poisoning in 1963, the same year my uncle was killed."

Kennedy, a master falconer, said the peregrine falcon has rebounded since the enactment of legislation banning the deadly pesticide, but the true peregrines of his childhood are indeed extinct. The birds of prey seen today are a "mixed and matched" offspring of 17 sub-species that were bred in captivity and released into the wild.

RFK Jr. talks during the 13th annual Westheimer Peace Symposium at Wilmington College, Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2003.

"This hybrid progeny is no where near as spectacular as the creature that took a million years to evolve and then disappeared in the blink of an eye because of ignorance and greed," he said.

Kennedy related that personal story to illustrate how unchecked pollution can forever change the world.

Hitting even closer to home, he described the terrible asthma attacks suffered by three of his sons that have resulted in numerous visits to hospital emergency rooms. The cause of their malady and similar afflictions suffered by thousands of other children in the region is polluted air, most of which, he said, has traveled from a handful of coal-burning, Ohio Valley power plants.

"They were supposed to retool their plants by now under the Clean Air Act, but recently President Bush finalized a new policy that says those plants can pollute forever," he said. "They've been able to literally rob the breath from our children's lungs."

Kennedy said those power plants also are responsible for 45 percent of the mercury emissions in the country.

"Half of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from acid rain and the forest cover up the Appalachian chain to Canada is deteriorating because of acid rain," he said. "In 28 states, no freshwater fish is safe to eat."

Similar devastation is occurring in West Virginia where mountaintops literally are being cut off in the search for coal and hundreds of thousands of acres of "incomparable forests with incomparable bio-diversity" are being destroyed by destructive strip-mining that makes moonscapes of once pristine land, he said. Also, runoff from these excavations is polluting the state's streams and rivers.

Kennedy said the coal and utilities industries contributed $48 million in the 2000 national election and, as a result, the Bush Administration has waived environmental performance standards that are resulting in billions of dollars in ill-gotten profits. "We the American people are going to be paying that debt for generations," he added. Kennedy chastised the Bush Administration as morally if not legally corrupt: "This is the most anti-environment administration we've ever had in American history and I include the Harding Administration with the Teapot Dome Scandal-we've never seen anything like this." Kennedy said the White House is pushing for more than 200 major environmental fallbacks. During the past three years, the nation's water pollution levels have risen for the first time since passage of the Clean Water Act in 1970. Also, he said The White House has proposed new air pollution limits that allow twice as much sulfur dioxide and three times more mercury emissions than if the Clean Air Act were fully implemented.

"Already they've done tremendous permanent damage to our country," he said. "If even a fraction of those rollbacks are passed, by this time next year, we'll have no significant federal environmental law left in this country.

"That's not exaggeration. That's not hyperbole. It is a fact." He said the country under George W. Bush is going the way of Mexico, which has "these wonderful, poetic environmental laws" with which no one complies because they're not enforced. Kennedy said the argument of the Bush Administration and many big businesses is the time has come for the United States to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other.

He asserts this is a false choice: "In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical with good economic policy."

An important measure of economic viability is how a country produces jobs, the dignity of those jobs over the long term and how those jobs preserve the value of community assets. "Environmental advocacy is about recognizing that our air and water, the commons that we share, are the infrastructure of our communities," he said. "If we want to meet our burden as a generation, as a civilization and as a nation-which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as our parents gave us-we've got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure."

Kennedy said the Bush Administration and the Republican dominated Congress are treating the planet as if it were a business in liquidation with a goal of converting natural resources to cash as quickly as possible. This can create what he termed as a "pollution-based prosperity" that is temporal at best.

"We can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy," he said, "but our children are going to pay for the joyride-they're going to pay for polluted landscapes with poor health and huge clean up costs.

"Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children." By 1970, the American public had enough of burning rivers, dead lakes, dirty air and polluted waterways. This "accumulation of insults" brought 20 million people to the streets in the largest public demonstration in the nation's history, Earth Day.

"They demanded that our political leaders return to the American people our ancient environmental rights that had been stolen from our citizens," Kennedy said, noting that groundswell of public sentiment resulted in the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and 28 major environmental laws passed during the 1970s. Kennedy urges that Americans not permit the dismantling of 30 years of environmental law by a "foolhardy Congress and reckless White House."

"An investment in our environment does not diminish our nation's wealth. Rather, it's an investment in infrastructure the same as road construction and telecommunications," he said. "And it's an investment we have to make if we're going to ensure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation.

"We don't protect the environment for the sake of the birds, fishes and trees-we protect it for our sake because it's the infrastructure of our communities."

(L-R) Florence Fulk, Sister Paula Gonzalez, Ka Hsaw Wa and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., arrive at the 2003 Westheimer Peace Symposium at Hugh Heiland Theatre in Wilmington, Ohio, October 29, 2003. Speaker Bibliographies