2007 Keynote Address

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

By Meghan Stromberg
Senior Editor, Planning magazine

Even without a slideshow of fever charts and figures, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presentation on the sad state of the environment — and the devastatingly successful efforts of powerful companies and government allies to abuse it — brought attendees at APA's National Planning Conference in Philadelphia to their feet. Planners continued to applaud long after he had left the stage, despite his talk running a quarter of an hour long already.

Click here for images from the opening keynote address

Kennedy opened the 99th annual planning conference on Sunday morning with a statement he said that many might find surprising. Actually, he articulated something planners already know: The most important environmental issue in the U.S., he said, is rebuilding our cities. "The worst enemy of the environment and civil life is urban sprawl," he said.

But, he added, it's not because the U.S. is overpopulated. "We can handle a much greater population in our country — as long as we're happy in our cities," he said. "We have to draw the population there by making them wonderful, wonderful places to live."

"And that's what you have dedicated your lives and careers to," he added, with a nod to the some 2,300 planners in attendance. (Some 6,000 are expected before the week is out, a number that includes more than 1,200 students.)

Kennedy currently serves as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a clinical professor at Pace University's School of Law's Environmental Litigation Clinic and was named one of Time magazine's "Heroes for the Planet" for his success in helping to restore the Hudson River.

Protecting water quality has long been important to him. He said he remembers a time when kids could look forward to fishing in the river all day and then proudly enjoying their catch that night at dinner. Today, U.S. rivers and streams are so polluted, that to serve fresh-caught fish to your kids would be akin to feeding them poison, he said.

By polluting and paving over our watersheds, Kennedy said, we are doing irreparable harm to not just the earth, but to ourselves and our children. That's a theme he returned to again and again: People who fight to save the environment aren't just tree huggers — they aren't just looking out "for the birds and fishes" — they are working to sustain themselves and the human race, as well as the planet that we have been entrusted by a creator to be the stewards of, he said.

'Polluters in charge'

To say that Kennedy's talk was politically charged is putting it mildly. But attendees responded ardently to his criticisms of the Republican-led federal government and call for change.

Kennedy railed against the current Bush administration's "deliberate and efficient efforts to eviscerate 30 years" of environmental policy. He noted that the NRDC website lists some "400 major environmental rollbacks" that have taken place in President Bush's six years in office.

"You can't speak honestly about the environmental without speaking critically of the current administration," he said. He went on to talk about — and enumerate — the various posts at EPA and other agencies that are or were recently occupied by lobbyists and executives working for major corporations, particularly energy companies. "They've put polluters in charge of the agencies that protect the environment." (An article by Kennedy in the May 2007 issue of Vanity Fair goes deeper into the involvement of energy-industry executives put in charge of environmental agencies.)

His 2004 book, "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy," is without a doubt a blistering attack on the Bush administration, big business, and Republican allies, but he said he would have done the same thing if a Democratic president were in charge.

"There's no such thing as Republican children and Democratic children," he said. "The worst thing we could do for the environment is allow it to become the province of a particular party."

Americans 'best entertained, least informed'

Kennedy went on to talk about specific issues, including the effects — economic, environmental, and politically — of the U.S. coal industry, the alarming asthma rate among children, and the (largely unreported, he said) connection between high mercury levels and rising incidence of autism and other brain-related illnesses in kids.

He also took the mainstream media to task for paying lip service to environmental issues and refusing to do real investigative reporting that would reveal the deep, powerful connections between polluting companies and government policy makers.

Scoffing at the term "liberal media," he said the "devolution" of the press resulted from the Reagan administration's abolition in 1988 of the Fairness Doctrine (which regulated TV and radio programming, mandating fair news reporting and limiting consolidation). Since then, he said, corporate consolidation of media outlets has made it so that "five corporations control almost all the news. That means just five guys are deciding what I'm hearing as news."

"Because [conservative-led media conglomerates] have no obligation to serve the public interest ... Americans are the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth," Kennedy said. And when hard-hitting news does come to light, he added, "even Republicans say 'How come I didn't know about this?'"

Kennedy quipped that he'd come to the conclusion that "80 percent of Republicans are Democrats who just don't know what's going on."

Environment and the economy

Toward the end of his speech, Kennedy talked about the connection between the environment and the economy — that "in 100 percent of situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy" — and said that the notion that the U.S. operates in a free-market, capitalist economy is false because of the benefits that big businesses receive from the government. "You show me a polluter," he said, "and I'll show you a subsidy."

Polluters and their political allies need to "stop treating the planet as if it were a business in liquidation," he continued. "Environmental injury is deficit spending." There has been a "liquidation of ours and our kids' capital for cash."

"We can't sell the farm to pay for groceries, we can't drain the pond to get to the fish, and we can't [blow the top off] the mountain to get to coal."

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