Robert F.
Kennedy, Jr.
I remember what it was like before Earth Day 1970. I
remember the Cuyahoga River burning for a week, with flames that
were eight stories high, and nobody being able to put it out. I
remember when they declared Lake Erie dead. I remember that I
couldn't swim in the Hudson, or the Charles, or the Potomac
growing up, and what the air smelled like in Washington, DC,
which wasn't even an industrial city. Some days you couldn't see
down the block for the smog. We had thousands of Americans dying
every year in the sixties during smog events. And in 1970, this
accumulation of insults drove twenty million Americans out onto
the streets—ten percent of our population, the largest
public demonstration in U.S. history—and the political
system responded. Republicans and Democrats got together. Nixon
created the Environmental Protection Agency, and we passed
twenty-eight major environmental laws over the next ten years to
protect our air, water, wetlands, endangered species, and food
safety.
What's more, those laws became the model for over 120
nations around the world that had their own versions of Earth
Day and made their own investments in environmental
infrastructure. But there are a lot of countries that didn't do
it. And invariably, those were the countries that didn't have
strong democracies, because democracy and the environment are
intertwined. You cannot get sustained environmental protection
under any system except for a locally based democracy, because
the fishes and birds and future generations don't participate in
the political process. Their voices and interests are not heard
in that process, except in a locally based democracy, where
individuals who harbor those values have the opportunity to
stand up and inject them into the political dialogue. That
doesn't happen in a tyranny, and that's why there's a direct
correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny in
various governments and the level of environmental
degradation—whether it's in right-wing tyrannies like
Brazil during the seventies and Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the
eighties and nineties, or in left-wing tyrannies like Eastern
Europe, China, and the Soviet Union, where they're now facing
economic catastrophe because of their failure to invest in their
environmental infrastructure.
Russia is a great example. Russia didn't have a democracy,
so it had no Earth Day, and therefore, it had no environmental
law. It didn't, for example, have NEPA [National Environmental
Policy Act], which is the most important of our environmental
laws, the first one we passed at the time of Earth Day. That's
the law that requires government agencies to perform
environmental impact reviews before they destroy or disperse an
important public trust asset. Because they didn't have NEPA in
Russia, the Aral Sea, which is the fourth largest freshwater
body on earth, is now a desert. It's as if all the Great Lakes
dried up at once. Because they didn't have a Clean Water Act,
the Sea of Azov, which was the richest fish nursery on earth
after Chesapeake Bay, is now a biological wasteland. Because
they didn't have nuclear regulatory review requirements,
one-fifth of Belorussia is now permanently uninhabitable due to
radiation contamination. In Turkey, they don't have a Clean
Water Act either. Three hundred species have disappeared from
the Marmara Sea over the past fifteen years. The Black Sea will
be dead within ten.
In those nations, and in many, many others, environmental
injury has matured into economic catastrophe. That's what would
have happened here if we hadn't made that investment back in the
seventies, and that's what will happen if we allow this
foolhardy Congress and this reckless White House to dismantle
thirty years of environmental law. The biggest environmental
problem today is not global warming, or population, or
sprawl—it's George W. Bush. Some of the worst damage has
already been done, and we're going to be paying for it for
generations. But if even a fraction of the over two hundred
rollbacks currently being proposed by the Bush Administration
are passed or enacted, by this time next year we will have
effectively no significant federal environmental law left in
our country.* That's not exaggeration. That's not
hyperbole. It is a fact. They didn't have NEPA in Russia, and
we're about to not have it here, too, because the Bush
Administration is destroying it. Many of our laws will remain on
the books, in one form or another, but they'll be unenforceable.
And we'll be like Mexico, which has these wonderful, poetic
environmental laws, but nobody knows about them and nobody
complies with them because they can't be enforced.
If you ask people in the White House and on Capitol Hill why
they're doing this, what they invariably say is, “The time
has come in our nation's history when we have to choose between
economic prosperity and environmental protection.” But
that is a false choice. One hundred percent of the time, good
environmental policy is identical to good economic
policy—that is, if we want to measure our economy (and
this is how we ought to be measuring it) based upon how it
produces jobs, and the dignity of jobs, over the generations,
and how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.
If, on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us
to do from this White House—which is to treat the planet
as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural
resources to cash as quickly as possible, and have a few years
of pollution-based prosperity—then we can generate an
instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous
economy. But our children are going to pay for our joyride.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading
the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our
children. And they're going to pay for it with denuded
landscapes, poor health, and huge cleanup costs that are going
to amplify over time.
So actually, environmental protection enriches us
economically, and we ignore that at our peril. But it also
enriches us aesthetically, and recreationally, and culturally,
and historically, and spiritually. The reason we protect the
environment is not for the sake of the fishes and the
birds—it's for our sake, because nature enriches
us. Human beings have other appetites besides money,
and if we don't feed them, we're not going to become the kind of
beings our Creator intended us to become. When we destroy
nature, we diminish ourselves, and we impoverish our children.
And this is really important for Americans to understand,
because we have a closer connectedness to nature than any other
industrialized nation in the world. From the beginning, our
cultural and political leaders told the American people,
“You don't have to be ashamed that you don't have fifteen
hundred years of culture like they have in Europe, because you
have this relationship to nature, to the land, and particularly
to the wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the Creator.
And that will be the source of your values, your virtues, and
your character as a people.”
That same connectedness was recognized by great spiritual
leaders and moral theologians throughout every religious
tradition in the history of mankind, who used parables,
allegories, and fables taken from nature as morality plays to
teach us the difference between right and wrong—to teach
us what the face of God looks like. I don't believe that nature
is God, or that we ought to be worshipping it as God.
But I do believe that it's the way God communicates to us most
forcefully. God talks to human beings through many vectors—through
each other, through organized religion, through the great books of those
religions, through art, literature, music, poetry, and dance—but
nowhere with such force and clarity and texture and grace and joy as
through creation. And therefore, destroying the environment is the
moral equivalent of tearing the last pages out of the last Bible,
Torah, Talmud, Qur'an, or Upanishad on earth. It's a cost that I don't
believe is prudent for us to impose upon ourselves, and I doubt if we
have the right to impose it upon our children. And that's all that
environmental advocacy is about—recognizing that we have an
obligation to the next generation.
Excerpted from a speech given in New York
at the Omega Institute's “Living a Fearless Life” conference on
April 2, 2004.
*See www.nrdc.org/bushrecord for details on the Bush
administration's environmental policies.