- We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a
world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, our children
are brought into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe.
-
- 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.
-
- We know that the principal source of ozone and particulates
in our air is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning
coal illegally. They were supposed to install controls over fifteen years
ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those
plants. But this industry gave $48 million to President Bush during the
2000 campaign, and they've contributed $58 million since. One of the first
things that President Bush did when he came to office was to order the
Justice Department to drop all 75 of those suits. The Justice Department
lawyers were shocked. This has never happened in our history before, where
somebody running as a presidential candidate accepts money from a criminal
and then lets that criminal off the hook. Many of you remember what happened
when President Clinton pardoned Mark Rich and how indignant the press and
the public was at that action. But Mark Rich was one person, and he never
killed anybody. According to EPA, these 75 plants, just the criminal exceedences
from these plants, kill 5,500 Americans every year. After letting these
criminals off the hook, the president then went and rewrote the Clean Air
Act, illegally we believe. We're suing him, we'll win the suit, but it
may take ten years, and in the meantime they'll discharge what they want.
-
- I live in New York State. Most of the fish in New York
are now unsafe to eat from mercury contamination. I live two miles from
the state of Connecticut; in Connecticut every freshwater fish is now unsafe
to eat. Last week, the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that in 19 states
it is unsafe to regularly eat any freshwater fish, and in 48 states at
least some fish are unsafe to eat. The mercury is coming, largely, from
those same 1,100 coal-burning power plants. We know a lot about mercury
that we didn't know five or ten years ago. We know that one out of every
six American women of childbearing years now has so much mercury in her
womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: cognitive
impairment; mental retardation; autism; blindness; kidney, liver or heart
disease. I have so much mercury in my body, I was told by Dr. David Carpenter,
who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that if I were
a woman of childbearing years and produced a child, that the child would
have cognitive impairment, and, he estimated, a permanent IQ loss of five
to seven points. There are 630,000 children born in this country every
year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in the womb.
-
- Recognizing this threat to the American public, the Clinton
administration reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the
Clean Air Act; that triggered the requirement that those companies remove
90 percent of that mercury within three and a half years. It would have
cost, according to EPA, less than one percent of the revenues of those
plants for them to do that. That's a great deal for the American people,
but it's still billions of dollars for that industry. Eight weeks ago,
Bush announced that he was scrapping the Clinton-era rules and substituting,
instead, rules that were written by the industry's lobbying firm Latham
and Watkins. On their face, they say that they have to clean up, within
fifteen years, 50 percent of the mercury. But they've woven so many loopholes
into the new rule that they will literally never have to clean up. The
chief lobbyist for the firm who wrote it is now the head of the Air Division
at EPA.
-
- We are living today in a science fiction nightmare, a
world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, our children
are brought into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe.
This is a world where, because somebody gave money to a politician, my
children and the children of millions of other Americans can no longer
enjoy the seminal, primal activities of their youth - which is to go fishing
with their father or mother and come home and eat the fish. I live two
hours south of the Adirondack Mountains. This is the oldest protected wilderness
area on the face of the Earth; it's been protected since the 1880s. Today,
one-fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are sterilized from acid rain
which is coming from those same coal-burning power plants, and this president
has put the brakes on the statutory requirement that those companies remove
the materials that are causing the acid rain.
-
- I flew recently over the coalfields of the Appalachians.
I saw something that if the American people could see there would be a
revolution in this country. We are cutting down the mountains, literally
cutting them down. The coal companies blow off the tops of the mountains,
using 2,500 tons of dynamite in West Virginia alone every year. They fire
the workers: When my father was fighting strip mining in West Virginia
in 1968 there were 114,000 coal miners digging coal out of West Virginia.
He told me that strip mining was not only going to destroy the economy
of West Virginia in the long term but it was designed to destroy the jobs
so that they didn't have to employ union labor. Now, there are only 12,000
miners left to get the same amount of coal. They do it by blowing off the
tops of the mountains, and they take that rubble and they dump it into
the adjacent river valley. They've already covered up 1,200 miles of our
streams. We are destroying, flattening this landscape that is a part of
American history. It's the source of our values, our virtues, our character
as a people; the landscapes, the mountains where Davy Crockett and Daniel
Boone roamed, and we are cutting them to the ground. Of course it's illegal,
you cannot take rubble and debris and toxic waste and dump it into a river
without a Clean Water Act permit, and the Clean Water Act could never let
you get a permit to do that. So we sued. Joe Lovett, the attorney from
West Virginia, sued the Bush administration and the Army Corps of Engineers
for allowing this practice to happen. We won the lawsuit, and the judge
enjoined all mountain top mining. Two days from that victory, the Bush
administration rewrote the Clean Water Act to allow mountain top mining
to continue forever; not only that, but changed the structure of the act
so that anybody can dump rubble and debris simply by getting a rubber stamp
permit from the Corps of Engineers.
-
- If you ask the people in the White House who are promoting
this legislation, Why are you doing this?, what they'll say is: 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. We want to measure our economy
based upon how it produces jobs and how it preserves the value of the assets
of our community. If, on the other hand, we want to do what the Bush administration
has been urging us to do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a
business in liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly
as possible, to have a 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. They are going to pay
for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup costs that
are going to amplify over time and that they are never going to be able
to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading
the costs of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
-
- There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism
than myself. The free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the
elimination of waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy
you would eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market
economy you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich
and without enriching your community. Polluters make themselves rich by
making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves
by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by
escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay
their production cost. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy.
Corporations are externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to
figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.
-
- I'll give you an example. When the coal companies, the
utilities, discharge mercury into the air they are avoiding one of the
costs of bringing their products to market, which is the cost of properly
disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. When they avoid the costs
they can out-compete their competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil
and wind power. But the costs don't disappear. They go into the fish, they
make children sick, they permanently injure children's lungs, they put
people out of work, they acidify the lakes in the Adirondacks and they've
destroyed the forest cover of the Appalachian Mountains all the way from
Georgia up into Quebec. Those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that
should be reflected in the price of that product. All of the federal environmental
laws are meant to restore free-market capitalism in America. I don't even
consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free marketeer. I go
out into the marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them,
We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you're
internalizing your profits. Americans have to understand that there is
a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our
country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate
crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it
is in Nigeria.
-
- I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial
hog meat production, which is not only one of the primary threats to the
American environment but also one of the primary threats to the American
worker. It's allowing a few monopolies to control our food supply and to
put farmers out of business. Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent
hog farmers in North Carolina, today there are none. They have been replaced
completely by 2,200 hog factories, 1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield
Foods, one large corporation. They produce such huge amounts of waste they
have to dispose of it illegally, and so they have to corrupt political
officials in order to continue operating.
-
- I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake,
Iowa, and I said that I am more frightened of these large multinationals
than I am of Osama bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers
in the room, but I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand
by what I said. It's the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our
country was too strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign
enemy, but our democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called
"malefactors of great wealth," who would destroy them from within.
Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil
War in 1863, said, I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind
me and for my country, I fear the bankers more.
-
- From the beginning of American history our greatest political
leaders - Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson
- have warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate our
political systems and our lives. Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower,
the most famous speech he made was warning America against the domination
by the military-industrial complex. Franklin Roosevelt said that the domination
of our nation by large corporations is the definition of fascism. I have
an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if you look up fascism,
says, "the domination of government by large corporations driven by
right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism" - that's getting to
look pretty familiar. The problem with letting large corporations dominate
our government is that it erodes democracy, it erodes our capacity to participate
in public life, our capacity for dignity, and it allows these entities
to squander resources that belong to our children. But the thing that we've
squandered worst of all is our natural heritage: the air that we breathe,
the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands - all these things that
make us proud to be American. This administration has taken the conserve
out of conservatism. They claim to like the free market, but what they
are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism, socialism for the
rich. They claim to love property rights, but only when it's the right
of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor's property or
to destroy the public property. They claim to like law and order, but they
are the first ones to let the large corporations and their corporate contributors
violate the law at public expense. They claim to love local control and
states' rights, but it's only in those instances when they're taking down
the barriers to large corporations.
-
- They claim to embrace Christianity while violating the
manifold mandates of Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and
that we are meant to care for nature. They have embraced this Christian
heresy of dominion theology, which James Watt was the first to enunciate
when he told the Senate, I don't think that there is any point in protecting
the public lands because we don't how long the world is going to last before
the Lord returns. The woman he mentored for twenty years, Gale Norton,
is running the Department of the Interior.
-
- The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches
us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore
that at our peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally,
culturally and historically, and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites
besides money, and if we don't feed them we're not going to become the
kind of beings that our Creator intended. When we destroy nature we impoverish
ourselves, we diminish ourselves and we impoverish our children. We're
not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush
Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We are protecting
those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity
standing than they would have if we cut them down. I'm not fighting for
the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the stripped bass
but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my community
will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon
and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson is 350
years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families that learned the
same fishing methods that they're using today from the Algonquin Indians
during the Dutch colonial period. I want my children to be able to touch
them when they come to shore to repair their nets or wait out the tides,
and in doing that, connect themselves to New York history and understand
that they are part of something larger than themselves. I don't want my
children to grow up in a world where it's all Unilever and 400-ton factory
trolleys 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no interface with
humanity, and where we have no family farmers left in America; where we've
driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson's vision of an
American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of freeholds owned by family
farmers, each with a stake in our democracy. I don't want a world where
we've lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect
us to the ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before
there were laptops, and that connect us ultimately to God.
-
- I don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to
be worshiping it as God, but I do believe that it's the way that God talks
to us most clearly. God talks to human beings through many vectors: through
each other, through organized religion, through the great books of those
religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music and poetry
- but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace and joy as through Creation.
We don't know Michelangelo by looking at his biography, we know him by
looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We know our Creator best
by studying Creation, which all of the religious texts mandate us to do.
If you look at all of the great, central epiphany in every religious tradition
in mankind's history, the revelation always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha
had to go into the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had
to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the
middle of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to
go onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews
had to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400
years of slavery in Egypt. Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness
to discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man of the
wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and dressed in the
skins of wild animals. All of Christ's parables are taken from nature:
I am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard Seed; the little swallows
the scattering, the seeds on fallow ground. He called himself a fisherman,
a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That's how he stayed in touch
with the people. He was saying things to them that contradicted everything
that they had heard from the literate, sophisticated people of their time.
They would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm
the wisdom of his parables about the fishes and the birds through their
own observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He's not
telling us something new, he's simply illuminating something that's very,
very old.
-
- When we destroy these things, we're cutting ourselves
off from the very things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life.
And for these people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following
the mandate of Christ by liquidating our public assets, what they are really
doing is a moral affront to the next generation. That's why we preserve
nature. Not for our sake, but for the sake of the future. That obligation
is expressed by the term sustainability. All that word means is that God
wants us to use the things we've been given, to enrich ourselves, to improve
our quality of life, to serve others - but we can't use them up. We can't
sell the farm piece by piece in order to pay for the groceries; we can't
drain the pond to catch the fish. We can't cut down the mountain to get
at the coal. We can live off the interest; we can't go into the capital
that belongs to our children.
-
- What you can do: To track the Bush record on the environment,
go to www.nrdc.org/bushrecord at the website for the Natural Resources
Defense Council, where you will also find alerts, updates on victories,
and opportunities for action.
-
- - Published in EarthLight Magazine #52, Winter 2005
-
- http://www.earthlight.org/2005/essay52_kennedy_pff.html
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