Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Spanks Government and Corporate Liars

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. didn’t steal the show, he was the show at the October 18-19 Conference on the Environment at the University of Charleston. A few RFK, Jr. nuggets:

"No movement has democratized us like the environmental movement -- anyone with a question about [a project] can demand an Environmental Impact Statement."

"The environment... [is] ultimately about community advocacy."

"Men saw the gravest threat to community was what happened to the [Hudson] river.-- fishermen formed the first Riverkeepers on the Hudson."

"[The Hudson River] produces more pounds [of fish] per acre than any water on the Atlantic Seaboard – economic prosperity through environmental action."

"For a few years of pollution-based prosperity, our children pay for our joy ride."

"Polluters make themselves rich and lower the quality of life for everyone else. They liquidate our natural resources for cash."

"Thirty billion a year in subsidies [has created] a lot of crybabies. You can hear them whine, when you pull the Federal nipple out of their mouths."

"Capitol Hill says they want to return control to states – [the] real outcome does not equal community control, the real outcome equals corporate control.... [in states], where corporations so easily dominate the political landscape – how fast can you say coal, timber, or poultry?"

"Rivers, streams, and the fish in them are owned by the people [cited the Constitution]. They are public trust assets owned by all the people. Every child should have the right to fish to feed his family. That right has been taken away!"

"Animals and future generations don’t vote, and in a tyranny don’t get represented at all."

"The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves."

Among many clinchers, Kennedy drove home the spirituality of environmentalism.

"God speaks to us in many ways, but most of all through nature. Nowhere [else does He] speak with such grace, and detail, and texture, and joy as through nature."

Kennedy described as "science fiction nightmares" what has happened to the Russia’s Aral Sea which is now a desert, Turkey’s Black Sea with 300 species gone, in Thailand the people have to wear gas masks, in China there are 100,000 smog related deaths/year, and in Mexico City where driving is restricted to 3.5 days per week after environmental destruction "matured into economic catastrophe."

Later on a water panel, using research largely provided by Viv Stockman, I brought up some unspoken risks to West Virginia’s water future – corporate buyouts, downstream states securing their’s, chlorine by-products, pharmaceuticals in water everywhere, and of course the obliteration of headwater streams through Mountain Top Removal and slurry pond catastrophes.

West Virginia Rivers Coalition’s Jeremy Muller offered a factual and truthful portrait of the bleak environmental and economic landscape – strongly reinforcing his point, we must change.

Bryan Moore, possibly the least visible superstar in West Virginia’s environmental movement, delivered the message that high environmental standards directly correlate to robust economies. His message – so often repeated – rang with the truth only such integrity, professionalism, credentials, and a disarming style as Bryan’s can produce.

On day two of the conference, West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Michael Callaghan and Wise Commerce Commissioner Alisa Bailey made a scene as they created and signed a Memorandum pushing ecotourism.

I was left wondering, how you push ecotourism with a statewide advisory on fish due to coal-fired power plant emissions and residual methyl mercury levels in their flesh? I wonder what RFK, Jr and the Riverkeepers would have to say about that.