COVER STORY :: OCTOBER 20, 2004

Defending America from ‘stealth attack’:
An exclusive interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

(Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a professor at Pace University School of Law, where he is supervising attorney of the Environmental Litigation Clinic. His new book, “Crimes Against Nature,” is an account of the Bush administration environmental record. Kennedy is tentatively scheduled to speak at Michigan State University in November. City Pulse editor and publisher Berl Schwartz interviewed him.)

One of your book’s main messages about the environment is that the Bush administration is allowing certain corporations to destroy “our country’s most central values.” Yet you say that when you deliver that message in such places as the affluently conservative Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Conn., where George and Barbara Bush met, you were warmly received. How do you explain that?

Kennedy: All the polling shows that both Republicans and Democrats care deeply about the environment. The latest Gallup Poll shows that 81 percent of Republicans want stronger environmental laws and want them strictly followed. Of course, this is the rank and file, not the leadership. I’ve been bipartisan and nonpartisan in my approach to the environment over 20 years as an environmental advocate. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as Republican children and Democratic children. I think the worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party.

You can’t talk honestly about the environment in any context without speaking critically about this president. This is the worst environmental president we have had in our history. His White House has masterminded over 400 major environmental rollbacks or implemented them over the last three and a half years as part of a deliberate, concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law. The White House knows — and I show in my book that they were informed of this by their pollsters — that both Republicans and Democrats will be angry at them if the public learns about this assault on our environmental infrastructure. So the White House has framed this as a stealth attack. They use Orwellian rhetoric to mask their attack from the American people.

What’s an example of this Orwellian rhetoric?

Kennedy: When they want to hand the forest over to the timber industry, they call it the Healthy Forests Act. When they want to destroy the Clean Air Act, they call it the Clear Skies Bill. But most insidiously, they’ve put polluters in charge of the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist in American history. [Rey is an under secretary of natural resources and environment for the U.S. Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service.] The head of Public Lands is a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. [Griles is deputy secretary of the U.S. Interior Department.] The head of the air division at EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, is a utility lobbyist who’s represented the worst air polluters in America. The last job of the head of Superfund was advising corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second-in-command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist, and so on and so on throughout virtually all the subsecretaries and agency heads in the Departments of Agriculture, Energy and Interior and EPA. These individuals have not entered government service to serve the public interest, but specifically to subvert the very laws they’re now charged with enforcing to enrich the president’s campaign contributors.

If the Republicans are so vulnerable on the environment, then why have environmental issues barely been touched in the presidential debates and hardly surfaced in the Kerry campaign?

Kennedy: The Kerry campaign, of course, doesn’t choose the questions that are asked during the debates. In the last debate, there was not a single question about the environment, or in the first debate, either. There was only one question the entire time, and that was in the second debate.

The Kerry campaign is talking about these issues. The problem is, the press won’t cover it. I’ve talked to John Kerry about it a number of times, and he and Bob Schrum and the campaign people said ‘we cannot get traction on this issue.’ And I have a chapter in my book that shows why the American press will not cover environmental stories, or really any of the substantive issues in the campaign. Only 4 percent of the 15,000 minutes of network news last year were devoted to environmental stories, and most of those were human-interest type stories, like whales caught in sea ice. They weren’t really doing the kind of analysis you need to do to connect cause and effect and explain to people the catastrophic impact of environmental change on their lives.

Why do you think the media aren’t pursuing environmental stories?

Kennedy. It really stems back to the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald Reagan in 1988. Since the advent of commercial radio in 1924, there was a rule that governed the networks called the Fairness Doctrine, and that rule acknowledged that the air waves were owned by the public, that the broadcasters were licensed to use them openly with the proviso that they advance the public interest and our democracy. The Fairness Doctrine had three basic requirements. One is that the networks cover news of import to the American people. They would have had to cover environmental stories. No. 2, they had to show both sides of issues. You couldn’t have had a Fox News or a Rush Limbaugh under the Fairness Doctrine. No. 3, there had to be local control and diversity of control because they wanted farmers in North Dakota to get crop reports and people in Kansas to get tornado warnings, people in the Southwest to get country music and not have programming dictated by a few large corporations on the coasts.

Well, Reagan abolished the Fairness doctrine in 1988 as a favor to the studio heads who had helped him get elected, and a result of that today is there are six corporations that control virtually all the media outlets in America, all 6,000 television stations, almost all 15,000 radio stations and most of the 16,000 newspapers in our country. The news departments have become corporate profit centers. Corporations no longer have any obligation to advance the public interest. So their only obligation is to their shareholders, which means they want to increase viewership and lower costs.

So they have fired their investigate reporters, the people who could actually get these environmental stories, complex as they are, to the American public. They’ve gotten rid of their foreign news bureaus, which means that now we’re in this really strange situation that in the United States, the home of the free press, where you cannot get foreign news unless you go to the BBC. All they want to do now is increase viewership, because that increases profits, and how do you do that? By appealing to the prurient interest that all of us have in the reptilian cores of our brain, in sex and celebrity gossip. So we see Kobe Bryant and we see Michael Jackson and we see Laci Peterson and then, of course, terror, which does the same thing, so we see lots of terror alerts, which benefits networks. But we’re not getting the story about lead in our children and mercury poisoning — one out of every six American women are now poisoned by mercury – or about asthma attacks or global warming and the connection between the corporations who are imposing these costs on the American people, burdening us with it, and the money that they’ve given to the political figures who dismantle the laws which make that kind of pollution illegal.

Your book connects the religious right to the destruction of the environment. How are they related?

Kennedy: The anti-environmental movement in this country, which has culminated in the election of George Bush and Dick Cheney and the appointment of [U.S. Interior Secretary] Gale Norton to the federal government, began in the late ‘70s. It was masterminded by Colorado’s worst polluter, Joseph Coors. It was a marriage between the right-wing fanatics, many of them from the religious right — the primary leaders were Sun Myung Moon and Pat Robertson — and industry money. These two groups got together, and the polluting industries, mainly the extractive industries from the West, began pouring money into these movements and creating phony grassroots groups — we call them Astroturf groups —including foot soldiers from the religious right and linking the right-wing issues with anti-environmental issues. It was a marriage that benefited both sides, because the industry suddenly had foot soldiers doing its bidding and fighting for industry profit taking and fighting against pollution laws. The radical right, which always had intensity but never had money, suddenly had huge amounts of money being poured in.

And I show this evolution in my book, where Coors started the Mountain State Legal Fund and brought James Watt [Reagan’s interior secretary] in to run it, and then Gale Norton. And he also created the Heritage Foundation and the Comparative Enterprise Institute and a number of other of right-wing think tanks. He invented the right-wing think tank and put them in Washington, D.C., where they provided the ideological underpinnings to anti-environmentalism. The Heritage Foundation said its primary goal was to destroy the environmental movement. They claimed to be free-market oriented and property-rights oriented. But they’re not. The only consistent theme in their pronouncements is unregulated corporate profit-taking.

If you were creating a deck of cards of environmental enemies, who would be on the face cards?

Kennedy: I think Dick Cheney would be up there, Gale Norton, Tom DeLay, and of course George Bush himself, who I don’t think has thought through these issues very clearly. His orientation is toward a world view that seems to have been dictated the fossil fuel industry.

Who are the Wise Use fanatics?

Kennedy: The Wise Use movement was created by Joseph Coors and Sun Myung Moon and Pat Robertson and a number of others. The guru of it was Ron Arnold, a timber industry press flack who said he could create a grassroots movement by drawing on people with an interest in environmental destruction — workers in the extractive industries, for example — and give the industry something it never had, which is a political base.

The industry had always tried to manipulate politics using money, which was not as effective as it could have been. He said he could create a counterbalance to the environmental movement by recruiting people from the religious right and employees of the extractive industries to defend the interests of the industries in the political system.

The movement that preceded it had been called the Sagebrush Rebellion. That morphed in 1988 into the Wise Use Movement. It was created at the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nev., at a meeting between the religious right and the extractive industries. Big coal, big oil, big gas, big mining, big timber, big agriculture and representatives of those industries and their trade associations attended this meeting with leaders of the religious right and the now-defunct Sagebrush Rebellion and they created this new movement which helped get Newt Gingrich elected.

James Watt’s Sagebrush Rebellion has been extraordinarily effective politically. Watt had helped get Reagan elected. Reagan called himself a Sagebrush rebel. He then stocked his Cabinet with people who were picked by Coors who were anti-environmentalists. Coors was given an office in the Executive Office Building directly across from the White House and was the head of Reagan’s so-called kitchen cabinet. The Heritage Foundation, which was Coors’ creation, drafted the 2,000-page mandate for change, which was the blueprint for the Reagan administration, and most of that consisted of ways to dismantle the nation’s environmental laws. Coors handpicked James Watt, the interior secretary,

As I listen to you and you talk about the different industries meeting at the Golden Nugget, it almost sounds like Mafia families meeting to divvy things up. How much were they motivated by ideology and how much is sheer greed?

Kennedy: I don’t try to look into people’s heads, but there are some people who are driven just by the ideology. I’d say most of the people who’ve risen to the top have been able to cash in on their ideological fervor.

You blame the industry for being polluters, but you say free-market capitalism is the best thing that could happen to the environment. What do you mean?

Kennedy: It’s not the free market that destroys the environment. It’s the suspension of free market rules. In a true free-market economy, you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. But polluters make themselves rich by making everyone else poor. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market by forcing the public to pay their production costs.

You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs. When the coal-burning utility puts mercury into our air which it could easily and cheaply remove, it’s avoiding one of the costs of bringing its product to market. When it puts acid rain, which acidifies our lakes, or ozone and particulates, which cause tens of thousands of deaths and millions of asthma attacks, all of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company’s product when it makes it to the market.

But corporations are externalizing machines. They are constantly trying to figure out ways to force the public to pay their production costs, and pollution is one of those ways. Pollution is a subsidy, it’s a theft of public wealth, of the commonwealth.

The public owns the air. It doesn’t belong to corporations. The public owns the waterways. These are public trust assets. We own the fisheries, the wildlife, the public land. They have been protected on behalf of the public since Roman times. This is ancient law. Those things that are not subject to private ownership by their nature are owned by the people. They’re not owned by the governor or the legislature or the corporations. The rule is, everyone has a right to use them but nobody can use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. Today every fish in 19 states is inedible or unsafe to eat — the EPA made that announcement two weeks ago — because of mercury contamination. That contamination is coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants. They’re making money by poisoning our foods, by stealing something that the constitutions of the states say belong to the public. I pay $60 for a fishing license every year, but I can no longer go fishing with my kids and let them eat fish because the fish are too poisonous to eat in my state (New York). The same is true in 19 states, and in 48 states at least some of the fish are contaminated from mercury. So that’s a theft from the public.

All the environmental laws were meant to do was to restore free-market capitalism in our country by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market. I don’t even consider myself an enviromentalist any more. I’m a free marketeer. I go out in the free marketplace and catch the cheaters, the polluters, and I say to them we are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you internalize your profits, because none of us get the advantages of the efficiency and the prosperity and the democracy that a free market promises our country as long as somebody is cheating the free market. It distorts the entire market place.

In your book, you talk about the memory of the faces of America you saw from the funeral train that carried your father to his burial in 1968, bu you add that many of those same people who supported your father in 1968 supported George Wallace in 1972. Would you elaborate on this point?

Kennedy: Every human being, like every nation, has a darker side and a lighter side, and the easiest thing for a politician to do is to appeal to our greed, to our fear, to our hatred, to our xenophobia, to our bigotry and prejudice and self-interest. And it’s much more difficult for a political leader or a party to ask people to transcend their narrow self-interests and act on behalf of the community. But that’s really the challenge for America, that’s the challenge for our soul. Are we an idealistic nation that’s going to try to meet our national mission, our historic mission, which is to create communities for our children that are models for the rest of the world, showing what human beings can accomplish if they work together and maintain their focus on their spiritual mission? Or are we going to devolve into a nation where it’s everybody for themselves, where America is nothing more than a bunch of strangers who have gotten together from across the world to increase the size of their own piles? I think that America means more than that.

We’re not protecting nature for the sake of the fish and the birds. We’re protecting it for our own sake, for the infrastructure of our communities, and if we want to meet our obligation as a nation and civilization, which is to provide communities for our children that give them the same opporunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave to us, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure — the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the public lands, the landscapes that connect to our history and to the generations that came before us that root us in a sense of community. Those are the things are being put on the auction block today, all those things that make us proud to be Americans.

I think this administration is really trying to appeal to the darkest side of our country, to the hatred and the division and to fear, rather than an optimistic America.

What role did your father play in shaping your interest in the environment?

Kennedy: I was born with an interest in the environment, in wildlife in particular, and I spent all of my free time in the woods when I was a kid catching frogs and crayfish, trapping hawks and training. I still do that today. I’m a licensed falconer. I have a licensed rehabilitation center at my home for injured or orphaned raptors. I trap and ban raptors for the Fish and Wildlife Service and train and hunt with them, so I’ve always been interested in wildlife. But it was something my father was deeply interested in, too. He took us hiking and mountain climbing and white water kayaking and rafting all over our country. He really understood this was part of our commonwealth and heritage, that this was the shared heritage of the American people, and that our wilderness defined us as a nation from the beginning of our national history.

Our great cultural and political leaders told the American people you don’t have to be ashamed for not having the 1,500 years of culture they have in Europe, because you have this relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness, which is the undiluted work of the creator. And that’s going to be the source of your values, and virtues, your character, that’s going to define you. My father understood that and tried to inculcate us with those values, and to some extent I think he succeeded.

Your father had a deep belief that many of the solutions to problems in this country are local. What advice do you have for people locally about the environment?

Kennedy: Almost all the battles are local battles, the important ones. We’re going to be left with a patchwork of communities 20 or 30 years from now, and some of them are going to be proud communities that are sustainable, that have made good decisions, that have not taken the easy money from the Wal-Marts of the world, that have said we’re going to close our downtown merchants and sell them out and take the quick money. Instead, there are people who have said we’re going to build our communities with a sense of responsibility to the next generation and a sense of sustainability. There are going to be some communities that will be devastated, places where people don’t want to live or raise children, and there are going to be some communities that are wonderful and proud, and those are the ones where people have cared about their environment and the next generation.