TORONTO (djc Features) — The toxic waters of Quassaic Creek were causing the cuts on his hands to fester. The stench of human waste and a cocktail of industrial solvents filled his nostrils. A fetid stream in upstate New York seems an odd place to find a Kennedy, a peculiar place for an epiphany and an even stranger place to discover a life’s calling.
It was in that stream Robert F. Kennedy Jr. realized that the fight for social justice was inextricably linked to the fight for the world’s ecology.
“The battle for the environment,” Kennedy would later write, “was the ultimate civil rights and human rights contest, a struggle to maintain public control over publicly owned resources against special interests that would monopolize, segregate and liquidate them for cash.”
It’s a battle his father, assassinated Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy Sr., would doubtless have approved.
Until the days of Quassaic Creek, Kennedy Jr. lived under the shadow cast by his legendary family name. It was a burden that drove him to make several mistakes culminating in a 1983 arrest for heroin possession. The resulting public scrutiny, compounded by the drug-related death of his younger brother David, would prompt deep introspection and a return to the great love of his childhood: nature.
Kennedy is a lawyer by training. In January 1984, he fulfilled his community service sentence by working with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). His first project on its behalf involved transforming a stretch of Hudson riverbank into the Castle Rock Field Station, whose first tenant would be a group called the Hudson River Fisherman’s Association (HRFA). It was through this group that Kennedy would meet two of his most influential figures, John Cronin and Bob Boyle.
In Cronin, Kennedy met a kindred spirit. Kennedy recalls how Cronin “saw the Hudson as a community where sports fishermen, commercial fishermen, river pilots, oil tankers, barges and pleasure boats enjoy the beauty and support their livelihoods.” Cronin had been fighting for that community. Since the early 1970s, he and Robert H. Boyle (a writer for Sports Illustrated) had been bringing lawsuits against Hudson polluters, including General Electric and Exxon, on behalf of the HRFA using legislation inspired by the inception of Earth Day in 1970. They did it with great success, and their reckless style and blue-collar work ethic struck a chord with Kennedy.
With the help of local residents, Kennedy, Cronin and the NRDC prepared 20 cases against Quassaic Creek polluters. Although only four were proceeded to litigation, all 20 would produce settlements and funds to establish a new organization, dubbed Riverkeeper. The rebirth of the HRFA under the Riverkeeper banner mirrored Kennedy’s awakening as an environmentalist.
In banding with dozens of local residents in the fight against polluters, Kennedy realized that the environment was not an abstract issue that could be separated from other concerns in people’s lives. “The environment is our neighbourhood, our community,” he said. “It is our quality of life.”
Although a lawyer, Kennedy knew little about environmental law. This prompted his enrolment in night school and later the honour of receiving Pace University’s first-ever master’s degree in environmental law.
Over time, Pace supported the Riverkeeper legal machine, as young students had the opportunity to litigate cases prepared by Kennedy and company. In a landscape where your opponents are larger in both size and bank account, having a pool of free legal talent proved a great equalizer. In the coming years, Kennedy and his students would score victories over the very best lawyers and firms New York state had to offer.
People began to take notice. So did the press.
Over the past two decades, Riverkeeper secured legal triumphs against a wide array of large corporations and city sewage and treatment plants, culminating in a historic agreement to protect the New York City watershed.
In addition to these successes, the Riverkeeper model proved to be highly exportable. The fight against polluters expanded to nearby Long Island Sound and then to other waterways across the U.S. There are now 121 Waterkeeper chapters worldwide, including one for Lake Ontario, headquartered in Toronto.
But building environmental awareness about the waterfront in the Toronto area is difficult because residents seem unaware the city even has a waterfront. Thanks to the Gardiner Expressway, numerous commuter train tracks and a cordon sanitaire of condominiums, Toronto’s downtown lakefront is mostly out of sight and out of mind.
Not so for Waterkeepers Mark Mattson and Krystyn Tully.
Mattson, an environmental lawyer with 14 years experience, and Tully, the group’s executive director, operate from a cheerily anarchic office at Pier 4, where they represent communities from Sarnia, Ont., in the west through to Moncton, N.B., in the east. Kennedy is an active participant on the local front and brings a high level of exposure to the organization.
Last summer, when Kennedy was in Toronto for the Waterkeeper annual general conference, he attended a fundraiser for then-mayoral candidate David Miller. With the help of the Kennedy seal of approval, the environmentally friendly Miller campaign moved from nine per cent support in August to an eventual win.
The Toronto mayoralty race is an example of how Kennedy now bolsters municipal officials around North America and proves that the environment can be a kingmaker.
During his time in Toronto Kennedy was also introduced to Moses Znaimer who, in short order, extended an invitation to speak at his annual ideaCity conference, a three-day gathering that is developing a reputation as Canada’s pre-eminent meeting of great minds.
“What I respect about Moses,” said Kennedy, “is his commitment
to the forum of ideas within a democracy. Through conglomeration, the forum of ideas in the media has too often been replaced by the forum of commerce.” For Kennedy, ideaCity represents an ideal forum to spread his message.
However, it is a message some are tired of hearing.
Environmental legislation and standards enforcement affects big business and Kennedy, the environment’s most recognizable advocate, is not without his well-heeled detractors. Environmentalists are often branded as alarmist, even fanatical. Kennedy is aggressive and by some accusations, reckless.
But, unfazed by his critics, Kennedy refuses to let up.
“I deal in fact,” he says. “The fact that the polar ice won’t be there in 40 years alarms me. The fact that I can’t eat the fish I catch in my home state alarms me. It should alarm me.”
Square in Kennedy’s sights now is the Bush administration. He is completing a book on Bush’s environmental record for HarperCollins this coming August — just in time for the U.S. fall election — among other literary projects.
Kennedy is in this fight for the long haul; he discovered his own life in the polluted waters of upstate New York, and he will not rest until he has cleaned up every stream.
The Kennedy File
• Born: January 17, 1954
• Son of assassinated Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy
• Nephew of assassinated President John F. Kennedy
• One of eleven children born to Robert Kennedy and Ethel Skakel
• Father of six children
• Received an undergraduate degree from Harvard University in Massachusetts
• Received a law degree from the University of Virginia
• Served as assistant District Attorney in New York City in the 1970s
• Joined Riverkeeper in 1984
• Received a Master’s degree in environmental law from Pace University in New York
• Founded Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic in 1986
• Secured historic New York City watershed protection
agreement in 1995
• Served as counsel in hundreds of environmental law cases
• Secured millions of dollars in damages as a result of litigation
• Co-author of The Riverkeepers, published by Simon & Schuster in 1997
• Master falconer and avid whitewater enthusiast
Current roles include:
• President of the Waterkeeper Alliance (www.waterkeeper.org)
• Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeeper (www.riverkeeper.org)
• Senior Attorney for the National Resources Defense Council (www.nrdc.org)
• Supervisor at the Environmental Law Clinic at Pace University (www.law.pace.edu/envclinic)
This article is part of Digital Journal’s national magazine edition. Pick up your copy of Digital Journal in bookstores across Canada. Or subscribe to Digital Journal now, and receive 8 issues for $19.95 + GST ($39.95 USD).
