RFK Jr. carries on father’s tradition of effecting change
On one end of a conference room at Pace Law School sits a stuffed Sumatran tiger, and on the other, a lion of the environmental movement.
Clad in a suit and blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his hair parted on one side with a rise in the middle that evokes his late father, professor Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. recalled how his career as an environmental activist started early.
“When I was 8 years old, I wrote my uncle, President Kennedy, a letter asking to meet with him about pollution,” said the longtime Westchester County resident. Invited to the White House, the young activist told his uncle that he wanted to write a book about pollution, and his uncle arranged for him to interview the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, and Rachel Carson, the author of “Silent Spring,” a book about the effect on the environment by the overuse of pesticides.
“I always knew I wanted to do environmental advocacy from when I was little, and I always saw pollution as a form of theft, that people had no right to steal the air or the water, that it was part of the commons,” said Kennedy, who graduated from law school at the University of Virginia in 1979.
When Kennedy was in law school, there was only one class offered in environmental law, which had not yet fully evolved as an area of practice. A few years later, when Kennedy was hired by Riverkeeper, a clean water advocacy organization, as its lead attorney, he began taking classes at Pace Law School at night.
“I came back to law school here at night so that I could be a better advocate for my client,” he said. “After the second year, they began offering the L.L.M. (Master of Laws). Since I already had half the course load, I just completed it and was the first one to graduate” from the program.
Asked to join the faculty at Pace, Kennedy has lived in Westchester County ever since, in what was the cradle of the environmental movement in the U.S.
“The first big battle was actually in the 1840s. Washington Irving sued to stop the railroads from being built and stealing the shoreline,” said Kennedy, a font of knowledge on the history of environmentalism in the Hudson Valley. “He stopped them for about 20 years ”” for a while, until he got bought off with railway stock.”
It was just more than 100 years later, Kennedy explained, that the Hudson Valley became the epicenter of the nascent movement.
“In 1966, it was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York city and south of Albany,” Kennedy said. “It caught fire. It turned color depending upon what color they were painting trucks at the GM plant in Tarrytown.”
Around the same time, the Hudson River Fishermen”™s Association was formed in Crotonville, seeking to stop the damage to the river. According to Kennedy, the group of anglers had considered more aggressive means than civil suits to protect the Hudson fishery.
“They were talking about blowing up pipes on the river and putting a match to the oil slick on the Penn Central pipeline and floating a raft of dynamite into the Indian Point power plant intake, because that plant was killing a million fish a day on its intake screens and taking food off of their family tables,” he said.
However, it was Sports Illustrated outdoor editor Bob Boyle who convinced the group to take a different tack. Boyle, who exposed the state of the Hudson fishery in the April 26, 1965, article “A Stink of Dead Stripers,” found out that the 1888 Rivers and Harbors Act, which made it illegal to pollute any waterway in the U.S., was still good law ”” and that people who reported polluters got to keep half the fines assessed.
“That evening he stood up in front of all those people, men and women, with this 19th century statute and he said, ”˜You know, we shouldn”™t be talking about breaking law, we should be talking about enforcing it,”™” Kennedy said.
That group later became Riverkeeper, which defends the Hudson against pollution with the help of the Pace Environmental Law Clinic, which Kennedy runs. He is president of Waterkeeper Alliance, a group linking more than 250 organizations that fight water pollution.
Kennedy”™s legal clinic gives law students at Pace the opportunity to litigate civil cases against companies who pollute the river. Kennedy teaches every Monday, and on Tuesday, the clinic has a case review session, where the students and professors discuss the progress of the suits.
“We give each of the students four polluters to sue, and they file complaints, they do discovery, they do depositions, they go to court and they argue their cases,” he said. “They get the kind of responsibility and trial experience here that they probably wouldn”™t get until they were five or seven years out of law school.”
With the early part of the week devoted to his academic work, the latter part of his week often takes him outside the Westchester area. He and his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, whom he married in August, recently bought a $5 million home in Malibu, Calif.
“I travel over like 220 days a year,” Kennedy said. “I get a lot of work done on airplanes, and I”™m just kind of used to it.”
Kennedy speaks with passion about New York state”™s environment and the Hudson Valley.
“Right now, we have a market that is governed by rules that were written and rigged by the incumbent polluters to reward the dirtiest, filthiest, most poisonous, most toxic, addictive fuels from hell rather than the cheap, clean, green, wholesome, patriotic fuels from heaven, and we need to change that dynamic,” he said.
Though he sees progress through new, greener technologies, Kennedy says the battle now is to get those technologies on a level playing field with fossil fuels.
“Wind and solar can now deliver electrons cheaper ”” far cheaper ”” than coal or oil, particularly if we got rid of the subsidies to the incumbents and if we force them to internalize their costs,” he said. “Even with the vast subsidies and political preference that”™s enjoyed by the incumbents, we”™re still beating them in the marketplace.”
Kennedy”™s role is to make sure the polluters can do no damage to that which belongs to all of us.
“A lot of what we do is making sure that the public trust, the commons, stays in the hands of the people, that it”™s regulated intelligently so that everyone can use it, so that nobody uses more than its share,” he said. “Those things aren”™t susceptible to private property ownership, but by their nature are the possession of the entire community and the assets of the community, whether you”™re rich or poor, black or white, humble or noble.”
This article was first published in WAG magazine, the Business Journal”™s sister publication.