Kennedy: Bush Can't See the Forest for the Trees

"Is the environmental movement dead?" an audience member asked Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Thursday evening in Wheeler Auditorium.

After listening to Kennedy bemoan the country's current environmental condition, such a question seemed reasonable.

After all, Kennedy, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and son of former New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy, called President Bush "the worst environmental president we've had in American history" who has led "a concerted effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law."

Kennedy pointed to numerous grim statistics: One-fourth of black children have asthma, coal power plants discharge chemicals that kill 10,000 Americans per year, and 1,200 miles of Appalachian mountains are being torn down by coal mining.

He himself has double the safe level of mercury in his blood, Kennedy said.

"If a woman had this much, her child would have cognitive impairment," he said.

Nonetheless, the environmental movement is alive, Kennedy told an audience of about 800, which included just a smattering of students.

He said the blame for Bush's policies should fall not on the environmental movement, but instead on the media.

The national press skips over environmental issues in favor of being "stenographers for the White House" and covering celebrity gossip, Kennedy said. The effect is that citizens do not fully grasp the reality of the damage.

"Today, as a result, we are the best entertained and least informed people on the face of the earth," he said.

Kennedy falls in line with other recent campus speakers like Paul Krugman, Al Gore and Michael Moore as a harsh critic of the Bush administration.

More than the others, however, Kennedy is a vocal presence at the forefront of the environmental movement.

Though he previously served as the assistant district attorney for Manhattan, Kennedy has repeatedly turned down calls to make a bid for office, including running for attorney general of New York in 2006.

He has instead concentrated his efforts on addressing environmental issues through the law, including working to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant in New York.

Beyond critiquing the president, Kennedy said that excessive corporate power is destroying the nation's ability to protect the environment.

He quoted former President Lincoln, who at the end of the Civil War said, "I have the South in front of me and the bankers behind me, and for my country I fear the bankers more."

Many corporations put profits ahead of protecting the environment, Kennedy said, and cited poet Walt Whitman and former President Theodore Roosevelt as proof that there is a long history of support for the environment in the United States.

"Nature is the unifying element of our national culture," he said.

He then turned back to the Bush administration, which he said misses the importance of that history.

"It looks at the landscape and sees nothing but money," he said.

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