2008 Woodie Awards
Q and A with discourse speaker Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
By: Courtney Hime
Issue date: 10/9/07 Section: News
- Page 1 of 1
Before environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. gave his speech about the contract with the future Friday evening, The DePauw, WGRE and D3TV sat down and asked him a few questions.
The DePauw: Why is the environment such a center point of your life? At what point did that happen?
RFK: It was always an important part of my life. I started going hunting and fishing when I was very, very young. The outdoors has always been an important part of my life. I always, from a very young age saw pollution as a form of theft. It was anti-democratic. It was somebody who was stealing the publicly-owned resources of society that should belong to everybody. They were privatizing those resources.
If we want to meet our obligation as a generation and a civilization and a nation, which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health and prosperity, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands. These publicly owned resources enrich the landscape, it provides context for our communities, the source, ultimately, of our values and our virtues and our character as a people.
TDP: Do you see that type of environmentalism as purely American, or do you see that fitting into international ideas?
RFK: [The Riverkeepers have] spread now to all the major rivers on the east, on the west coast, every major river. We’ll have keepers on every major river across North America in five years. But this concept works so well, the formula and the model works so well, that it’s also spread to other countries. It’s a model that works, with some adjustment, almost everywhere.
D3TV: What message do you hope students can take away after they see you speak?
RFK: The most important message is that the environment and democracy are intertwined. The best measure of how a democracy functions is how it distributes the goods of the land. The greatest threat today to the environment is the same as the greatest threat to our democracy, which is the corrosive impacts of excessive corporate power. I think that’s mainly what I’m going to talk about tonight is, rather than specifically focusing on the environment, to focus on how corporate power is eroding democracy, and erodes economy as well as the environment.
TDP: How do you feel about the Bush administration?
RFK: It’s the worst environmental administration in our history. I think it’s the worst administration of any kind in our history. I think the Iraq war was the worst foreign policy decision, without a doubt, that has ever been made in this country, in 230 years of existence.
When I was a little kid I went to Europe with my father. Everywhere we went, we were met by these vast crowds of people who came out just because they wanted to be close to an American politician. The whole world was starved for our leadership. They were hungry for our moral authority. They loved America.
It took 230 years of discipline, restrained and visionary leadership by Republican and Democratic leaders to build up those vast reservoirs of public love and respect for the leadership in the United States and in seven short years, those reservoirs have been drained dry through monumental arrogance and incompetence.
There was a poll done in Europe recently, really disturbing, that shows that among European youth, Osama bin Laden is more popular than George Bush, than our president. It’s sickening. For more that’s the bitterest pill to swallow, because I saw, as a little boy, in the faces of those vast crowds, the hope for American leadership. Not just to do good things for our country, but to do great things for all of humanity. That’s gone today.
D3TV: What do you think is the way back from this?
RFK: You can’t fix the environment unless you first fix our democracy, because the democracy cannot survive under any system except for a functioning environment. That’s why there’s a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny in various countries and the level of environmental destruction.
The only way that you can protect the environment is to have functioning, locally-based democracy. Birds don’t vote, fish don’t vote, they don’t participate in the political process, and our children don’t either. So the only way that those voices get heard, those interests get heard in the political process, is in a locally-based democracy where individuals who harbor those interests and values can inject them into the political dialogue.
People always say what’s the most important environmental law. I say, number one, campaign finance reform. Number two, bring back the Fairness Doctrine to break up these huge corporate consolidations, conglomerations, which now monopolize the news, where the news has become corporate profit centers. The news departments are now no longer informing us, which they have to do in a democracy, but instead they’re entertaining us. This happened because Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1986. We had a law in this country that required that the airwaves be used to advance democracy and promote the public interest. If you’re using public airwaves, you have an obligation to inform the public, whether the public wants to be informed or not. That’s a critical part of our democratic process. It’s a critical issue for our democracy and the environment. They’re all intertwined.
The DePauw: Why is the environment such a center point of your life? At what point did that happen?
RFK: It was always an important part of my life. I started going hunting and fishing when I was very, very young. The outdoors has always been an important part of my life. I always, from a very young age saw pollution as a form of theft. It was anti-democratic. It was somebody who was stealing the publicly-owned resources of society that should belong to everybody. They were privatizing those resources.
If we want to meet our obligation as a generation and a civilization and a nation, which is to create communities for our children that provide them with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health and prosperity, we’ve got to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wildlife, the fisheries, the public lands. These publicly owned resources enrich the landscape, it provides context for our communities, the source, ultimately, of our values and our virtues and our character as a people.
TDP: Do you see that type of environmentalism as purely American, or do you see that fitting into international ideas?
RFK: [The Riverkeepers have] spread now to all the major rivers on the east, on the west coast, every major river. We’ll have keepers on every major river across North America in five years. But this concept works so well, the formula and the model works so well, that it’s also spread to other countries. It’s a model that works, with some adjustment, almost everywhere.
D3TV: What message do you hope students can take away after they see you speak?
RFK: The most important message is that the environment and democracy are intertwined. The best measure of how a democracy functions is how it distributes the goods of the land. The greatest threat today to the environment is the same as the greatest threat to our democracy, which is the corrosive impacts of excessive corporate power. I think that’s mainly what I’m going to talk about tonight is, rather than specifically focusing on the environment, to focus on how corporate power is eroding democracy, and erodes economy as well as the environment.
TDP: How do you feel about the Bush administration?
RFK: It’s the worst environmental administration in our history. I think it’s the worst administration of any kind in our history. I think the Iraq war was the worst foreign policy decision, without a doubt, that has ever been made in this country, in 230 years of existence.
When I was a little kid I went to Europe with my father. Everywhere we went, we were met by these vast crowds of people who came out just because they wanted to be close to an American politician. The whole world was starved for our leadership. They were hungry for our moral authority. They loved America.
It took 230 years of discipline, restrained and visionary leadership by Republican and Democratic leaders to build up those vast reservoirs of public love and respect for the leadership in the United States and in seven short years, those reservoirs have been drained dry through monumental arrogance and incompetence.
There was a poll done in Europe recently, really disturbing, that shows that among European youth, Osama bin Laden is more popular than George Bush, than our president. It’s sickening. For more that’s the bitterest pill to swallow, because I saw, as a little boy, in the faces of those vast crowds, the hope for American leadership. Not just to do good things for our country, but to do great things for all of humanity. That’s gone today.
D3TV: What do you think is the way back from this?
RFK: You can’t fix the environment unless you first fix our democracy, because the democracy cannot survive under any system except for a functioning environment. That’s why there’s a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny in various countries and the level of environmental destruction.
The only way that you can protect the environment is to have functioning, locally-based democracy. Birds don’t vote, fish don’t vote, they don’t participate in the political process, and our children don’t either. So the only way that those voices get heard, those interests get heard in the political process, is in a locally-based democracy where individuals who harbor those interests and values can inject them into the political dialogue.
People always say what’s the most important environmental law. I say, number one, campaign finance reform. Number two, bring back the Fairness Doctrine to break up these huge corporate consolidations, conglomerations, which now monopolize the news, where the news has become corporate profit centers. The news departments are now no longer informing us, which they have to do in a democracy, but instead they’re entertaining us. This happened because Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1986. We had a law in this country that required that the airwaves be used to advance democracy and promote the public interest. If you’re using public airwaves, you have an obligation to inform the public, whether the public wants to be informed or not. That’s a critical part of our democratic process. It’s a critical issue for our democracy and the environment. They’re all intertwined.
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