Robert Kennedy Jr.

In an autobiographical chapter in “The Riverkeepers,” a book he coauthored in 1997, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. invokes a kind of Doctor Doolittle upbringing at Hickory Hill in suburban Virginia, where the household menagerie included barnyard animals, horses, a giant leopard tortoise and a California sea lion. Kennedy told everyone who asked that he was going to be a veterinarian.

But Kennedy followed his father’s path through Harvard and the University of Virginia law school, then joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He had already begun experimenting with heroin, and, in 1983, he was arrested for possession on his way to a treatment center. A year later, as part of his rehabilitation, Kennedy took a volunteer job with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Since 1970, the NRDC had served as legal counsel for the Hudson River Fishermen’s Assn. in its battle to stop Consolidated Edison from blasting a 6-billion-gallon reservoir out of the summit of Storm King Mountain in the Hudson Headlands. The project would have sucked 1 million cubic feet of water a minute from the river and wiped out one of the two principal spawning grounds for the Atlantic Coast striped bass. The 1980 Hudson River peace treaty between the utility and the fishermen led to the establishment of the first “riverkeeper” program.

Kennedy and the riverkeeper, a former Hudson River commercial fisherman named John Cronin (his coauthor), were natural allies. Their work along Quassaick Creek, an urban stream that runs through Newburgh, N.Y., on its seven-mile journey to the Hudson, led to a string of legal victories. For Kennedy, it was the start of a career as an environmental lawyer and the beginning of a lifelong love affair with the Hudson River. Five years ago, he led negotiations that resulted in a landmark agreement between federal, state and local communities and environmental groups to permanently protect the Catskill watersheds that produce New York City’s water supply.

Today, Kennedy is Hudson Riverkeeper chief prosecuting attorney, a senior attorney for the NRDC and a professor at Pace University School of Law, where he heads an environmental litigation clinic. At the beginning of the semester, he assigns each of his students four polluters to sue. The riverkeeper program now includes more than 30 affiliates patrolling waterways from Long Island Sound to Santa Monica Bay.

When he was 11 years old, Kennedy read T.H. White’s Camelot tale, “The Once and Future King,” and knew that he wanted to be a falconer, training wild hawks to hunt, a sport that he has pursued passionately ever since.

Kennedy was recently in town to attend an NRDC fund-raiser at UCLA’s Royce Hall and a Riverkeepers’ gathering at Pepperdine College. He lives with his wife, Mary Richardson, and five children, three from a previous marriage, in Mount Kisco, N.Y., in the Hudson River Valley. Kennedy was interviewed at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

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Question: What makes you so interested in falconry?

Answer: The ecologist Aldo Leopold called falconry “the perfect sport” because you’re not really doing anything to nature. You’re not teaching the bird to do something it otherwise isn’t inclined to do. Essentially, the birds are allowing you to hunt with them, to participate in the hunt. I fly a pair of Harris hawks, and they do exactly what they’d do if they were hunting in the wild: To see the birds fly like that, to see them close up, is a breathtaking experience every time I see it.

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Q: You’re saying it’s a way of joining with nonhuman nature.

A: Well, human beings are a part of nature, too. We have 2 billion years of biological wiring that says we’re a biological organism.

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Q: Do you see environmentalism as a kind of nature worship?

A: I don’t think we should worship nature.

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Q: Why not?

A: I don’t think nature is God. Nature is the creation of God. In every religious tradition, God has commanded human beings to take care of nature because it’s his property. . . . The reason we object to the destruction of nature is because that’s where we get a sense of the divine. St. Thomas Aquinas said you can get a sense of God through looking at a single creature; but you can’t get a sense of the divine in all the complexities of the creator unless you look at the whole web of creation. When we destroy pieces of that web, we’re destroying our own ability to sense the divine . . . and therefore what our own potential is as human beings.

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Q: Do you see your work as a spiritual journey?

A: If you don’t have a strong spiritual undertone to your cosmology when you’re doing this kind of work, I think it’s hard to sustain; because, for one thing, there’s a lot of losses. How do you deal with that unless you have some faith? . . .

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Q: Who inspires you the most?

A: The people who [fight for the environment] day after day without getting credit for it, and who don’t get paid. I end up working a lot of the time with fishermen and community organizers, just people who are fighting on behalf of their community. To me, protecting the environment isn’t about protecting nature for its own sake, but because we recognize that it nurtures us and enriches community. . . . It gives us a basis for relating to each other.

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Q: Riverkeepers have been criticized because it goes for the throat so quickly, that it’s too fast to file lawsuits.

A: The last thing anybody wants to do is to litigate. Litigation is simply a mechanism for getting us to a negotiating table where people will negotiate in good faith. We’re not going to be able to outspend our opponents. We’re not going to be able to influence the political process, which they’ve succeeded in capturing. General Electric can buy NBC. Westinghouse can buy CBS. You have the biggest polluters in the country now owning the biggest networks. We can’t compete with a political process in which hundreds of millions of dollars [are contributed by] polluters every year. The one place they can’t capture with money is the courts. It’s the thing that gives us equality at a negotiating table, because we know we can litigate as well as anybody.

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Q: How do you see environmental law evolving?

A: The opposition is constantly getting more sophisticated. We could not pass a Clean Water Act today. We could not pass a Clean Air Act. We couldn’t pass an Endangered Species Act. We were able to do that because we caught our opponents by surprise. But now they’re sophisticated. They’re rich. They control the politicians. Capitol Hill is essentially just indentured servants to the polluting industries.

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Q: Would you say that is true of both political parties?

A: Both parties. More the Republicans than Democrats, but it’s only a matter of degree.

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Q: You said it would be impossible today to pass the kind of environmental laws we passed in the 1970s. Why is that?

A: Polluting industries now are pouring so much more money into the political process, roughly $300 million every political cycle, while environmentalists are contributing about $2 million. It’s working: You’re seeing a lot less enforcement of environmental laws. The Environmental Protection Agency’s budget has been slashed. State governments have stopped enforcing laws. The discharge of pollutants into the nation’s waterways has increased, not declined. If governments were actually enforcing the laws we have, we’d need very few more.

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Q: Is it enough to win legal battles?

A: There [are two] ways to measure the effectiveness of a democracy: how it dispenses justice and how it distributes the goods of the land--fresh air, clean water, abundant fisheries, the things that are owned by all the people. . . . What the environmental movement is all about is trying to ensure the fair distribution of those assets even to people who don’t participate in the political process. The burden of environmental injury always falls hardest on the poorest, falls hardest on the next generation. If you look at where toxins end up in this country, four out of every five toxic-waste dumps . . . are in black neighborhoods. The highest concentration of toxic-waste dumps in America is the South Side of Chicago. The most contaminated zip code in California is East L.A. . . . Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of stealing from a future generation that is going to pay the cost of our pollution-based prosperity.

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Q: In some quarters, environmentalists are perceived as elitists, well-to-do people protecting resources for their own pleasure. How do you make the connection between environmentalism and restoring communities?

A: The poorest members of the community . . . bear the burden of toxic-waste disposal. We now know there’s no way to get rid of toxic waste. If you burn it in an incinerator, it goes into the air, and people in the neighborhood get sick. If you put it in a landfill, it goes into the ground water. . . . People in affluent neighborhoods don’t allow toxic waste to get into their neighborhoods, because they don’t allow incinerators and landfills. . . . They . . . make sure it . . . ends up in the neighborhoods that can least afford to get sick. Probably the greatest health epidemic in this country is not AIDS or cancer but the [high numbers of] African American kids who are poisoned by lead every year. . . . Protecting the environment is a way of acknowledging that we can’t buy our way out of community. We can’t trade higher standards of living for a few people for lower quality of life for everybody else. . . .

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Q: One of the differences between what you’re doing on the Hudson and what we’re doing on the Los Angeles River is the difference between protecting a river and recreating one that’s nearly been destroyed. Do you think it’s as valuable to recreate a river as to protect one?

A: Are you asking what’s the point of restoring a river system that’s been eradicated or destroyed? Is it worth the money it’s going to take? There clearly is a symbolic importance. The waterway connects us to the history of the area. It’s a sign of respect for the ecology. It’s an acknowledgment that there was something here before the Corps of Engineers came, and that we ought to be able to live in harmony with it. . . . We have to restore the Los Angeles River so that city kids can go into the creek and turn over a rock and find a salamander.

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Q: What do you think are the major issues the environmental movement is facing today?

A: The biggest issue is urban sprawl, the destruction of landscapes. You can restore rivers. In the ‘60s, the Hudson River was reeling against the ropes; it barely had a pulse. Now it’s one of the richest fisheries in the North Atlantic. But once the landscapes are gone, they’re pretty much gone forever. We know that pavement is the biggest source of pollution. When as little as 10% of the watershed is paved, it irrevocably damages the ecology. That’s not a good sign for the L.A. River. *