Bush's Crimes Against Nature

By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Eugene Weekly. Posted October 7, 2004.

Editor's Note: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is arguably the nation's most prominent environmental attorney. His new book is "Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy." On Sept. 23, he made an impromptu appearance in Eugene, Oregon. Below is an edited transcript of his talk.

I've written a book about Bush's environmental record, but it's not so much about the environment as it is about an excess of corporate power and the corrosive impact of that on our democracy. And it's not about a Democrat attacking a Republican. I've been disciplined for 20 years as an environmental advocate about being non-partisan and bi-partisan in my approach to these issues. I don't think there's any such thing as Republican children or Democratic children, and the worst thing that can happen to the environment is if it becomes the province of a single political party. But you can't talk honestly about the environment today in any context without speaking critically about this president. This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history.

If you look at Natural Resource Defense Council's website, you'll see over 400 major environmental roll-backs that have been promoted by this administration during the last three and a half years, and I tell you it's part of a concerted deliberate attempt to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

It's a stealth attack. They have concealed their radical agenda from the American public using Orwellian rhetoric. When they destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Law; when they destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Bill. And most insidiously they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution. The head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist. The head of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist who believes that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the air division at EPA is a utility lobbyist who has represented the worst air polluters in America. The second in command at EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist. The head of Superfunds, an agency critical to quality of life here in Oregon, is a lobbyist whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfunds.

If you go through all the agency heads, sub-heads and secretaries in the Department of Agriculture, Department of the Interior, Department of Energy and EPA, you'll find the same thing: The polluters are running regulatory agencies that are supposed to regulate them. And these are not individuals who have entered government service for the sake of the public interest, but rather specifically to subvert the very laws that they are in charge of enforcing. This is impacting our quality of life in America in so many ways that we don't know about because the press simply isn't doing its job of informing the American public, scrutinizing these policies, connecting the dots between the corporate contributors and the dramatic decline in American quality of life that we are now experiencing.

This year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Water Act, EPA announced that America's waterways are actually getting dirtier. The New York Times ran a story that the levels of sulfur dioxide (that causes acid rain) have grown 4 percent over the last year. I have three children who have asthma and one out of every four black children in this country in our municipalities now has asthma.

Asthma rates have doubled among our children over the last five years. Whether it's hormones in our food or antibiotics, something is causing our children to have these kinds of haywire immune systems. We do know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and particulates. About 60 percent of those materials in our atmosphere are coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. They were supposed to have cleaned up 15 years ago. The Clinton administration was prosecuting the worst 70 of these plants for criminal violations. But this is an industry that donated $48 million to President Bush and the Republican Party in the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since. And one of the first things that President Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department to drop those lawsuits against those utilities

According to the EPA, just the criminal excedences from these 70 plants kill 5,500 Americans every year. And then the Bush administration tore the heart out of the Clean Air Act abolishing the New Source Reviews section that require these companies to clean up their pollution. That decision is killing 30,000 Americans every single year, according to EPA, including 165 people in the state of Oregon.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of Waterkeeper Alliance.

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