Crimes Against Nature by Jr. Robert F. Kennedy Read Free Book Online Page B

immediate beneficiaries of this corrupt largesse have been the nation’s most irresponsible mining, chemical, energy, agribusiness, and automobile companies. The American people have been the losers.
    Environmental injury is deficit spending — loading the costs of pollution-based prosperity onto the backs of the next generation. In 2003 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that for the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed 30 years ago, American waterways are getting dirtier. In Lake Erie, painstakingly resurrected by the Clean Water Act, the infamous dead zone is expanding once again. More raw sewage is flowing into our rivers, lakes, and streams as the White House throws out rules designed to end sewer-system overflows. Bush’s policies promote greater use of dangerous pesticides, deadly chemicals, and greenhouse gases, and encourage the filling of wetlands and streams. The administration has removed protections from millions of acres of public lands and wetlands and thousands of miles of creeks, rivers, and coastal areas.
    I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and on bad-air days I watch them struggle to breathe. And they’re comparatively lucky: One in four African American children in New York City shares this affliction, and many lack the insurance and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive and active. 2 Sadly, too, few children today can enjoy that quintessential American experience, going fishing with Dad and eating their catch. Most bodies of water in New York — and all freshwater bodies in 17 other states — are so tainted with mercury that one cannot eat the fish with any regularity. Forty-five states advise the public against regular consumption of at least some local fish due to mercury contamination.
    I often take my children to hike, fish, and canoe in the nearby Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on Earth. Since the area was declared “forever wild” in 1885, generations of Americans might reasonably have expected to enjoy its unspoiled rivers and streams. But 500 lakes and pools (out of 2,800) in the Adirondacks have now been rendered sterile by acid rain.
    The mercury and the pollutants that cause acid rain and provoke most asthma attacks come mainly from the smokestacks of a handful of outmoded coal-burning power plants. These discharges are illegal under the Clean Air Act. But President Bush recently sheltered these plants from civil and criminal prosecution, and then excused them from complying with the act. Amazingly, his administration is instead relying on a cleanup schedule written by polluters for polluters that will leave the United States with contaminated air, poisoned water and fish, and sickened children for generations. The energy industry, by the way, gave $48 million to President Bush and his party during the 2000 campaign, and have ponied up another $58 million since. They are now reaping billions of dollars in regulatory relief. But generations of Americans will pay that campaign debt with poor health and diminished lives
    Furthermore, the addiction to fossil fuels so encouraged by White House policies has squandered our Treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks, and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.
    Several of my own lawsuits have been derailed by George W. Bush and friends. As he began his presidency, I was involved in litigation against the factory-pork industry, which is one of the largest sources of air and water pollution in the United States. Industrial farms illegally dump millions of tons of untreated fecal and toxic waste onto the land and into the air and water. Factory farms have contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways, put tens of thousands of family farmers and fishermen out of work, killed billions of fish, sickened consumers,