RFK Jr. Champions Conservation Efforts

Environmental lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ’76 railed against a celebrity-centered culture and an inept media in a speech last Friday regarding conservation efforts.

Kennedy, the nephew of late former President John F. Kennedy ’40 and son of former U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy ’48, D-N.Y., spoke as part of this weekend’s campus sustainability conference sponsored by the Green Campus Intiative (GCI), an interfaculty organization.

“There is no democratic value more important than sustainable development,” he told the Science Center crowd. “The job of an institution like [Harvard] is not just to impart education but to promote values in our society.”

Kennedy said that Americans are the “best entertained and least informed population on the face of the planet.”

“We know more about Brad [Pitt] and Jen [Aniston] than we do about global warming,” he said.

He added that this lack of education lies in the failure of the media to meet its responsibilities to the people.

“Every American today knows an asthmatic kid, but they don’t connect the dots between these kids and the president,” Kennedy said.

“This is the fault of a press that’s not making those connections.”

Kennedy said that environmentalism should not be a controversial issue because “the values Americans share are the same values—80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.”

Kennedy further warned against the “military-industrial complex,” calling President Bush’s current economic policies “corporate crony capitalism.”

“[The current administration] calls it Healthy Forest when they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Clear Skies Act when they want to destroy the air,” Kennedy said. “And then they put polluters in charge of all these initiatives.”

As an academic institution, Harvard is in a unique position to effect change, Kennedy said.

“Harvard has an obligation to serve a higher purpose, which is to constantly remind us that we’re supposed to be accumulating not just education but values,” he said.

Kennedy’s environmental activism spans the legal, publishing, and business worlds.

During the 1980s, he began work with the Riverkeepers, a group of attorneys, New York residents, and fishermen concerned with pollution in the Hudson River.

In 1998, Kennedy and two partners launched the Keeper Springs bottled water company, which donates all proceeds, after taxes, to charity.

The conference, which kicked off last Thursday, garnered a pledge from University President Lawrence H. Summers to double GCI loan fund for campus conservation projects to $12 million.