“I’m going to die fighting. I’m never going to sell out.” Sporting khakis and an easy manner, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. addressed a rapt student audience. He regaled an admiring crowd with harrowing adventures of civil disobedience in Puerto Rico last summer – and the subsequent 30-day jail term. The man was impressive.
“What he said about the hog farmers was really disturbing,” said junior Monica Chevalier, a biology major who attended the Thursday, March 20, question-and-answer session. She was responding to his chilling account of North Carolina’s hog farming industry.
Throughout his visit that day, a part of the Bryan lecture series, Kennedy embodied and interwove both an activist passion for the environment and extensive lawyerly knowledge of the issues involved.
“He is the kind of environmentalist that will create broad change at the corporate level,” said senior Kristina Millhiser, a veteran leader in Guilford’s Forevergreen club. “I’m glad Kennedy is out there doing his thing and being an articulate voice for the many that know saving the earth is a good thing but can’t get their point across quite as well.”
Since he was a boy, Robert Kennedy Jr. has been interested in the environment, and today serves as the chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper and senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. During his 90-minute lecture in Dana Auditorium, entitled A Contract with Our Future, he often referenced his long experience working with the Riverkeeper organization. “I’m interested in issues that connect the environment to the human condition,” Kennedy said.
Riverkeeper has had tremendousy impact on the communities along the Hudson River. Kennedy described the Hudson before the group’s inception (and after General Electric began dumping pollutants into the river): a veritable graveyard for what once was a thriving watershed area. Fires on the river would actually burn for days at a time, due to the massive amount of pollution.
Local fishermen, losing their livelihoods, started Riverkeeper in attempts to fight for their rights to use those waters; in attempts to keep General Electric from stealing their fish. Thanks to the organization, the Hudson River has the cleanliest water in the eastern United States today.
Working to preserve the Hudsun meant working at the same time to enrich the local economy.
“Polluters make themselves richer by making everyone else poorer,” said Kennedy, who added again and again that they wouldn’t be able to do so if it weren’t for the campaign contribution system currently in place.
He’s a staunch supporter of the idea that prosperous economies and healthy environments go hand-in-hand; indeed, if corporations were subject to free market capitalism, according to Kennedy (i.e., not subsidized by the government), environmental problems would all but vanish. There is a prevalent idea that if corporations were forced to pay the full, real cost of their hazardous practices, there would be far less pollution.
Some students disagree with Kennedy, like junior Bryan Warf, who, though he considers Kennedy’s work and life to be “inspiring and absolutely amazing,” also thinks that “capitalism promotes greedy institutions and corporations.” According to Warf, “corporations will always find ways to escape environmental regulation to cut costs.” He sees a solution, rather, in introducing socialist policies that account for everyone into the capitalist system.
That Thursday night, however, there was no argument as to the gravity of the North Carolina hog farming industry situation. The state no longer has any independent hog farmers whatsoever, and 1,600 of the 2,200 farms existing belong to Smithfield Foods, the largest hog producer in the world. Supported by government subsidy and vertical integration, this corporation eliminated North Carolina’s independent hog farming entirely. And pollution has skyrocketed.
“Children in this state can no longer go swimming in the summertime,” Kennedy said. Untreated hog waste is being deposited anywhere and everywhere, and it’s full of the antibiotics and growth hormones that the pigs are fed.
The quality of life for communities neighboring these polluting, industrial hog farms has decreased dramatically, the value of some homes dropping as much as 30%. The only fish left in the Noose River, according to a very serious Robert Kennedy, Jr., are covered with pustules. He suggests that the most effective way to deal with the problem is to organize locally and join environmental groups.
“We can have success,” Kennedy said. “Some of these institutions, even though they’re worm-eaten, can still work.”