[Mb-civic] With your Permission

[Michael Butler]

Please take the time to read this speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. I know I
have sent it before. This might be a man to watch. Michael


Published on Friday, September 16, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Those of Us Who Know That America¹s Worth Fighting for Have to Take It Back
Now from Those Who Don¹t
by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005
San Francisco, California
September 10, 2005
 

I want to tell you how proud I am to accept the William O. Douglas Award.

Two of my most poignant memories as a child involved Justice Douglas. One of
them was when I was 11 years old I did a 20 mile hike with my little brother
David and with Justice Douglas and my father, which was a bird watching hike
on the C & O Canal which he played a critical role in protecting. We started
at four o¹clock in the morning and walked all day. Then I did a 10 day pack
trip with him. He took my whole family up to Olympic Range and the San Juan
Peninsula and went camping for almost two weeks when I was eight years old.

Justice Douglas had a very strong relationship with my family. My
grandfather brought Justice Douglas into public life and gave him his first
job at the SEC as his deputy and then got Franklin Roosevelt to appoint him
to run the SEC and played a critical role in getting him appointed as a
justice of the Supreme Court. He said that his relationship to my
grandfather was a father son relationship. When my father was 18 years old
Justice Douglas took him for a walking tour of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan,
all the Asian Soviet Republics. They were the first Westerners to enter
Soviet Asia after the 1917 revolution and they had an extraordinary trip and
Justice Douglas wrote a book about it.

He had a very, very close relationship with my family and as an attorney the
case that was the most important case, he was our greatest environmental
jurist and the most important case was Sierra Club vs. Morton where he
actually said that he believed the trees should have standing to sue
[applause]. And there is nobody in American history that I more admire than
him. What he understood - which is what I think more and more people are
understanding - is that protecting the environment is not about protecting
the fishes and the birds for their own sake but it¹s about recognizing that
nature is the infrastructure of our communities and that if we want to meet
our obligation as a generation, as a civilization, as a nation which is to
create communities for our children that provide them with the same
opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health.

As the communities that our parents gave us, we¹ve got to start by
protecting our environmental infrastructure, the air we breathe, the water
we drink, the public lands, the fisheries, the wildlife, the public areas
that connect us to our past, that connect us to our history, that provide
context to our communities that are the source ultimately of our values and
virtues and character as a people. Over the past 22 years as an
environmental advocate, I¹ve been disciplined about being non-partisan and
bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don¹t think there is any such
thing as Republican children or Democratic children.

I think the worst thing that could happen to the environment is it becomes
the province of a single political party. It was mentioned that I have a
book out there that is very critical of this president and that¹s true but
it¹s not a partisan book. I didn¹t write that book because I¹m a Democrat
and he¹s a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same
book. I¹m not objecting to him because of his political party and I¹ve
worked for Republicans if they¹re good on the environment and Democrats on
the same level but you can¹t talk honestly about the environment in any
context today without speaking critically of this president. This is the
worst - - [applause].

This is the worst environmental president we¹ve had in American history.

If you look at NRDC¹s website you¹ll see over 400 major environmental roll
backs that are listed there that have been implemented or proposed by this
administration over the past four years as part of a deliberate concerted
effort to eviscerate 30 years of environmental law.

It¹s a stealth attack.

The White House has used all kinds of ingenious machinations to try to
conceal its radical agenda from the American people including Orwellian
rhetoric. When they want to destroy the forests, they call it the Healthy
Forest Act. When they wanted to destroy the air, they called it the Clear
Skies Bill.

But most insidiously, they have put polluters in charge of virtually all the
agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution.

President Bush appointed as head of the Forest Service a timber industry
lobbyist, Mark Rey, probably the most rapacious in history. He put in charge
of public lands a mining industry lobbyist, Steven Griles, who believes that
public lands are unconstitutional. He put in charge of the air division of
the EPA, Jeffrey Holmstead, a utility lobbyist who has represented nothing
but the worst air polluters in America. As head of Superfund, a woman whose
last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Superfund. The second
in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.

The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago we all read that as second
in command of CEQ which is in the White House directly advising the
president of environmental policy, he put a lobbyist of the American
Petroleum Institute whose only job was to read all of the science from all
the different federal agencies to make sure they didn¹t say anything
critical, to excise any critical statements about the oil industry.

He was there to lie to the American public, to protect one of the big
corporate contributors to this White House. This is true throughout all of
the agencies that are supposed to protect Americans from pollution, the
Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of
Commerce which regulates fisheries, the Department of the Interior, EPA of
course, and the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. The same
thing, all these agencies and sub secretariats, it is the polluters who are
now running these agencies.

There is nothing wrong with having business people in government. It¹s a
good thing if you¹re objective is to recruit competence and expertise but in
all of these cases these individuals as I show in my book, have entered
government service not to benefit the public interest but rather to subvert
the very laws they¹re now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the
president¹s corporate pay masters.

They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country.

The problem is most Americans don¹t know about it, they don¹t see the
connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and
indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down
American democracy [applause]. All this right wing propaganda which is
planned and organized and has dominated this country, the political debate
for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know
there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.

There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now
getting their news, that¹s where they¹re getting it. According to Pew 30
percent of Americans now say that their primary news source is talk radio
which is 90 percent dominated by the right.

22 percent say their primary news source is Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, all
dominated by the right and another 10 percent, Sinclair Network which is the
most right wing of all. That¹s the largest television network in our
country. It¹s run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his
affiliate television stations -- and this is where Mid-Westerners get their
news, red state people get their news -- all of them have to take a pledge
to not report critically about this president or about the war in Iraq.

Then the rest of us are -- the majority of Americans are still getting their
news from electronic media and it¹s the corporate owned media and they have
no ideology except for filling their pocket books and many of them are run
by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all
kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public
officials.

This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine.
The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were
public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters
could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them
to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had
to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news
hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it¹s
expensive, they lose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation.
They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the
requirement of the law since 1928.

Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant
multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our
country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all
of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you
have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what
we see as news.

The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer
have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation
is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing
viewer ship. How do you do that? Not by reporting the news that we need to
hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by
entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have
in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip --
[applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe
Bryant and we¹re today the best entertained and the least informed people on
the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.

If you look at the PIPA Report and I¹ve known this for many, many years
because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there
is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is
doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way
Republicans react and the Democrats react except the Republicans come up
afterwards and say, ³Why haven¹t we ever heard of this before? I say to
them, ³It¹s because you¹re watching Fox News and listening to Rush.²

And 80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don¹t know what¹s going
on [applause].

I don¹t know if any of you saw the PIPA Report which came out after the last
election but it confirmed everything and this is kind of a digression but
this whole talk has turned into a digression. The PIPA Report was done by
the University of Maryland and it showed that there is no‹you know all these
Saturday morning gas bags, the political pundits you see on TV talking about
the moral difference and the ideological difference between red states and
blue states.

There is no difference.

The only difference is there is a huge informational deficit in the red
states and I¹ve known this for a long time reaction I get people and the
PIPA Report confirmed that by going and asking people who voted for Bush and
who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. What they found
that of the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic
values, they were just misinformed. 70 percent said that they believed that
Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, 70 percent believed that
weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, 64 percent believed that
President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and
environmental standards in our foreign treaties and on and on.

When PIPA went back and asked them what they believed, there was almost no
difference between what the Republicans and Democrats believed where America
should be headed. The problem was a huge information deficit because the
news media in this country is letting down American democracy and democracy
cannot survive long without a vigorous news media.

I¹ll give you an example. As I said a gigantic diminution in quality of life
that has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President¹s
environmental policy that Americans mainly don¹t know about. I¹m just going
to focus on one industry which is coal burning power plants.

I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in
America¹s cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered
primary by bad air, by ozone and particulates and we know that the principle
source of those materials in our atmosphere are 1,100 coal burning power
plants that are burning coal illegally. It¹s been illegal for 17 years.
President Clinton¹s administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those
plants but that¹s an industry that donated $48 million to this president
during the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since.

One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order
the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three
enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, Eric Schaeffer, all
resigned their jobs in protest. These weren¹t Democrats, these were people
who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush
administration.

A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in
American history before where a presidential candidate accepts money,
contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment and
then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achieves
office.

Immediately after dropping those lawsuits, the White House went and
abolished the New Source Rule which was the heart and soul, the central
provision of the Clean Air Act. That rule is the rule that required those
plants to clean up 17 years ago and it¹s the fundamental compromise that
allowed the passage of the Clean Air Act.

If you go to EPA¹s website today, you will see that that decision alone,
that single decision, this is EPA¹s website, kills 18,000 Americans every
single year. Six times the number of people that were killed by the World
Trade Center attack. This should be on the front page of every newspaper in
this country every single day and yet you¹re not reading about it in the
American press.

A couple of months ago EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to
eat any freshwater fish in the state for mercury contamination. We know
where the mercury is coming from, those same coal burning power plants. In
48 states at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat. In fact, the only two
states where all of the fish are still safe to eat are Alaska and Wyoming
where Republican controlled legislatures have refused to appropriate the
money to test the fish. In all of the other states at least some, most or
all of the fish are unsafe to eat.

We know a lot about mercury we didn¹t know a few years ago. We know for
example, that one out of every six, now one out of every three American
women have so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a
grim inventory of diseases, autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart,
liver, kidney disease.

I have so much mercury in my body, I had my levels tested recently and
Waterkeeper will test your levels, you can send them a hair sample. Mine are
about double what the EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter
who is the national authority on mercury contamination that a woman with my
levels of mercury in her blood would have children with impairment. I said
to him, ³You mean she might have² and he said, ³No, the science is very
certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage.²
He estimated an IQ loss in those kids of about five to seven points.

Well, we have 630,000 children who are born in America every year who have
been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother¹s wombs.
President Clinton recognizing the gravity of this national health epidemic
reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That
triggered the requirement that all of those companies remove 90 percent of
the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than one
percent of plant revenue, a great deal for the American people. We have the
technology, it exists, we already require it in states like Massachusetts.

But it still meant billions of dollars for that industry and that¹s the
industry that gave $100 million to this president and about 12 weeks ago the
White House announced that it was abolishing the Clinton era rules and
substituting instead rules that were written by utility industry lobbyists
that will allow those companies to never have to clean up the mercury. The
rules say in their face that they have to clean up 70 percent within 15
years which by itself is outrageous but in fact, the utility lawyers who
wrote those rules wrote so many loopholes into them that the utilities will
be able to challenge them probably successfully and certainly forever and
they will never have to clean up any additional mercury.

We¹re living in a science fiction nightmare today in the United States of
America where my children and the children of millions of Americans who have
asthmatic kids are bringing children into a world where the air is too
poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children and the children of most
Americans can now no longer safely engage in the seminal primal activity of
American youth which is to go fishing with their father and mother and to
come home and eat the fish because somebody gave money to a politician.

I live three hours south of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected
wilderness on the face of the earth. It¹s been protected since 1888. We had
a right, the American people, to believe that we would be able to enjoy
those pristine landscapes, the forests, the beautiful lakes for generations
unspoiled.

But today, one fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from
acid rain which has also destroyed the forest cover on the high peaks of the
Appalachian from Georgia all the way up into Northern Quebec and this
president has put the brakes on the statutory requirements that those
companies, those coal burning power plants clean up the acid rain. As a
direct result of that decision, this year for the first time since the
passage of the Clean Air Act sulfur dioxide levels went up in our country an
astronomical four percent in a single year.

The person who gave me this t-shirt talked about mountain top mining a few
minutes ago. A year ago in May, I flew over the coal fields of Kentucky and
West Virginia and I saw where the coal is coming from. If the American
people could see what I saw, there would be a revolution in this country
because we are cutting down the Appalachian Mountains. These historic
landscapes where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed are the source of our
values and our culture and we¹re cutting them down with these giant machines
called drag lines. They¹re 22 stories high, they cost half a billion dollars
and they practically dispense with the need for human labor and that of
course, is the point.

I remember when my father was fighting strip mining back in the Œ60¹s, a
conversation I had with him at the dinner table where he said they are not
only destroying the environment but they are permanently impoverishing these
communities because there is no way that you can generate an economy from
the moonscapes that they leave behind and they¹re doing it so that they can
break the unions and he was right. In 1968 when he told me that there were
114,000 unionized mine workers taking mines out of tunnels in West Virginia.

Today there are only 11,000 miners left in the state and almost none of them
are unionized because the strip industry isn¹t. Using these giant machines
and 25 tons of dynamite that they explode in West Virginia every day, a
Hiroshima bomb every week. They are blowing the tops off the mountains and
then they take these giant machines and they scrape the rubble and debris
into the adjacent river valley.

Well, it¹s all illegal.

You cannot dump rock and debris and rubble into a waterway in the United
States of America without a Clean Water Act permit. So Joe Lovitz sued them
and he won in front of a great crusty old West Virginia judge, Judge Charles
Hayden who recently died. Charles Hayden said the same thing I said, he
said, ³It¹s all illegal, all of it² and he enjoined all mountain top mining.

Two days from when we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal who
had given millions of dollars to this White House met in the White House and
the White House rewrote one word of the Clean Water Act. The definition of
the word fill that changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it
legal today as it is in every state in the United States to dump rock,
debris, rubble, construction debris, garbage, any kind of solid waste into
any water way in this country without a Clean Water Act permit. All you need
is a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers that in many cases you
can get through the mail. It has none of the safeguards that the Clean Water
Act provides.

And this is what we¹re fighting today, this is not just a battle to save the
environment. This is the subversion of our democracy.

The industry and the great big polluters and their indentured servants and
our political process have done a great job and their PR firms and their
faulty [biastitutes] and all these think tanks on Capitol Hill, have done a
great job over the past couple of decades of marginalizing the environmental
movement, of marginalizing us as radicals, as tree huggers, as I heard the
other day, pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people.

But there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for
our children. As I said before, we¹re not protecting the environment for the
sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We¹re protecting it for our
own sake because it¹s the infrastructure of our communities and because it
enriches us.

If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of
changes and ask them, ³Why are you doing this?² What they invariably say is,
³Well, the time has come in our nation¹s history where we have to choose now
between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on
the other.²

And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good
environmental policy is identical to good economic policy -- [applause]. If
we want to measure our economy and this is how we ought to be measuring it,
based upon it loses jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over
the long term and how it preserves the value of the assets of our
communities.

If on the other hand, we want to do what they¹ve been urging us to do on
Capitol Hill which is to treat the planet as if were a business in
liquidation, convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible,
have a few years of pollution based prosperity, we can generate an
instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy but our
children are going to pay for our joy ride.

They¹re going to pay for it with the muted landscapes, poor health, huge
clean up costs that are going to amplify over time and that they will never,
ever be able to pay.

Environmental injury is deficit spending. It¹s a way of loading the cost of
our generation¹s prosperity on to the backs of our children -- [applause].

One of the things I¹ve done over the past seven, eight years, since 1994,
since this whole movement, the anti-environmental movement got a foothold, a
beach head in Congress, is to constantly go around and confront this
argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our
nation¹s wealth. It doesn¹t diminish our wealth, it¹s an investment in
infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications and road
construction. It¹s an investment we have to make if we¹re going to insure
the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation. I want to
say this, there is no stronger advocate for free market capitalism than
myself.

I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to
distribute the goods of the land and that the best thing that could happen
to the environment is if we had true free market capitalism in this country
because the free market promotes efficiency and efficiency means the
elimination of waste and pollution of course is waste. The free market also
would encourage us to properly value our natural resources and it¹s the
under valuation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully.
But in a true free market economy you can¹t make yourself rich without
making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.

But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else
poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of
life for everybody else and they do that by evading the discipline of the
free market.

You show me a polluter; I¹ll show you a subsidiary. I¹ll show you a fat cat
using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market. And force
the public to pay his production costs. That¹s what all pollution is, it¹s
always a subsidy, it¹s always a guy trying to cheat the free market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They¹re constantly figuring out
ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production, that¹s their
nature. One of the best ways to do that and the most common way for a
polluter is through pollution. When those coal burning power plants put
mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley and it
comes down on my state New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year
but I can¹t go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish
from me.

They liquidated a pubic asset, my asset. The rule is the commons are owned
by all of us. They¹re not owned by the governor or the legislator or the
coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them.

Nobody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that
will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they¹ve
stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State.

When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest and it
destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or
wealth generation. When they put the mercy‹the mercury poisons our
children¹s brains and that imposes a clause on us. The ozone in particular
has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, hundreds of
thousands lost work day.

All of those impacts, impose costs on the rest of us. That should in a true
free market economy be reflected in the price of that company¹s product when
it makes it to the market place.

What those companies and all polluters do is they use political clout to
escape the discipline in the free market and force the public to pay their
costs. All of the federal environmental laws, everyone of the 28 major
environmental laws, all of them were designed to restore free market
capitalism in America by forcing actors in the market place to play the true
cost of bringing their product to market. What we do with the
Riverkeepers‹we have 147 licensed Riverkeepers now and each one has a patrol
boat, each one is a full time paid river keeper and each one agrees to sue
polluters.

What we do and we don¹t even consider ourselves environmentalists any more.
We¹re free marketers.

We go out into the market place, we catch the cheaters, the polluters, and
we say to them, ³We¹re going to force you to internalize your costs the same
way that you internalize your profits because as long as somebody is
cheating the free market, none of us get the advantages of the efficiency
and the democracy and the prosperity that the free market otherwise promises
our country.

What we have to understand as a nation is that there is a huge difference
between free market capitalism which democratizes a country, which makes us
more prosperous and efficient and the kind of corporate cloning capitalism
which has been embraced by this White House which is as antithetical to
democracy, to prosperity and efficiency in America as it is in Nigeria --
[applause].

There is nothing wrong with corporations. Corporations are a good thing.
They encourage us to take risks, they maximize wealth, they create jobs. I
own a corporation.

They¹re a great thing but they should not be running our government.

The reason for that is they don¹t have the same aspirations for America that
you and I do.

A corporation does not want democracy. It does not want free markets, it
wants profits and the best way for them to get profits is to use our
campaign finance system which is just a system of legalized bribery to get
their stakes, their hooks into a public official and then use that public
official to dismantle the market place to give them a competitive advantage
and then to privatize the common, to steal the commonwealth, to liquidate
public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from the rest of us.

And that doesn¹t mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they¹re
amoral and we have to recognize that and not let them into the political
process.

Let them do their thing but they should not be participating in our
political process because a corporation cannot do something genuinely
philanthropic.

Its against the law in this country because their shareholders can sue them
for wasting corporate resources. They cannot legally do anything that will
not increase their profit margins and that¹s the way the law works and we
have to recognize that and understand that they are toxic for the political
process and they have to be fenced off and kept out of the political
process.

This is why throughout our history our most visionary political leaders
Republican and Democrat have been warning the American public against the
domination by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt and again, this White House has done a great job of
persuading a gullible press and the American public that the big threat to
American democracy is big government. Well, yeah, big government is a threat
ultimately but it is dwarfed by the threat of excessive corporate power and
the corrosive impact that has on our democracy. And you know, as I said, you
look at all the great political leaders in this country and the central
theme is that we have to be cautious about, we have to avoid the domination
of our government by corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by
a foreign power but he warned that our political institutions, our
democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth
who would erode them from within. Dwight Eisenhower, another republican in
his most famous speech ever warned America against the domination by the
military industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the
height of the Civil War ³I have the South in front of me and I have the
bankers behind me. And for my country I fear the bankers more.²

Franklin Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of
government by corporate power is ³the essence of Fascism² and Benito
Mussolini who had an insider¹s view of that process said the same thing.
Essentially he said that ­ he complained that Fascism should not be called
Fascism. It should be called corporatism because it was the merger of state
of corporate power.

And we what we have to understand as Americans is that the domination of
business by government is called Communism.

The domination of government by business is called Fascism.

And what our job is is to walk that narrow trail in between which is free
market capitalism and democracy. And keep big government at bay with our
right hand and corporate power at bay with our left.

In order to do that we need an informed public and an activist public.

And we need a vigorous and an independent press that is willing to speak
truth to power. And we no longer have that in the United States of America.
And that¹s something that we all, puts us all, all the values we care about
in jeopardy because you cannot have a clean environment if you do not have a
functioning democracy. They are intertwined, they go together.

There is a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny
and the level of environmental destruction. I could talk about that all day
but you cannot‹the only way you can protect the environment is through a
true, locally based democracy.

You can protect it for a short term under a tyranny where there is some kind
of beneficent dictator but over the long term the only way we can protect
the environment is by ensuring our democracy. That has got to be the number
one issue for all of us; to try to restore American democracy because
without that we lose all of the other things that we value.

I¹ll say one last thing which is the issue I started off with which is that
we¹re not protecting the environment. What Justice Douglas understood.

We¹re not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the
birds.

We¹re protecting it for our own sake because we recognize that nature
enriches us. It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy. And
we ignore that at our peril.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment but it also
enriches us esthetically and recreationally and culturally and historically
and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money and if we
don¹t feed them we¹re not going to grow up. We¹re not going to become the
kind of beings our creator intended us to become.

When we destroy nature we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children.

We¹re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest as Rush
Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We¹re preserving those
forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity
standing then they would have if we cut them down. I¹m not fighting for the
Hudson River for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass,
but because I believe my life will be richer and my children and my
community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and
sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson.

And where my children can see the traditional gear, commercial fishermen on
the Hudson that I have spent 22 years fighting for their livelihoods, their
rights, their culture, and their values. I want my kids to be able to see
them out in their tiny boats using the same fishing methods that they
learned, their great grandparents learned from the Algonquin Indians who
taught them to the original settlers of New Amsterdam. I want them to be
able to see them with their ash poles and gill nets and be able to touch
them when they come to shore to wait out the tides, to repair their nets.
And in doing that connect themselves to 350 years of the New York State
history.

And understand that they¹re part of something larger than themselves;
they¹re part of a continuum. They¹re part of a community.

I don¹t want my children to grow up in a world where there are no commercial
fishermen on the Hudson, where it¹s all Gordon Seafood and Unilever and 400
ton factory trawlers 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no
interface with humanity.

And where there are no family farmers left in America. Where it¹s all
Smithfield and Cargill and Premium Standard farms raising animals in
factories and treating their stock and their neighbors and their workers
with unspeakable cruelty.

And where we¹ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things
that connect us to the 10,000 generations of human beings that were here
before there were laptops.

And that connect us ultimately to God.

I don¹t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as
God, but I do believe that it¹s the way that God communicates to us more
forcefully.

God talks to human beings through many vectors. Through each other, through
organized religions, through wise people and through the great books of
those religions; through art and literature and music and poetry.

But nowhere with such force and clarity and detail and texture and grace and
joy as through creation. We don¹t know Michelangelo by reading his
biography; we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

And we know our creator best by immersing ourselves in creation. And
particularly wilderness which is the undiluted work of the creator.

And you know -- [applause] -- if you look at every one of the great
religious traditions throughout the history of mankind the central epiphany
always occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go to the wilderness to
experience self realization and nirvana. Mohammed had to go to the
wilderness in Mt. Harrod 629, climb to the summit, rest one angel in the
middle of the night to have the Koran squeeze from his body.

Moses had to go to the wilderness of Mt. Sinai for 40 days alone to get the
Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years wandering the wilderness to
purge themselves of 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

Christ had to go into the wilderness for 40 days to discover his divinity
for the first time. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man who lived in the
Jordan valley dressed in the skins of wild beasts and ate locust and the
honey of wild bees and all of Christ¹s parables are taken from nature. I am
the vine; you are the branches. The mustard seed, the little swallows, the
scattering of seeds on the [Fellowgram], the lilies of the field. He called
himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd.

The reason he did that was that¹s how he stayed in touch with the people.
It¹s the same reason all the Talmudic prophets, the Koranic prophets, the
Old Testament prophets, the New Testament prophets. Even the pagan prophets
like Aesop they did the same thing; they used parables and allegories and
fables drawn from nature to teach us the wisdom of God.

And all of the Old Testament prophets, all the Talmudic prophets, all the
New Testament prophets came out of the wilderness. Every one of them and
they were all shepherds. That daily connection to nature gave them a special
access to the wisdom of the all mighty. They used these parables and the
reason Christ did that was that¹s how he stayed in touch with the people. He
was saying things that were revolutionary like all the prophets.

He was contradicting everything that the common people had heard from the
literal sophisticated people of their day and they would have dismissed him
as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables through
their own observations of the fishes and the birds.

And they were able to say, he¹s not telling us something new; he¹s simply
illuminating something very, very old. Messages that were written into
creation at the beginning of time by the creator. We haven¹t been able to
discern or decipher them into the prophets came along and immersed
themselves in wilderness and learned its language and then come back into
the cities to tell us about the wisdom of God.

You know, all of our values in this country are the same thing. This is
where our values come from, from wilderness and from nature and from the
beginning of our national history. People from Sierra Club have to
understand this and articulate it.

Our greatest spiritual leaders, moral leaders and philosophers were telling
the American people ³You don¹t have to be ashamed because you don¹t have the
1,500 years of culture that they have in Europe because you have this
relationship with the land and particularly the wilderness. That¹s going to
be the source of your values and virtues and character.

If you look at every valid piece of classic American literature the central
unifying theme is that nature is the critical defining element of American
culture, whether it¹s Emerson, Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, Mark Twain,
Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. All of them.

Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in this
country, an international best seller, was [James Fenimore Cooper]. He wrote
the The Leather Stocking Tales, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder,
The Deerslayer, about this character Natie Bumpo who was a creature of the
American wilderness. He had all the virtues that the European romantics
associated with the American woodland; he was a crack shot, he was self
reliant, he had fortitude and integrity and he was a gentleman and honest.

The reason they made him a bestseller in Europe was not because it was great
writing; it wasn¹t. It was atrocious, but because they believed that there
really was a new being being created out of the American forest. We made him
a best seller in our country because we believe that about ourselves. A
generation after that you had Emerson and Thoreau come along who have kicked
off the traces of the European heritage and they embrace nature as a
spiritual parable of all Americans.

They say if you¹re an American and you want to hear the voice of God you
have to go into the forest and listen to the songs of the birds and the
rustle of the leaves and if you want to see the American soul you have to
look at the mirror of Walden Pond. Our poets Whitman, Frost, Emily
Dickinson, Robert Service.

Our artists, we have two schools, defining schools of art in this country:
the western school ­ Remington and Russell ­ and the Hudson River School ­
Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Samuel F. B. Morris, etc. And all
of them painted these stark, indomitable portraits. Storm King Mountain, El
Capitan, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon. Any evidence of
humanity is in ruins.

And there are other national schools of art that painted nature. The British
have their still lives and the French and Italians and their garden scenes,
etc. But that¹s nature tamed.

The American artist chose to paint nature in its wildest state because they
saw that as the way to capture the American soul.

As I said this is where our values come from.

These people on Capitol Hill they look out at our green landscapes and they
see nothing but cash for their corporate contributors, quick cash. I saw a
couple of days ago Donald Rumsfeld on TV and I saw him and I saw how
articulate and eloquent he was. I know Donald Rumsfeld, he lives next to my
house in Washington.

When I got out of prison in Puerto Rico a couple of years ago he actually
was very kind to me. I met him at lunch and dinner a couple of times at my
mom¹s house. He¹s a very charming guy, an affable. If you¹re not in Abu
GhraibŠ but I saw him on TV in his suit and he looked so good and he¹s so
eloquent and charming and stuff and I say, here¹s a man who¹s had the best
of our country. He¹s gone to our churches, had the best schools, the
education, the contacts, the money everything. And then I see these letters
that he wrote back and forth with Alberto Gonzales, he¹s e-mailed debating
how much it was permissible for Americans to torture people. And I say to
myself how did these people miss the whole point of America? How do they not
know that torture is not an American family value?

And I say that this is an administration that represents itself as the White
House of values but every value that they claim to represent is just a
hollow façade, that marks the one value that they really consider worth
fighting for which is corporate profit taking.

They say that they like free markets but they despise free market
capitalism. What they like if you look at their feet rather than their
clever, clever mouths what they really like is corporate welfare and
capitalism for the poor but socialism for the rich.

They say that they like private property but they don¹t like private
property except when it¹s the right of a polluter to use his private
property to destroy his neighbors property and to destroy the public
property.

And they say that they like law and order but they are the first ones to let
the corporate law breakers off the hook. And they say that they like local
control and states rights but they only like those things when it means
sweeping away the barriers to corporate profit taking at the local level.
And you and the Sierra Club know and I can give you hundreds of examples.
They¹re suing my cousin Arnold Schwarzenegger. Detroit is suing him for
this‹I know that¹s not going to get a lot for applause in this room.

But you know what do you sign into law? The best automobile emissions bill
that was passed by the Democratic legislature and now Detroit is saying
they¹re going to sue them just because they recognize that the emissions
here were not protecting the health of the people of their state. So they
want ones that will. Now Detroit is saying it¹s going to sue them and the
Federal government is now making noises that it¹s going to come into that
suit on the side of Detroit. That¹s not local control.

We know and when I¹m fighting these hog farms down in North Carolina and the
first people they hear from when these local counties try to pass the zoning
ordinance to zone out the big hog shows. The first person they heard from is
Ted Olson up in the federal government saying that¹s an interference with
federal commerce and we¹re going to come down on you like a hammer.

The same thing in West Virginia, when the localities try to zone out Massey
Coal and Peabody from cutting down their mountain the federal government
comes down and crushes them. So they don¹t like local control.

And you know all of these things they claim to love.

They claim to love Christianity but they have violated every one of the
manifold mandates of the Christian faith --[applause] -- that we care for
the environment.

We treat the earth respectfully and we treat our future generations with
respect and all of these things, the values go along with the land we all
know that.

I¹ll close with a proverb from the Lakota people that all of you have heard,
that¹s been expropriated by the environmental movement to a large extent
where they said we didn¹t inherit this planet from our ancestors; we
borrowed it from our children.

I would add to that if we don¹t return to our children something that is
roughly the equivalent of what they receive, not just in the quality of the
environment but in the integrity of the values that have been handed down
through generations of Americans.

You know, visionary Republican and Democratic leadership only to hit these
destructive people who are now running our country. The worst administration
that we¹ve had in American history and the greatest threat now to our
country and our democracy. And all the values that cherish about America.
And you know the way we¹re viewed and the rest of the world we need to
return those things.

I look at this White House and I ask myself‹and this may be unfair‹but I ask
myself a lot of times, how did they get so many draft dodgers in one place?
You know, the president, Dick Cheney five deferments; John Ashcroft, six
deferments. Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Tom DeLay, all of their buddies.
Dennis Hastert, Rush Limbaugh, well, you know, there are a lot of people who
dodged the draft during the Vietnam War and I know a lot of them.

Most of them did it because they had moral qualms about that war.

But not these people.

These people love the war; they just wanted somebody else to fight it. And
it occurs to me that the reason for that is that these are people who don¹t
understand the values that makes America worth fighting for. But America is
worth fighting for and it¹s worth dying for.

Those of us who know that it¹s worth fighting for have to take it back now
from those who don¹t.

Thank you very much.

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