Would Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Be The Best Environmental President in U.S. History?

By Gary Wockner, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

By Gary Wockner, Special to The Kennedy Beacon

I got to know Robert F. Kennedy Jr. while he and I were fellow “Waterkeepers” in the Waterkeeper Alliance from 2008 to 2020, and during that time I helped the Alliance launch an initiative to protect free-flowing rivers here in the U.S. and around the world. My experience with Kennedy, as well as my familiarity with his environmental career, makes me ask if he would be the best environmental president in U.S. history.

In a world where hot takes and tweets cause hearings on Capitol Hill, as well as tremors across the world’s political landscape, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s environmental career and accomplishments are more like a 75-page, highly cited, carefully and thoroughly researched court brief filled with accompanying high-profile accomplishments and hundreds of lower-profile successes. 

Kennedy’s list of environmental achievements – over 45 years of work – is far too long to catalog, but he is most well-known for his work protecting and restoring the Hudson River in New York, which was a polluted, toxic mess prior to his engagement in the 1980s. Kennedy first volunteered for the “Hudson River Fishermen’s Association,” a nonprofit devoted to cleaning up the Hudson River and taking legal action against government and corporate entities that have polluted it. The Association later changed its name into “Riverkeeper,” which was one of the seed organizations for the global Waterkeeper Alliance of which Kennedy is a founder. 

The Waterkeeper Alliance is the largest water protection organization on the planet with over 300 affiliated organizations. As former Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeeper, and formerly with the Alliance, Kennedy helped spearhead hundreds of lawsuits to enforce the Clean Water Act in the U.S. Protecting the public’s health – by making sure America’s waterways are more swimmable, fishable, and drinkable – has been a prime directive of Kennedy’s environmental career.

Photo: Robert Kennedy, Jr. at Waterkeeper Alliance Annual Conference 2015

Throughout the same timeframe, Kennedy furthered his career when he received a masters degree in environmental law from Pace University in New York, and then co-founded the University’s Environmental Litigation Clinic. Through the clinic, and also as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Kennedy continued his law-enforcement work protecting America’s environment and public health in numerous court cases and actions.

Notable achievements with these organizations, and through private environmental law firms where he represented the public interest, include what I’ve added up to be hundreds of court victories representing billions of dollars of court awards and settlements against corporate polluters, against various levels of government, and all for the public good. Many of these settlements have forced environmental cleanups, stopped polluters, and righted wrongs against local and poor people whose lives had withered, or worse, because of corrosive and corrupt corporations working hand-in-hand with lax or sold-out government regulators. 

My Environmental Priorities (from Team Kennedy)

This list is long, but when Kennedy speaks about his past accomplishments, he seems to most relish his victories protecting poor and minority people including Native Americans in the U.S. through what is now more commonly known as “environmental justice” work.  Kennedy has represented poor, indigenous, and minority communities numerous times, including the NAACP, against corporate polluters, and was one of the few prominent environmentalists to visit the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2016 as part of the standoff against the Dakota Access pipeline.

Most recently, Kennedy is known for his work protecting the public’s health from poisoning by the lethal substance, mercury, which is a neuro-toxin. Kennedy became aware of this pollution source through his environmental work fighting against coal-fired power plants, which emit mercury from their smokestacks. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency currently estimates that “more than 75,000 newborns in the United States each year may have increased risk of learning disabilities associated with in-utero exposure to methylmercury.” In 2016, Kennedy founded and launched the “World Mercury Project,” which was “dedicated to ending exposure to neurotoxic mercury in fish, medical products, dental amalgams and vaccines.” The organization later changed its name to “Children's Health Defense.” 

While Kennedy’s U.S.-based work is most recognized, his international work is equally accomplished and where he and I have the most overlap. Kennedy has helped lead the fight against multiple proposed river-destroying dam projects in Latin America and Canada, as well as supported and represented indigenous people who were defending their land, fisheries, and livelihoods. 

I will use one such case, with which I have a personal connection, as an example of why I believe that Kennedy could be the best environmental president in U.S. history, but also a great world leader on environmental issues.

When Kennedy and I formerly overlapped in the Waterkeeper Alliance, I traveled extensively around the world recruiting and supporting our Waterkeeper colleagues. One trip was to the wild and remote Maranon River in Peru, which drains the eastern flank of the Andes mountains and is the largest tributary to the Amazon. The Maranon River is also under threat of multiple large hydroelectric dams that would destroy its ecology as well as flood out villages supporting hundreds of local poor people and farmers. I’ve made protecting rivers much of my life’s work because I believe that rivers are the arteries of life on the planet, as well as keystone ecosystems for biodiversity, and important as fisheries for human food consumption and survival. 

In 2016, I traveled to the Maranon River for the inaugural river trip of the Maranon Waterkeeper, and I chronicled that story in Canoe and Kayak Magazine. The Maranon River story is a classic developing-world conundrum where the government seeks “development” and rural and indigenous people – as well as the natural environment – would be devastated in-so-doing. The piece I wrote made no illusions about a likely victory, but merely described the struggle of what would be lost because of the massive cascade of hydroelectric dams.

A couple months later, Kennedy took it upon himself to travel to Peru and address the approaching calamity on the Maranon. Given his stature, Kennedy called the President of Peru, who connected him with the Minister for Environment and the Minister for Energy and Mining. After an afternoon of meetings in Lima, a 5-year moratorium was announced for dams on the Maranon, and to this day no dams have been built. The meetings happened behind the scenes, and the moratorium was later announced with little fanfare in a newspaper article in Lima titled, “‘Large Dams in the Jungle are not on the Agenda of the Government.”

Few people knew that Kennedy was there and helped change the course of the largest river in Peru – and its peoples – perhaps forever. Few people also know that Kennedy has used his name and stature to place thousands of those calls and hold thousands of those meetings over the last 45 years, to leaders across the U.S. and the world, to advocate for the protection of the planet’s environment and its people.

As I ponder what impact a “President Kennedy” could have at a global scale, I ask this: The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that air pollution causes 6.7 million premature deaths per year across the globe – what difference would it make to this calamity if the U.S. had a president who spent some of his career fighting corporate air polluters? Likewise, the WHO also reports that over 1.7 billion people drink contaminated water which results in over ½ million deaths per year. What difference would it make if the U.S. had a president who spent much of his career fighting for clean water?

And so I ask, would Kennedy be the best environmental president in U.S. history? He’s rising in the polls, so we might find out.

Gary Wockner, PhD, is a leading global river-protection advocate. His opinions above are solely his own and do not represent any organization or company he is affiliated with. Contact: Gary@GaryWockner.com