Robert
F. Kennedy, Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance, spoke to a group of
activists, including more than 200 Waterkeepers from 30 nations at the
organization’s annual conference in Boulder, Colorado. Photo credit:
John L. Wathen / Hurricane Creekkeeper
Speaking to
a group of activists, including more than 200 Waterkeepers from
30 nations, Kennedy declared, “We are engaged, as Abraham Lincoln said,
‘in a great Civil War.'” This time, he said, “the conflict involves all the
Earth’s peoples. It’s not just a battle to protect our waterways, our
livelihoods, our property and our backyards. It’s a struggle for our
sovereignty, our values, our health and our lives. It’s a
battle for dignified humane and wholesome communities. It’s a defensive war
against toxic and economic aggression by Big Oil and King Coal. It’s a struggle
to break free of the ‘soft colonialism’ of carbon’s corporate tyranny and
create an economic and energy system that is fair, rooted in justice, economic
independence and freedom.
He started
by talking about the disproportionate impact of pollution on the poor and
minorities. “Polluters,” he explained, “assault soft targets first—and that
means the poor.” He recounted how the majority of toxic industrial
sites and noxious facilities are in lower income
communities where residents lack political power or connections to protect
themselves. He gave examples of these environmental injustices including,
Emelle, Alabama, which is home to the largest toxic waste
dump in America—one
of the country’s most impoverished regions where one-third of the
residents live below the poverty line and more than 65 percent of the
residents are black—Chicago’s south side, which has more toxic waste sites than
any other American community and East Los Angeles, a primarily black and
Hispanic community, which is the most contaminated zip code in America.
“In these communities,” he
said, “Not just the land and water, but the people have been commoditized—and
everything becomes expendable in the drive for corporate profits.”
But he
added, “It’s not just the poor who are under assault. The corporate hunger for
profit is threatening all people with loss of their natural world and the other
assets of their patrimony.”
Kennedy said that
corporate efforts to privatize the commons are occurring in all parts of the
world and that “environmental injury correlates almost perfectly with political
tyranny.”
… “These are the apocalyptical forces of ignorance and greed.
These are the four horsemen from the book of Revelations herding humanity
toward a dystopian nightmare of their creation. Koch Industries is not a benign
corporation. It’s a suicide pact for creation. It’s the archetype of ‘disaster
capitalism.’ It’s the command center of an organized scheme to undermine
democracy and impose a corporate kleptocracy that will allow these greedy men
to cash in on mass extinction and the end of civilization."
