Redefining the Environmental Debate
    By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
    Waterkeeper Alliance

    Tuesday 04 April 2006

    Corporate polluters, their phony think tanks and political toadies like to marginalize environmentalists as tree huggers, or radicals. But there is nothing radical about clean air or water. Environmentalists are battling for the very mainstream values that right-wing fanatics so often herald in their rhetoric: property rights, law and order, local control, and free market capitalism. Too often these are only hollow facades that mask the radical agenda of the White House's doublespeakers whose only real value seems to be corporate profit taking.

    These federal officials have taken the "conserve" out of conservatism. They only embrace property rights when it is the right of polluters to use their property to destroy their neighbor's or the public property. (Where is their clamor when industrial hog syndicates and mountaintop mining conglomerates destroy the properties of their neighbors?) While proclaiming law and order, they let corporate polluters off the hook. (As President Bush did when he ordered the Justice Department and EPA to drop dozens of lawsuits against coal-burning utilities and corporate hog farms that had contributed millions to his campaign.) Local control is only invoked to dismantle the obstacles to corporate dominion at the local level. And while proclaiming Christianity they routinely violate the manifest mandates of Christianity that we act as stewards of the Earth and exercise responsibility toward our children. Rather than honoring the free market, they fight for corporate welfare and envision a system of capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.

    In a true free-market economy you can't make yourself rich without enriching your neighbors and your community. A true free-market properly values natural resources and promotes efficiency and the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So the free market eliminates pollution. But polluters subvert the discipline of the free market. Corporations are externalizing machines - ever seeking ways of foisting their costs on the public, and pollution is perhaps the most common method for loading production costs onto the rest of us. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy-a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.

    All our federal environmental laws were intended to promote free market capitalism by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true costs of bringing their products to market. The Waterkeepers enforce these laws. We go into the marketplace, and catch cheaters. "We are going to force you," we tell them, "to internalize your costs the same way you are internalizing your profit." I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketeer. So long as the polluters are cheating, none of us will get the benefits of the efficiency, prosperity and democracy that the free market promises America.

    Pollution threatens all of our national values. It violates the free market, diminishes property rights, mocks law and order, promotes corporate rather than local control and shatters the duties of responsibility mandated by the Judeo-Christian and other religious traditions. It is pessimistic, defeatist and anti-democratic. It contradicts America's historical ties to wilderness and the American tradition of responsibility, resourcefulness and commitment to community. It is unpatriotic and un-American and threatens our public health and national security far more than any terrorist. Our battle is a battle for those values and for all the things that make us proud of our country.

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    Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., President of Waterkeeper Alliance. Join Waterkeeper Alliance and stand up for clean water and strong communities.