Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s speech
at the Sierra Summit, September 10, 2005

The following is a transcript of a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at the 
Sierra Club's National Convention and Expo on September 10, 2005 in San 
Francisco. Kennedy received the Sierra Club's William O. Douglas Award on 
behalf of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

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 o'clock 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 was our greatest environmental jurist. He had a very, very close 
relationship with my family and as an attorney the case that was 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 it's about recognizing that nature is the 
infrastructure of our communities, and if we must meet our obligation as a 
generation, as a civilization, as a nation, 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, we've 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, I've been disciplined about being nonpartisan and 
bipartisan in my approach to these issues. I don't think there are any such 
things 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 that is very critical of this President, and that's true, but it's 
not a partisan book. I didn't write that book because I'm a Democrat and 
he's a Republican. If he were a Democrat, I would have written the same 
book. I'm not objecting to him because of his political party, and I've 
worked for Republicans, if they're good on the environment, and Democrats on 
the same level. But you can't talk honestly about the environment in any 
context today without speaking critically of this President. [applause]

This is the worst environmental president we've had in American history. If 
you look at NRDC's website, you'll see over 400 major environmental 
rollbacks 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. It's 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 that as second-in-command 
of CEQ, which is in the White House directly advising the president on 
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 didn't 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. [In] all these 
agencies and sub secretariats, it is the polluters who are now running these 
agencies.

There is nothing wrong with having businesspeople in government. It's a good 
thing, if your 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 they're now charged with enforcing in order to enrich the 
president's corporate pay masters.

They have imposed enormous diminution in quality of life in this country. 
The problem is most Americans don't know about it. They don't 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 rightwing propaganda, which is 
planned and organized and [has] dominated this country, the political debate 
for so many years [is] 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 rightwing media, and if you look where most Americans 
are now getting their news, that's where they're 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 
rightwing of all. That's the largest television network in our country. It's 
run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his affiliate television 
stations, and this is where midwesterners 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 it's the corporate owned media and 
they have no ideology except for filling their pocketbooks, 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 it's 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 
multinational corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our 
country, almost all 6,000 TV stations, 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 interest, their 
only obligation is to their shareholders, and they fulfill that obligation 
by increasing viewership. How do you do that? Not by reporting the news that 
we need to hear 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 we're 
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 I've known this for many, many years because I do 40 
speeches a year in red states -- Republican audiences -- 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 Democrats react, except the Republicans come up 
afterward and say, "Why haven't we ever heard of this before?" I say to 
them, "It's because you're watching Fox News and listening to Rush." And 80 
percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on. 
[applause]

I don't 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 difference. 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 I've known this 
for a long time by the reaction I get from people. 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. They found that 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 [about] 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.

I'll 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 
president's environmental policy that Americans mainly don't know about. I'm 
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 
America's 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 is 1,100 coal-burning 
power plants that are burning coal illegally. It's been illegal for 17 
years. President Clinton's administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of 
those plants, but that's an industry that donated $48 million to this 
president during the 2000 cycle and has 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 weren't 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 one that required those 
plants to clean up 17 years ago, and it's the fundamental compromise that 
allowed the passage of the Clean Air Act. If you go to EPA's website today, 
you will see that that decision alone, that single decision -- this is EPA's 
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 
you're 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 [because of] 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 didn't know a few years ago. We know for 
example, that one out of every six, now one out of every three, American 
women has 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, "You mean she might have" and he said, "No, the science is very 
certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage." 
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 mother's 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 that's 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 on 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.

We're 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. It's 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 Appalachians 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 mountaintop 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 Davey Crockett roamed are the source of 
our values and our culture, and we're cutting them down with these giant 
machines called drag lines. They're 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 60s, 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 they're 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 coal 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 isn't. 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, it's 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, "It's all illegal, all of it," and he enjoined all mountaintop 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 waterway 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 we're 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 [biostitutes] 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, we're not protecting the environment for the 
sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We're protecting it for our 
own sake, because it's 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, "Why are you doing this?" What they invariably say is, 
"Well, the time has come in our nation's history where we have to choose now 
between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on 
the other." 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 its 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 they've 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 joyride. They're going to pay for it with 
the muted landscapes, poor health, huge cleanup costs that are going to 
amplify over time and that they will never, ever be able to pay. 
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of 
our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children. [applause]

One of the things I've done over the past seven, eight years, since 1994, 
since this whole movement, the anti-environmental movement got a foothold, a 
beachhead in Congress, is to constantly go around and confront this argument 
that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation's 
wealth. It doesn't diminish our wealth. It's an investment in 
infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications and road 
construction. It's an investment we have to make if we're going to ensure 
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 it's the 
undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But 
in a true free-market economy, you can't 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; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll 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. That's what all pollution 
is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free 
market.

Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out 
ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's 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 can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish 
from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset, they liquidated a pubic 
asset, my asset. The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're 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 abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way 
that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've 
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 mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's 
brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a 
million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, hundreds of thousands of 
lost work days. 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 
company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.

What those companies and all polluters do is 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, every one of the 28 major 
environmental laws, all of them were designed to restore free-market 
capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay 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 Riverkeeper -- each one agrees to sue 
polluters.
That's what we do, and we don't even consider ourselves environmentalists 
anymore. We're free marketers. We go out into the marketplace, we catch the 
cheaters, the polluters, and we say to them, "We're 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-crony 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. They're a great thing, but they should not be running our 
government. The reason for that is they don't 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 it 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 marketplace to give them 
a competitive advantage and then to privatize the commons, to steal the 
commonwealth, to liquidate public assets for cash, to plunder, to steal from 
the rest of us.

And that doesn't mean corporations are a bad thing. It just means they're 
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. It's 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 that's 
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 domination by corporate power.
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 warned America against domination by the military 
industrial complex.

Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in our history, said during the 
height of the Civil War "I have the South in front of me and I have the 
bankers behind me. And for my country, I fear the bankers more." Franklin 
Roosevelt said during World War II that the domination of government by 
corporate power is "the essence of fascism" and Benito Mussolini -- who had 
an insider's view of that process -- said the same thing. Essentially, 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 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 our job 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 
that's something that puts 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.

I'll say one last thing, which is the issue I started off with, which is 
that we're not protecting the environment. What Justice Douglas understood. 
We're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the 
birds. We're 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 aesthetically and 
recreationally and culturally and historically and spiritually. Human beings 
have other appetites besides money, and if we don't feed them we're not 
going to grow up. We're 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. 
We're not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush 
Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We're preserving those 
forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity 
standing than they would have if we cut them down. I'm 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, that 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 New York State history. And understand that 
they're part of something larger than themselves. They're part of a 
continuum. They're part of a community.

I don't want my children to grow up in a world where there are no commercial 
fishermen on the Hudson, where it's all Gorton's 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 it's 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 we've 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 don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as 
God, but I do believe that it's the way that God communicates to us most 
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 don't 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. [applause] And you know 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 Mohammad had to go to 
the wilderness. 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 Christ's 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 fallow ground, the lilies of the field. He called himself a 
fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. The reason he did that 
was that's how he stayed in touch with the people. It's 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 Almighty. They used these parables, and the 
reason Christ did that was that's 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 literate 
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, he's not telling us something new; he's simply illuminating something 
very, very old. Messages that were written into creation at the beginning of 
time by the Creator. We haven't been able to discern or decipher them until 
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 "You don't have 
to be ashamed because you don't have the 1,500 years of culture that they 
have in Europe, because you have this relationship with the land and 
particularly the wilderness. That's 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 it's Emerson, 
Thoreau, Melville and Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Jack London, F. Scott 
Fitzgerald, Hemmingway. All of them.
Let me just finish this thought. The first great writer we produced in this 
country, an international bestseller, 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 wasn't. 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 bestseller 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 you're 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 Dickenson, 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. Morse, 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 lifes, and the French and Italians and their garden scenes, 
etc. But that's nature tamed. The American artists 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 
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 mom's 
house. He's a very charming guy. Affable, if you're not in Abu Ghraib.
But I saw him on TV in his suit, and he looked so good, and he's so eloquent 
and charming and I say, here's a man who's had the best of our country. He's 
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, his emails 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 facade, 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 don't like private property except when it's the right of a 
polluter to use his private property to destroy his neighbor's 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 lawbreakers 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. 
They're suing my cousin, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Detroit is suing him for 
this -- I know that's not going to get a lot of 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 they're 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 it's going to sue them, 
and the Federal government is now making noises that it's going to come into 
that suit on the side of Detroit. That's not local control.

When I'm fighting these hog farms down in North Carolina, and the first 
people they hear from when local counties try to pass a zoning ordinance to 
zone out the big hog sheds. The first person they hear from is Ted Olson up 
in the federal government saying that's an interference with federal 
commerce, and we're 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 don't 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. 
I'll close with a proverb from the Lakota people that all of you have heard, 
that's been expropriated by the environmental movement to a large extent, 
where they said we didn't inherit this planet from our ancestors; we 
borrowed it from our children.

I would add to that, if we don't 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 we've 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 we're 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. 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 loved 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 don't understand the values that make America worth fighting 
for. But America is worth fighting for, and it's worth dying for. Those of 
us who know that it's worth fighting for have to take it back now from those 
who don't. Thank you very much.

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