Who speaks for the environment?

• Author: Kennedy, Robert F., Jr.

In May 2000 Karen Kraft Sloan Member of Parliament for York North organized an EcoSummit conference which brought together scientists, academics and parliamentarians for a two-day meeting on the impact of water borne pollutants on human health. The following is an edited version of the keynote address to the EcoSummit.

Let me begin by acknowledging progress made by the environmental movement since Earth Day in 1970. When I was growing up, before Earth Day, I remember the Cuyahoga River burning for a week with flames so high no one could find a way to put it out. I remember when Lake Erie was declared dead. I remember not being allowed to swim in the Hudson, the Potomac or the Charles rivers. I remember Washington D.C. when black smoke billowed out of the stacks so that on some days you could not see a city block.

I am a falconer and have been interested in birds since I was three years old. When I was nine or ten we lived in Northern Virginia and I could go down to the Justice Building once or twice a week with my father or occasionally visit my uncle at the White House. Whenever I went to Washington, I would always look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the old post office building. On the roof lived a pair of eastern anatum peregrine falcons. They were the most spectacular predatory bird we had in North America. A sub-species of peregrine falcons, it was salmon pink, and had a beautiful white coverlet over its nair. It could fly 200 miles an hour.

I would watch these birds come off the roof of the post office and fly down Pennsylvania Avenue picking pigeons out of the air some forty feet over the pedestrians. To me, a sight like that was much more exciting than visiting the White House. But that sight is one my children will never see because that bird became extinct in 1963 from DDT poisoning. A creature that took a million years to evolve disappeared in the blink of an eye because of ignorance and greed.

In 1970, an accumulation of such insults drove twenty million Americans -- ten percent of our population into the street in the largest demonstration in American history. They demanded that our political leadership return to the people the ancient environmental rights taken from our citizens during the previous eighty years. The political system responded.

Republicans and Democrats got together and passed an extraordinary deluge of environmental laws -- 28 major laws over the next ten years, to protect our air, our water, our endangered species, our wetlands and our food supply. Those laws in turn have become the model for over one hundred and fifty nations around the planet which had their own versions of Earth Day and started making their own investments in environmental law.

The Democratic Dimension

Unfortunately there are nations which have not done as much to protect the environment. These are countries that do not have strong democracies. The environment cannot be protected under a system that does not have democracy because the fishes and the birds and the environment cannot vote. They do not participate in the political process and neither do our children. The only way to give them a voice in the political process is by creating democratic mechanisms that allow people at the community level to speak for them. Where those mechanisms do not exist, you see huge environmental degradation.

The Soviet Union, for example, had no environmental laws because it had no democracy. We have the National Environmental Policy Act, our most important environmental law. It was the first one passed after Earth Day. It requires all government agencies to perform environmental impact studies prior to disposing of or destroying major environmental resources.

They did not have that in the USSR, so the Aral Sea, the largest fresh water body on earth after the Great Lakes, is now a desert. They did not have a Clean Water Act so the Sea of Azov, which was the richest fishery on earth after the Chesapeake Bay, is now a biological wasteland. They did not have nuclear regulatory review requirements of the kind we passed in the United States following Earth Day 1970, so one-fifth of Belarus is now permanently uninhabitable because of radiation contamination.

In Turkey they do not have a Clean Water Act. Three hundred species have disappeared from the Marmara Sea over the past fifteen years. The Black Sea will be dead within the next ten. In Thailand, they do not have a Clean Air Act, and you can see people on any street in Bangkok with gas and particle masks. The New York Times recently reported that the average child in Bangkok who reaches the age of six has permanently lost seven I.Q. points because of the density of airborne lead contamination. They did not have a Clean Air Act that said that you have to get the lead out of the gasoline. In China, they lose a hundred thousand people every year from smog events. One of the growth industries in Beijing is oxygen bars, where people go to get a breath of fresh air. In Mexico City, if you own an automobile, you can legally drive it three-and-a-half days a week. Smog inversions kill 10,000 people a year and shut down their principle state industries, sometimes for weeks at a time.

In those nations, and in many others, environmental injury has matured into economic catastrophe. That is what would have happened in Canada and in the United States if we had not made the investment back in the seventies and early eighties, and it is what will happen if we allow foolhardy legislatures and government officials to dismantle the investments which we made back then. Or if we allow provincial officials and state officials to stop enforcing federal laws, which is another trend we are seeing all around.

One of the other things we hear on Capitol Hill and I am sure in Ottawa as well is: "We are going to get rid of the big federal government, and return control to the provinces and the states, and after all, that is local control, and that is the essence of democracy. The provinces and the states are in the best position to defend, protect and understand their own environment." But the real outcome of devolution is not community control--it is corporate control.

Let me tell you a story about community control from the Hudson valley in the 1960s. This is a tale that has been replayed ten thousand times across the continent in communities all over Canada and the United States. The General Electric company came into the town of Glens Falls, New York and said to the town's fathers, "We will build you a spanking new factory and we will bring in fifteen hundred new jobs and we are going to raise your tax base, and all you must do is waive your environmental laws and let us dump toxic PCBs into the Hudson River and persuade the state of New York to write us a permit to allow this. If you do not do this, we are going to move to New Jersey, across the river, and we are going to do it from over there, and we are going to pay taxes over there."

Glens Falls took the bait. Two decades later, GE closed the doors on that factory, fired the workers and left a two-billion-dollar clean-up bill that nobody in the Hudson valley can afford.

Federal environmental laws were meant to put an end to that kind of corporate blackmail. To stop these corporations from coming in and whipsawing...