Accessibility and Access Keys [0]
It was many years ago. As the sun fell on a languid summer day on the coast of Maine, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rose to speak. He talked until a tapestry of stars covered the sky, he talked with passion and authority, and he talked without a note.
Mr. Kennedy spoke of our obligation to the earth as tenants rather than landlords. Surveying the religious, historical, cultural and intellectual roots of the environmental movement, he described the earth as a legacy we borrow from our children rather than one we inherit from our parents.
In his language, his cadence and his manner, he recalled his extraordinary father, Senator Robert Kennedy. Unlike some of his siblings and cousins, however, this Kennedy eschews politics. It is shame, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the best of his generation.
Instead, he has become a leading environmentalist, a scourge of polluters and a darling of tree-huggers (which he says he isn’t). A lawyer and a law professor, he is the senior attorney to the Natural Resources Defense Council and the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance.
Waterkeeper, which hired him in 1984 as a prosecuting attorney, acts as guardian of endangered bodies of water around the world—rivers, creeks, lakes, bays—in the enduring battle to preserve an endangered and diminishing resource. It began in the 1960s as a movement of fishermen and others who wanted to reclaim the Hudson River, which had become toxic. Its lawsuits have won $4 billion U.S. in settlements and damages from polluters. Today, Mr. Kennedy says, the Hudson is teeming with natural life again.
It is this message of awareness, activism and engagement that he brings everywhere he goes. His recent address to a testimonial dinner of the Jewish National Fund of Ottawa—a tireless champion of conservation in Israel, where there is little land and less water—was the same kind of appeal to elevate the environment in our consciousness.
Waterkeeper has established a presence in Canada. It has appointed stewards in Georgian Bay, the Bay of Fundy, Lake Ontario and the Ottawa River, among other places. As Mr. Kennedy says, waterkeepers are part “investigator, scientist, lawyer, lobbyist and public relations agent,” reflecting a deep commitment to social activism.
Mr. Kennedy visits Canada often; he has been here five times alone in the last year to go wilderness canoeing, one of his passions. While our environmental laws are tough, he says, our fresh water is still at risk. We need to be vigilant.
Mr. Kennedy offends people. He calls the United States “the world’s biggest polluter” and exorciates George W. Bush for “declaring war on our environmental laws.” He makes no apology, even when he is wrong. Kennedys seldom do. He has the same defiance, flintiness and humour that made his father an American icon four decades ago.
Watching Robert Kennedy Jr. in full rhetorical flight (even as lingering malady renders his voice small and tremulous) is to marvel at the difference a person can make in society. And it is to wonder, in this Season of Gomery, why politics is no longer the honourable profession it was, and why we have the leaders we do.
It isn’t that our politicians are corrupt, much as people believe. It is that they are mediocre.
People of substance, like Mr. Kennedy, stay away. In Canada, Stephen Lewis champions the war on AIDS and Bob Rae advances education and citizenship. John Ralston Saul and Michael Ignatieff use ideas as their instrument of change. Hugh Segal, a formidable student of public policy, sits in the Senate, though his place should be in the House of Commons.
The truth is that this country needs these people today, and others too, of every political stripe. Instead, able people sit on the sidelines, chagrined by the posturing, the shallowness and the incivility of national politics.
It is one reason the federal cabinet is weak. Another is that an insecure Paul Martin purged all his rivals. Mr. Martin ignored a fundamental lesson of leadership and has paid for it; he would do well to read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s insightful new book on Abraham Lincoln, who appointed all his embittered rivals to his cabinet in 1861 because the fractured country needed them.
With a cancerous disdain for politics spreading, especially among young people, it will take a new kind of politician to make public service honourable again. In the United States, ironically, it could come from Senator John McCain, the most interesting politician in the country. He has the independence, generosity, and authenticity of Theodore Roosevelt.
For now, though, leadership and ideas are likely to come from outside politics. In our autumn of indifference, the best antidote to Gomery may be Kennedy, and his soulmates everywhere.
Andrew Cohen is a professor or journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
E-mail: andrew_cohen@carleton.ca .
© The Ottawa Citizen 2005