By Jill Goetz
Many of the 4,100 people who poured into Barton Hall on May 25 for Senior Convocation expected an impassioned defense of the environment from guest speaker Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the attorney who has made it his life's calling. But what they heard was a speech grounded as much in American history as it was in environmental advocacy.
"We enjoy in this country, in our social institutions, a greater connectedness to nature than any of the other industrialized nations on earth; it defines who we are as a people," said Kennedy, who last spoke on campus in 1993. He is the second oldest of the late senator's sons.
As senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, supervising attorney at Pace University Law School's Environmental Litigation Clinic and chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, Kennedy has sued alleged polluters on behalf of thousands of clients, many of them commercial and recreational fishermen along the Hudson River.
In a 45-minute address, without referring to notes, Kennedy recited a slew of statistics and anecdotes to illustrate the parallels between America's political, cultural and spiritual heritage and its peoples' reverence for the land.
"We are unique as a people in this country," Kennedy said, "and all you have to do is look around and see that -- in this crowd. We come from all over the world. We don't share any common history, or culture, or race, or language or religion. The only thing that allows us to call ourselves a nation instead of, for example, a continent is, one, our shared values -- and that means our love of democracy and the political institutions we have created in this country -- and the other is the land.
"It's not an accident that our nation invented the national park. We didn't have the great cathedrals and monuments of Europe. . . . We said, 'This is who we are as a people; this is what makes us special; this is what unites us."
He continued, "Our cultural institutions, our political institutions are rooted in nature; they grew out of it almost organically. Frederick Jackson Turner, who was one of the greatest American historians, said American democracy came out of the forest; without the great wilderness areas we would never have evolved the great political institutions in their current form."
Kennedy told several anecdotes about American political leaders of the past to illustrate their ties to the land. "Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln -- all of them were naturalists," he said. "All of them were rooted in the soil, and that rootedness gave them a special clarity of vision in terms of who we are as a people and what our national destiny was. . . .
"One of Thomas Jefferson's first acts as president was to send Lewis and Clark out
to the western region of this nation to inventory the wildlife; not just the
commercial species -- the bear, the bison, the beaver,
the
caribou -- but to collect the insects and flowers and grasses, because he saw that
as a national security issue. He thought that if
we are to know ourselves as a people, if we are to know what our national destiny was to be,
we have to know as much as possible about the nature out of which we were derived."
On Lincoln: "He would put birds back in their nests and move snakes out of the road; he said, 'Their lives are as sweet to them as ours are to us.'"
On Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "When you visit FDR's house in Hyde Park, the first thing you can see when you go through the foyer is floor-to-ceiling glass display cases . . . and in those cases are not his war memorabilia or his political iconography or photographs of him at Yalta with Stalin; there is his bird collection, one of the finest ornithological collections in New York state."
America's artistic heritage -- particularly the Hudson River School and Western art
-- also reflects our predecessors'
appreciation
of wild lands, Kennedy said. "There are other national schools of art that have painted
nature," said Kennedy. "The British have
their still lifes, the French and the Italians
have their gardens and agrarian scenes. But that's nature tamed. Our artists chose to paint
nature in its wildest state, because they saw that
as the way to capture the American soul."
In a speech filled with references to beleaguered animals, from starfish to spotted owls to snail darters to the American peregrine falcon, Kennedy stressed that nature should be preserved "not for nature's sake, but because it enriches us . . . if we destroy [nature], we will be diminished and our children will be impoverished.
"We are not preserving those northern forests, as Rush Limbaugh would argue, for the sake of a spotted owl," Kennedy said. "We are preserving those forests because we believe they have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down."