Only a strengthened environmental movement can compete with corporate polluters' lobbyists and earn the attention of legislators who would dismantle environmental-protection laws enacted since the first Earth Day, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told students who filled Cornell University's Call Alumni Auditorium April 23 for the first Kaplan Family Distinguished Lecture in Public Service.

"Before you buy a low-flow showerhead or a 40 miles-per-gallon car, join and work for an environmental organization," said Kennedy, who is a prosecuting attorney for two such organizations, Riverkeeper and the National Resources Defense Council.

When he visits Washington lawmakers, Kennedy said, he knows that lobbyists for corporate interests have been there before him, trying to buy votes to weaken environmental protection measures. Even though "our crazy Supreme Court thinks writing [campaign-finance] checks is free speech," Kennedy said he brings the legislators something better than money: the threat, if a legislator votes against environmental laws, "to tell a million people you're a bad guy."

Before introducing Kennedy, President Hunter Rawlings thanked the Kaplan family for endowing both the new lectureship and two faculty fellowships, which are administered through the Cornell Public Service Center to further its goal of engaging students with their community.

"The Kaplan family has allowed us to devote resources to that goal," Rawlings said, adding that he was "especially grateful [for their] commitment to undergraduate life."

Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowships in Service-Learning were awarded to Carl A. Batt, Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Food Science, co-director of the Nanobiotechnology Center and director of the Cornell/Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research Partnership, and to Paula Horrigan, associate professor of landscape architecture and faculty chair of the Faculty Fellows-in-Service Program, during a dinner ceremony following the lecture. Awards of $5,000 were given to each of the faculty members to establish or expand service-learning projects that actively involve Cornell students in community-based action research, teaching and outreach efforts addressing important community-identified policy issues.

Rawlings introduced the fellowship and lectureship benefactors – Leslie Kaplan and Barbara Kaplan '59, their son Douglas Kaplan '88 and daughter Emily Kaplan '88 – noting: "That's a lot of Cornell Kaplans! And Les, although he does not hold a Cornell diploma, has supported Cornell University to a remarkable degree."

Kennedy also thanked the family and the Public Service Center, teased Ithaca for its unseasonably cold weather, which had produced wet snow throughout the day, and told why he was thrilled to visit Cornell. "This is like coming to Mecca for a falconer," said Kennedy, a licensed master falconer, author of an instructional manual in the ancient sport and past president of the state falconry society. He has a Harris hawk setting on eggs at home, Kennedy said, and was looking forward to a Friday tour through the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, where a raptor repopulation program had begun in the 1970s under the leadership of then-professor Tom Cade.

Later in his impassioned speech, Kennedy told of visiting the White House as a young boy and being less interested in uncle John F. Kennedy than in a spectacle taking place outside the window. Peregrine falcons that were nesting in the cupola of the old Post Office were flying over the head of pedestrians on Pennsylvania Avenue, Kennedy recalled, "diving at more than 200 miles an hour and snatching pigeons out of the air."

That was the start of what his mother, Ethel Kennedy, called his obsession with falconry, the speaker recalled, but he said the peregrine falcons that do survive today – "thanks to Tom Cade and other brilliant scientists" – are not pure-bred. Rather, the peregrines that have been repopulated to urban and wilderness habitats throughout the country are genetic amalgams of several closely related species. Kennedy said, "The true peregrine falcons went extinct from DDT poisoning in 1963, the same year my uncle was killed."

Recounting courtroom successes on behalf of clients, such as Hudson Riverkeeper, and the discovery of a little-known law that awards half of polluters' fines to citizens who sue them, Kennedy lauded his students at the Pace University School of Law's Environmental Litigation Clinic, where he is a professor and supervising attorney. "We give each student four polluters to sue at the beginning of the semester," Kennedy said.

Students in the Pace program recently extracted a $5.7 million penalty from New York City – for polluting the Esopus Creek, which flows through the city's own Catskill Mountain watershed.

"But of course, if they don't win," Kennedy said of his law students, "they don't pass the course."