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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water supply, but his reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions. The list includes winning numerous settlements for Riverkeeper, prosecuting governments and companies for polluting the Hudson River and Long Island Sound, arguing cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline, and suing treatment plants to force compliance with the Clean Water Act.

Mr. Kennedy acts as Chief Prosecuting Attorney for Riverkeeper. He also serves as Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and as President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. At Pace University School of Law, he is a Clinical Professor and Supervising Attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York. Earlier in his career Mr. Kennedy served as Assistant District Attorney in New York City.

The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and the city's watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. He helped lead the fight to turn back the aggressive anti-environmental legislation during the 104th Congress.

Mr. Kennedy has worked on environmental issues across the Americas. He has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional homelands.

Mr. Kennedy has published several books, including "The Riverkeepers" (1997) with John Cronin. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, Esquire, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Pace Environmental Law Review, and other publications.

Mr. Kennedy is a graduate of Harvard University. He studied at the London School of Economics and received his law degree from the University of Virginia Law School. He also received a Masters Degree in Environmental Law from Pace University.

He is a licensed master falconer, and as often as possible he pursues a life-long enthusiasm for white-water paddling. He has organized and led several expeditions to Latin America, including first descents on three little known rivers in Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela.

Blog Entries by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Mitt Romney's Test of Moral Fiber

581 Comments | Posted January 9, 2012 | 08:42:03 (EST)

I was surprised when Mitt Romney's son, Matt, resuscitated the "birther" issue in New Hampshire on December 29. Speaking at a campaign event, the young Romney deflected a question about his father's refusal to release his income tax return by citing a proposal that President Barack Obama should...

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Big Carbon's Sock Puppets Declare War on America and the Planet

1396 Comments | Posted November 25, 2011 | 08:39:56 (EST)

It's now become de rigueur among the radical right wing rhetoricians to characterize any government support of America's green energy sector as wasteful, fruitless, and scandalous. They greeted with glee the collapse of the government supported solar company, Solyndra, America's first major casualty in our race with China to dominate...

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The Fracking Industry's War On The New York Times -- And The Truth

Posted October 20, 2011 | 15:18:04 (EST)

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an...

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An Assault on Clean Water and Democracy

Posted July 6, 2011 | 17:05:19 (EST)

Like the 104th Congress when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, the House today is swinging a sledgehammer at a cornerstone of contemporary American democracy and undermining the most extraordinary body of environmental law in the world.

Chief among the attacks is HR 2018, known as the "Clean...

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The March on Blair Mountain: A Protest to Protect Our Jobs and Our Mountains

Posted June 9, 2011 | 22:09:44 (EST)

This week an important protest is taking place in the coalfields of West Virginia. The March on Blair Mountain began on Monday as several hundred people embarked on a five-day journey retracing the steps of over 10,000 miners who 90 years ago staged the largest armed insurrection after...

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Regulators Reject Proposal That Would Bring Fox-Style News to Canada

Posted February 28, 2011 | 21:54:48 (EST)

As America's middle class battles for its survival on the Wisconsin barricades -- against various Koch Oil surrogates and the corporate toadies at Fox News -- fans of enlightenment, democracy and justice can take comfort from a significant victory north of Wisconsin border. Fox News will not be moving into...

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Tucson: Time for Another Examination of Conscience

Posted January 11, 2011 | 19:57:43 (EST)

On November 22, 1963, Mummy picked me up early from Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. Driving home to Hickory Hill in northern Virginia, I noticed that all the District flags were at half staff. Mummy told us that a bad man had shot Uncle Jack and that he...

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Sex, Lies and Oil Spills

Posted May 5, 2010 | 11:19:28 (EST)

A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.

In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's...

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Pebble Mine: Foreign Mining Companies' Scheme Would Poison America's Paradise

Posted April 7, 2010 | 13:09:59 (EST)

On Earth Day, April 22, 2010, of all days, the British mining giant Anglo American is holding its annual shareholder meeting in London. Anglo American and Northern Dynasty Minerals, its Canadian partner, are scheming to construct one of the world's largest copper and gold mines, the Pebble Mine, in the...

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Central Figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds With $2M

Posted March 11, 2010 | 11:25:00 (EST)

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has...

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The New Arms Race

Posted November 19, 2009 | 15:11:22 (EST)

Hobbled by opposition from the carbon incumbents and their short-sighted allies on Capitol Hill the Obama administration acknowledged this week that it would not return from Copenhagen with any groundbreaking commitment to control green house gases. Meanwhile, Congress is backsliding on the administration's wise commitment to impose a rational price...

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King Coal

Posted July 26, 2009 | 21:38:04 (EST)

Over the past decade, nearly one hundred coal burning power plants have died in the proposal stage trumped by the legitimate objections of local communities fearful of a dirty deadly fuel that is neither cheap nor clean. Ozone and particulates from coal plants kill tens of thousands of Americans each...

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Alaskan Independence Party: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

Posted October 9, 2008 | 12:28:35 (EST)

In 2004, America's malleable mainstream media allowed itself to be manipulated by artful Republican operatives into devoting weeks of broadcast attention and drums of ink to unfairly desecrating John Kerry's genuine Vietnam heroics while obligingly muzzling serious discussion of George W. Bush's shameful wartime record of evasion and cowardice.

...
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Governor Palin's Reading List

Posted September 15, 2008 | 12:27:44 (EST)

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of...

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Hillary Haters and the Roosevelts

Posted December 12, 2007 | 23:40:46 (EST)

Even some Democrats who agree with Hillary Clinton on every issue and consider her an effective, inspiring leader, fret that the blind, irrational hatred, that burdened her husband during his presidency and that continues to dog his wife, might impair her electability. "She is too polarizing" they say, parroting the...

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Coal's True Cost

Posted November 29, 2007 | 21:31:07 (EST)

Last evening's GOP CNN/YouTube debate and the Democratic presidential debate on November 15 were jointly sponsored by a coal industry coalition comprised of mining, railroad and utility interests.

Their high profile civic involvement is designed to further confuse American voters about coal's true cost to our society. Many...

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Attack on Mothers

Posted June 19, 2007 | 19:51:23 (EST)

The poisonous public attacks on Katie Wright this week--for revealing that her autistic son Christian (grandson of NBC Chair Bob Wright), has recovered significant function after chelation treatments to remove mercury -- surprised many observers unfamiliar with the acrimonious debate over the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal. But the patronizing attacks...

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Robert F. Kennedy

Posted April 4, 2007 | 20:23:05 (EST)

In 1968, my father, running for President, addressed in a speech, the White House's proposal for a troop surge in Vietnam. Robert Kennedy had initially supported the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Forty years later, as Congress and the White House debate the further escalation of yet another war that has...

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Exposing ExxonMobil, Part II

Posted February 8, 2007 | 14:27:08 (EST)

Last week the release of the IPCC Report by the world's 2500 top climatologists closed the scientific debate on global warming once and for all with a grave warning about its apocalyptical consequences to human civilization.

ExxonMobil Corporation reacted by publishing a paid advertisement on the New York Times Op-Ed...

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Exposing ExxonMobil

Posted January 28, 2007 | 23:10:25 (EST)

In a quarter-page advertorial in Thursday's New York Times, ExxonMobil launched a new greenwashing campaign to salvage its earned reputation as Earth's number one global warming villain. For over a decade the giant oil company has waged a successful multi-million dollar propaganda campaign to deceive the public about global warming....

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