Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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.

Hillary Haters and the Roosevelts

200 Comments | Posted December 12, 2007 | 11:40 PM (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

192 Comments | Posted November 29, 2007 | 09:31 PM (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 | 06:51 PM (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 | 07:23 PM (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 | 02:27 PM (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 | 11:10 PM (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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For the Last, Stubborn Holdouts on Global Warming

Posted January 16, 2007 | 10:01 PM (EST)


Last week I saw robins and bluebirds in upstate New York where they don't usually arrive before April. Crocuses and daffodils were in bloom everywhere. A friend ate asparagus he harvested in the normally frozen Catskills in the first week of January. Turtles in downstate New York, like bears in...

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A Poisonous Move for Kids by CDC

Posted March 6, 2006 | 08:47 PM (EST)


On February 22, CDC announced that it is dramatically expanding America's flu vaccination program to include all children between six months and 5 years and their siblings and caretakers. But, guess what CDC forgot to mention? There is not nearly enough thimerosal-free flu vaccine to go around. Vaccine makers produced...

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Time for CDC to Come Clean

Posted March 1, 2006 | 12:09 AM (EST)


Correspondence newly obtained under the Freedom of Information Act raises troubling new questions about CDC's role in the Thimerosal scandal. Thimerosal is the mercury-based vaccine preservative that has been linked to epidemics of neurological disorders, including autism, in American children born after 1989.

Responding to scientific studies linking dangerous levels...

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Destroying the Clean Water Act

Posted February 23, 2006 | 12:47 AM (EST)


After twenty two years as a clean water advocate using the Clean Water Act to protect America's waterways and the communities that rely upon them, it's been a difficult five years watching the White House systematically dismantle that popular and fantastically successful statute. But yesterday, the newly constituted Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas-dominated Supreme...

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The White House's Tortured Definition of Torture

Posted December 6, 2005 | 12:15 AM (EST)


The White House announced today that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will deliver a comprehensive address on the issues of torture on her European trip this week.

But anyone interested in a glimpse of the elaborate rationale that the White House has constructed for evading application of the "t" word...

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Global Warming: the Press Drops the Ball Again

Posted December 1, 2005 | 12:35 PM (EST)


George Bernard Shaw observed that "a journalist is someone who can't distinguish the end of civilization from a bicycle accident." Yesterday, scientists revealed that global warming has disrupted and slowed the ocean conveyor belt that carries the warm currents that have allowed the cultivation and growth of civilization in northern...

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Fox News' Global Warming Special: Putting the Conserve Back into Conservatism

Posted November 11, 2005 | 01:02 AM (EST)


A Fox News Special “The Heat is On: The Case of Global Warming” airing this Sunday at 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. EST, documents the devastating impacts that global warming is already having on our planet. In one segment of the show, I accompany a Fox News crew to Glacier...

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“For They That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind”

Posted August 29, 2005 | 06:03 PM (EST)


As Hurricane Katrina dismantles Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, it’s worth recalling the central role that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour played in derailing the Kyoto Protocol and kiboshing President Bush’s iron-clad campaign promise to regulate CO2.

In March of 2001, just two days after EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman’s strong statement affirming...

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Vaccines and Autism: Looking for the Truth? Study the Amish

Posted August 9, 2005 | 01:55 AM (EST)


On Sunday morning's Meet the Press, Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Institute of Medicine, debated New York Times reporter and author David Kirby about the strength of the science linking the current epidemic of neurological disorders among American children to the mercury-based vaccine preservative Thimerosal. The Institute of Medicine...

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Thimerosal Cover-Up: Let the Punishment Fit the Crime

Posted July 22, 2005 | 04:37 PM (EST)


Wednesday night, political guru and comedian Jon Stewart dropped by the Comedy Central green room as I awaited my turn on The Daily Show. He had asked me on his program to discuss my recent Salon.com/Rolling Stone articles about the federal government's efforts to conceal the overwhelming scientific...

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Philip Cooney Stays in the Fold

Posted June 15, 2005 | 10:55 AM (EST)


The news today is that Philip Cooney has gone to work for Exxon Mobil. But the real news is that he never left. This administration has consistently blurred the line between public service and private enterprise. They appoint a timber industry lobbyist to run the forest service, a mining...

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Will the Emasculated Stenographers of the Press Overlook Yet Another White House Deception?

Posted June 9, 2005 | 07:38 PM (EST)


“A journalist,” observed George Bernard Shaw, “is someone who cannot distinguish between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization.” Yesterday, the New York Times reported that a high level White House official had deliberately and methodically altered taxpayer funded studies on global warming to lie to the public...

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Facts are Stubborn Things

Posted May 17, 2005 | 09:25 PM (EST)


For 15 years King Coal and Big Oil, led by the Exxon Corporation, have funded dozens of Washington think tanks stocked with aberrant scientists (known as biostitutes) to persuade the public and the press that the science is still out on global warming and give political cover to the...

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