Left to right: Young Bobby and his soon-to-be-president uncle on a flight back to Boston after the 1960 Democratic Convention in Los Angeles; handling an Augur hawk in Kenya in 1975; and speaking out against the arms race at the Hollywood Bowl in 1981.
his friend John Kerry in Ohio. After nearly a quarter century of organizing, litigating, crusading and fund-raising—often while struggling against the political current—he displays the vitality and idealism that are his family’s hallmarks.
Over the past two decades, Kennedy has directed that intense energy into saving the nation’s waterways and, more broadly, into promoting an environmental ethic that is suddenly accepted as prophetic in the age of global climate change. As chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper, Kennedy has spearheaded the restoration of that magnificent estuary from the port of New York to the Erie Canal, leading a corps of attorneys, scientists and citizen activists. Their success has spawned hundreds of affiliates across the country and around the world. The local Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, which he joined as an unpaid lawyer in 1984, has grown into the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international network of sentinels protecting rivers, bays and coastlines from Casco Bay in Maine to the Yamuna River in India.
courses in environmental law. There was only one offered, because there really wasn’t a discipline called environmental law at that time,” Kennedy recalls. “I went back at night to Pace Law School, which specializes in environmental law, and got a master’s degree over the next two years.”
Eventually the Pace faculty asked Kennedy to start an environmental litigation clinic, where third-year law students work on cases under his supervision. Operating out of a small building on the Pace University campus in White Plains, N. Y., with an aquarium full of river fish as decor, they sue polluters—and have
Kennedy candidly recounted his personal journey from alienation to engagement in The Riverkeepers, a book he co-authored (with John Cronin) in 1994, and that served, in part, as a memoir of his own life’s renewal through work and faith. Soon after signing on as a volunteer lawyer for the anglers and scientists who were fighting a constant rear-guard battle against giant utilities and industrial polluters, Kennedy realized he wasn’t as well prepared as he needed to be. “When I went to law school, I hadn’t taken any
notched several of the environmental movement’s most important victories.
“We’ve brought over 400 successful legal actions against Hudson River polluters. We’ve forced polluters to spend over $4 billion in remediating the Hudson,” says Kennedy. “This waterway was a national joke in 1966 when this organization got started. It was dead water for 20-mile stretches north of New York City, south of Albany. It turned color. It caught fire.”
He sweeps his arm as if we were standing on the riverbank, his voice rising as he describes a recovery he regards as nothing short of miraculous.
“Today, it’s the richest body of water in the North Atlantic region, producing more pounds of fish per acre than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator,” he says. “And it’s the last major
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