Reply #45: Here's some of his killer interview with NOW [View All]

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR: --have a free market, you need regulation. And what all the federal environmental laws were meant to do was to restore free market capitalism in this country. We're not protecting nature for the sake of the fishes or the birds. Or for nature's sake. We're protecting it because nature enriches us. When we destroy nature, we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children.

And you know-- we're not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl. We're preserving them because we believe that trees have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down. You know, this administration and sometimes industry says that we have to choose between environmental protection on the one hand and economic prosperity on the other.

BRANCACCIO: That's often the way the debate is framed. In other words, environment versus jobs. And people tend to pick jobs if you present it that way.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR: It's a false choice. In 100 % of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children. If we treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay for our joy ride.

BRANCACCIO: Do you go fishing with your kids ever?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR: I go fishing with my kids-- you know, in the summertime I would say almost everyday. And customarily we used to eat a lot of fish. But I don't let my kids eat freshwater fish anymore. And that's a really sad thing.

My children and the children of millions of most Americans are now living in a science fiction nightmare where they can no longer engage in the seminal primal activity of American youth which is go fishing with their father and mother and to come home and eat the fish

Read the rest: http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcriptNOW103_full.html