A Letter From Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is Senior Attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of our nations's most effective environmental advocacy groups. Contact NRDC to get involved.

The next several months will be "do or die" for America's environment. Why? Because the Bush White House is quietly putting radical new policies in place that will let its corporate cronies poison our air, foul our water and devastate our wildlands for decades to come.

This sweeping onslaught will cripple many of the safeguards that protect us from the very worst excesses of the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical industries.

It took thirty years to put these vital protections in place. But by the end of this year, this Administration will be close to wiping them out. That's not an exaggeration. That's not hyperbole. It's a fact.

The scope of the coming attack is staggering. Few Americans even know about it, much less grasp what it will mean to our health and heritage. But you need to know what is at stake. And once you do, I trust you'll join with me in working to thwart the Bush Administration's dangerous plans.

Here is a small sampling of what they're looking to accomplish for their corporate allies over the next critical months—unless we succeed in stopping them:

• They're trying to excuse ExxonMobil and other behemoths from a key provision of the Clean Air Act and allow them to spew vastly more pollution into our air—dramatically increasing asthma and heart attacks, hospitalizations, and premature deaths.
• They plan to treat mercury pollution from power plants as non-hazardous even though mercury is one of the world's most dangerous substances. Why? So that those plants can keep pumping mercury into our air, where it rains down on lakes and oceans and winds up in the fish we eat.
• They would open all 155 of our national forests to logging without regard for the devastating impacts on the wolves, bears, eagles and other wildlife who depend on these sanctuaries for survival.

The list goes on and on.

I am angry—both as a citizen and as a father—at the terrible price we are about to pay so that this Administration's corporate allies can cash in.

Three of my own kids—and millions of others—already struggle to breathe on bad air days because they suffer from asthma. Should our children suffer even more to improve ExxonMobil's bottom line?

Fortunately, the Natural Resources Defense Council is counter-attacking in the federal courts and mobilizing a pro-environmental outcry that the White House and Congress will be unable to ignore. I've been working with the NRDC on the frontlines of environmental protection for 20 years. With our staff of 250 lawyers, scientists and other professionals—all backed by one million Members and online activists—NRDC is respected around the world, by friend and foe, as America's toughest environmental advocate.

Please join us in making sure that the environmental progress we've worked so hard to achieve over the past three decades is not stolen from us over the next several months.