RFK Jr: Christ Was An Environmentalist

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the OU Health Sciences Center, Oklahoma City, April 18, 2008.

RFK JR: CHRIST WAS AN ENVIRONMENTALIST

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. came to Oklahoma (the buckle of the Bible Belt) recently to deliver a talk on “Our Environmental Destiny,” he reminded the standing room only audience that Christ was an environmentalist — and that if Jesus walked among us today, he too might be dismissed as a quack.

In his remarks delivered Friday, April 18th at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, Kennedy used examples from all of the ancient religions to make his point:

“We know our Creator best by studying Creation, which all of the religious texts mandate us to do.” Kennedy said. “If you look at all of the great, central epiphany in every religious tradition in mankind’s history, the revelation always occurs in the wilderness.

“Buddha had to go into the wilderness to experience self-realization. Mohamed had to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira in 629 and wrestle an angel in the middle of the night to have the Koran squeezed out of him. Moses had to go onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get the Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge themselves of the 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

“Christ had to spend 40 days in the wilderness to discover his divinity. His mentor was John the Baptist, a man of the wilderness who lived in a cave in the Jordan Valley and dressed in the skins of wild animals. All of Christ’s parables are taken from nature: I am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard Seed; the little swallows the scattering, the seeds on fallow ground…

“He called himself a fisherman, a farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That’s how he stayed in touch with the people. He was saying things to them that contradicted everything that they had heard from the literate, sophisticated people of their time. They would have dismissed him as a quack but they were able to confirm the wisdom of his parables about the fishes and the birds through their own observations of the natural world. They were able to say: He’s not telling us something new, he’s simply illuminating something that’s very, very old.”

INTO THE WILDERNESS

“The American conservationist John Muir said that the wilderness is God’s temple, that destroying its most beautiful places is tantamount to tearing pages from the Scriptures.”

– Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 1992

Kennedy drew a clear line of distinction between true environmentalism and paganism: “I don’t believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as God,” he said, “but I do believe that it’s the way that God talks to us most clearly.

“God talks to human beings through many vectors: through each other, through organized religion, through the great books of those religions, through wise people, through art, literature, music and poetry – but nowhere with such clarity, texture, grace and joy as through Creation. We don’t know Michelangelo by looking at his biography, we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

“The reason that we protect nature is because it enriches us.” Kennedys explained. “It enriches us economically, yes, the base of our economy, and we ignore that at our peril. But it also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally, culturally and historically, and spiritually.

“Human beings have other appetites besides money, and if we don’t feed them we’re not going to become the kind of beings that our Creator intended. When we destroy nature we impoverish ourselves, we diminish ourselves and we impoverish our children.

“We’re not protecting those ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the sake of a spotted owl,” he argued. “We are protecting those forests because we believe that the trees have more value to humanity standing than they would have if we cut them down.”

“I’m not fighting for the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or the striped bass but because I believe my life will be richer; my children, my community will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and sturgeon and striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson is 350 years old. Many of these people come from Dutch families that learned the same fishing methods that they’re using today from the Algonquin Indians during the Dutch colonial period. I want my children to be able to touch them when they come to shore to repair their nets or wait out the tides, and in doing that, connect themselves to New York history and understand that they are part of something larger than themselves.

“I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where it’s all Unilever and 400-ton factory trolleys 100 miles offshore strip mining the ocean with no interface with humanity, and where we have no family farmers left in America; where we’ve driven the final nail into the coffin of Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an American democracy rooted in tens of thousands of freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.

“I don’t want a world where we’ve lost touch with the seasons and the tides and the things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of human beings that were here before there were laptops, and that connect us ultimately to God.”

“A MORAL AFFRONT TO THE NEXT GENERATION”

As Kennedy sees it, preserving our natural environment is every citizen’s moral obligation, because “when we destroy these things, we’re cutting ourselves off from the very things that make us human, that give us a spiritual life.

“And for these people on Capitol Hill to be saying that they are following the mandate of Christ by liquidating our public assets, what they are really doing is a moral affront to the next generation.

“That’s why we preserve nature.” Kennedy said. “Not for our sake, but for the sake of the future. That obligation is expressed by the term sustainability. All that word means is that God wants us to use the things we’ve been given, to enrich ourselves, to improve our quality of life, to serve others – but we can’t use them up. We can’t sell the farm piece by piece in order to pay for the groceries; we can’t drain the pond to catch the fish. We can’t cut down the mountain to get at the coal. We can live off the interest; we can’t go into the capital that belongs to our children.”

Kennedy launched into an attack on President George W. Bush (“the worst environmental president in history”) and his cronies who “claim to embrace Christianity while violating the manifold mandates of Christianity: that we are stewards of the land, and that we are meant to care for nature. They have embraced this Christian heresy of dominion theology.”

He explained how the Bush administration has worked hand-in-glove with multinational corporations to destroy the environment and thereby, the quality and length of our lives.

Kennedy focused on an example which has local impact on Oklahomans — large scale factory farming — saying that the poultry companies are “making themselves billionaires by poisoning the rest of us.”

He also praised the efforts of Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson for his lawsuits against Big Poultry. With Edmondson in attendance, Kennedy said factory farms use their lobbies to gain more than their fair share in influence in state capitols across the nation.

Edmondson, a Democrat, has said that pollution from poultry farms in an issue of national importance. In 2005, he filed a lawsuit in federal court against several poultry companies to stop the alleged pollution their operations have caused in the Illinois River watershed and Lake Tenkiller.

The lawsuit alleges the poultry companies are responsible for the runoff of polluted water from tons of poultry waste that has flowed into state waterways as the result of improper storage.

Kennedy said the large-scale farms injure Americans by “dumping their crap into the Illinois River and the other rivers of the state.”

Kennedy talks with Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson

“CORPORATE CRONY CAPITALISM IS ANTITHETICAL TO DEMOCRACY”

Another important distinction, according to Kennedy:

“Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

“I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat production,” he explained, “which is not only one of the primary threats to the American environment but also one of the primary threats to the American worker. It’s allowing a few monopolies to control our food supply and to put farmers out of business.

“Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent hog farmers in North Carolina, today there are none. They have been replaced completely by 2,200 hog factories, 1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one large corporation. They produce such huge amounts of waste they have to dispose of it illegally, and so they have to corrupt political officials in order to continue operating.

“A few years ago I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama bin Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but I got six months of abuse from the farm bureau.” Kennedy recalled. “I stand by what I said. It’s the same thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too strong and too committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our democratic institutions would be subverted by what he called “malefactors of great wealth,” who would destroy them from within.

“Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, during the heat of the Civil War in 1863, said, “I have the South in front of me, and the bankers behind me and for my country, I fear the bankers more”.

“From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders – Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson – have warned America against allowing large corporations to dominate our political systems and our lives.” Kennedy reminded the assembled crowd.

“Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, the most famous speech he made was warning America against the domination by the military-industrial complex.

“Franklin Roosevelt said that the domination of our nation by large corporations is the definition of fascism. I have an American Heritage Dictionary, and the definition, if you look up fascism, says, “the domination of government by large corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose nationalism” – that’s getting to look pretty familiar, isn’t it?” he asked. 

TEARING THE “CONSERVE” OUT OF CONSERVATIVE

“The problem with letting large corporations dominate our government is that it erodes democracy.” Kennedy explained. “It erodes our capacity to participate in public life, our capacity for dignity, and it allows these entities to squander resources that belong to our children.

“But the thing that we’ve squandered worst of all is our natural heritage: the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the lands – all these things that make us proud to be American.

“This administration has torn the conserve out of conservatism,” he said.

 ”They claim to like the free market, but what they are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism, socialism for the rich.

“They claim to love property rights, but only when it’s the right of a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor’s property or to destroy the public property.

“They claim to like law and order, but they are the first ones to let the large corporations and their corporate contributors violate the law at public expense.

“They claim to love local control and states’ rights, but it’s only in those instances when they’re taking down the barriers to large corporations.

“This is the revolving door plunder you get,” Kennedy concluded, “when you let corporations run a democracy.

“We’re living today in a science fiction nightmare when my children and most of the children in Oklahoma can no longer safely engage in a seminal primal activity of American youth: which is go fishing their father at the local fishing hole then come and safely eat the fish. All because somebody gave money to a politician.”

 

Text and photos copyright RFKin2008.com.

 

 

 

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Filed under RFK, RFK Jr., climate change, election 2008, environment, global warming, impeach Bush, politics, religion, robert f. kennedy, robert kennedy jr., senator robert kennedy, the kennedys

Tags: conservationism, corporate cronyism, industrial farming, Oklahoma Attorney General, oklahoma city, OU Health Sciences Center, poultry farms, Riverkeeper, University of Oklahoma News, waterkeeper alliance