"The Natural City" Symposion: Keynote speech: A contract with our future

Abstract

Recently lauded by Successful Meetings magazine as a man whose message supersedes his golden name, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. maintains a reputation as a resolute defender of the environment. His litany of successful legal actions includes: prosecuting governments and companies for polluting the Hudson River and Long Island sound; winning settlements for the Hudson Riverkeeper; arguing cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline; and suing sewage treatment plants to force compliance with the Clean Water Act. Mr Kennedy serves as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, all while serving as the President of the Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a clinical professor and supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law in New York. He has worked on environmental issues across the Americas and has assisted several indigenous tribes in Latin America and Canada in successfully negotiating treaties protecting traditional homelands. He is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's water supply. The New York City watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and New York City watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. The following are excerpts from the Keynote Address by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Convocation Hall, University of Toronto at the international symposionon 'The Natural City," Toronto, 23-25 June, 2004, sponsored by the University of Toronto's Division of the Environment, Institute for Environmental Studies, and the World Society for Ekistics, and are reprinted with kind permission from Idea&s: the Arts and Science Review, of the University of Toronto, Autumn 2004, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 10-12.