Looking into the future the Pelican feeding its young from a self-induced wound in its own breast (as depicted, mysteriously, on the state flag of Louisiana) is accepted as an appropriate symbol of both self-sacrifice and rebirth. Through his selfless efforts, man is raised from the slavery of ignorance to the condition of freedom conferred by wisdom. Given the current state of affairs in Louisiana, one hopes that the understanding of the Pelican as a symbol shall point the way towards a new consciousness of ourselves as a whole, and lead us to face our futures with strength, grace, wisdom and faith, to learn from our mistakes and carry our successes and zest for living to future generations.

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Save the Earth - Dump Bush!

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You talk a lot about the environment in spiritual terms. Are you a practicing Catholic?

Yes.

And yet, as you point out in your Rolling Stone article, some of the most passionate ground troops for the anti-environment backlash have come from the Christian right. How do you make sense of that -- that these people are also inspired by religious conviction?

I would say what the fundamentalists call "dominion theology" is a Christian heresy. These are people who read the Bible in a certain way, to justify corporate domination of the planet, the same way people used to read the Bible to justify slavery.

Dominion Christians believe that the Apocalypse is coming soon, the planet was put here for us to exploit, to liquidate for cash, and we have a duty to do that -- even if we destroy nature in the process. Reagan's EPA chief James Watt was a radical dominion fundamentalist -- he believed it was sinful for us to protect the earth for future generations.

The industrialist who first recognized the potential for organzing these right-wing fanatics into a political movement was Joseph Coors, who was Colorado's biggest polluter. Coors engineered a pact between polluting industries and this marginalized, paranoid element that has existed throughout America's political history. This was in the 1980s, around the same time that world communism was falling apart, and so the right wing needed a new bugaboo. If you read Pat Roberts' book "New World Order," the evolution is clearly outlined; he says the new communists are the environmentalists. He calls them "watermelons" -- green on the outside, but red on the inside. And he makes the same association that the John Birch Society did -- that because Earth Day happened to fall on Lenin's birthday, this was evidence that environmentalists were the new secret spies of the new world order, as communism disappeared.

Robertson interprets American politics through the lens of his apocalyptic theology. He calls environmentalists "the minions of Satan," who are trying to turn America -- which is the New Jerusalem -- over to the philistines of the earth who seek to dominate us through internationalism and the U.N.

Does this radical fringe actually have influence within the Bush administration?

Absolutely. Many of Bush's key appointments come out of this far-right fringe and the industries that fund them. [Interior Secretary] Gale Norton was Watts' successor at Mountain States Legal Foundation. Steven Griles, an energy industry lobbyist who is now Norton's deputy, also came right out of Watts' shop, and now he's busy doing all these terrible things -- giving away our parks, punishing scientists who tell the truth. The administration is full of these people, like Andrew Card, Condoleezza Rice, Spencer Abraham -- they come out of the auto or oil industries, the militantly anti-environmental wing of industry.

Why do you think Christie Todd Whitman resigned as EPA chief?

It was clearly a no-win situation for her. Now Whitman had an absolutely miserable environmental record when she was governor of New Jersey; she was one of the worst governors in the country -- the first thing she did when she took office in New Jersey was fire every lawyer in the state environmental department who knew how to do enforcement. We would have fought her EPA appointment, but despite her disastrous record, she actually looked good in comparison to some of the other characters Bush was recruiting as Cabinet secretaries.

After she took over the EPA, she tried to rein in the Bush administration on Kyoto [the global warming accords] and made a couple of anemic efforts to mitigate the industry looting. But each time, she was humiliated by the White House and ended up looking like a feeble scold at a frat house orgy. So if you look at it from her point of view, she was not making friends with the environmental movement and she was not making friends within the Republican Party. So what's the point of being there? It was just an untenable, no-win situation for her

So for someone like Christie Whitman to find herself in an untenable position ...

Shows the radicalism of this crowd. That they made her look moderate!

In Rolling Stone, you use the term "corporate fascism" to describe what's happening under Bush. Do you think that's excessive rhetoric?

No, I don't. When I was growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism leads inevitably to democracy. And I think that's the assumption of most Americans. Certainly if you listen to people like Sean Hannity or any other voices of the right, there's an assumption that capitalism in any form is beneficial for democracy. But that's not always true. Free market capitalism certainly democratizes a nation and a people. But corporate capitalism has the opposite effect. The control of the capitalist system by large corporations leads to the elimination of markets and ultimately to the elimination of democracy. And we desperately need to understand that point in our country -- that the domination of our country by large corporations is absolutely catastrophic for our democratic process.

Corporations don't want free markets, they want profits. And the best way to guarantee profits is to eliminate the competition; in other words, eliminate the marketplace, through the control of government. And that's what we're seeing today in our country. There is no free market left in agriculture. The free market has almost been eliminated in the energy sector. These are two of our most critical sectors, and the marketplace has disappeared. We're seeing the same process underway in the media industry now. So there's very little consumer choice and Americans aren't getting the benefits and efficiencies that the free market promises us.

Under Bush we're seeing the complete corporate domination of the various departments of government. The Agriculture Department, which was created to benefit small farmers, is now a wholly owned subsidiary of big agribusiness and the principal instrument of their destruction. The Forest Service is being run by a timber industry lobbyist, Public Lands by a mining industry lobbyist. Virtually all Bush's Cabinet secretaries, department deputies and agency heads come from the very industries that those agencies are supposed to be regulating.

The same thing happened in Germany, Italy and Spain during the fascist takeover in the 1920s and '30s -- you had industrialists flooding the ministries and running the ministries, and running them in many ways for their own profit. If you read the American Heritage Dictionary definition of fascism, it says "the domination of a government by corporations of the political right, combined with bellicose nationalism." Well, we're seeing that today.

Of course the first people who start talking about this connection are going to be derided for it. Even though Rush Limbaugh calls feminists "Nazis." The right wing for years has tried to discredit anyone who believes in the idea of community as a "communist" or a "pinko." But it's time that people started telling the truth about what's going on in this country. And start realizing that democracy is fragile, that corporate cronyism is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.

The other day I got something in the mail from a farmer -- small farmers in this country understand better than anyone how markets are being stolen and democracy is being eroded. He sent me a quote from Mussolini that said fascism should really be called "corporatism" -- because it's the control of government by large corporations.

Another farmer sent me my favorite quote. This one was by Lincoln, in 1863, during the height of the Civil War, when he says, "I have the South in front of me and the bankers behind me -- and for my country, I fear the bankers most." Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Eisenhower and all of our great leaders have warned our nation that the greatest threat to our democracy is from large corporate interests.

Many conservatives would say it's easy for wealthy liberals like the Kennedys to talk about saving the environment because they've amassed their wealth already. Your grandfather Joe Kennedy was the buccaneer capitalist who made the family fortune, and all his descendants are living off his wealth. But what about the rest of us, who are still clawing our way toward our piece of the American dream and are being hobbled by government regulations? These are people who equate environmentalism with elite liberalism, and the Kennedy name to them symbolizes all of that.

Well, let me say this: Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy, if we want to measure our economy -- and this is how we should be measuring it -- based on how it produces jobs, and the dignity of those jobs, and how it creates opportunity, and how it preserves the value of our nation's assets. If, on the other hand, you want to treat the planet the way the current Washington regime does, like it's a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, well then you can create the short-term illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride. And they're going to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup costs that they're never going to be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the costs of our prosperity onto the backs of our children.

So your environmentalism is not the luxury hobby of a rich kid?

There is no stronger advocate of free-market capitalism than myself. As a small businessman who is founder and operator of a bottled water company, I believe in and understand the free market a lot better than Sean Hannity ever will. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. What polluters do is make themselves rich by making everyone else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everyone else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. Show me a polluter and I'll show you a subsidy, I'll show you a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay his costs of production.

You look at all the Western resource issues, like grazing and lumber and mining and agriculture, and it's all about subsidies -- for some of the richest people in America, these welfare cowboys in the Western states who are getting $35 billion a year in federal subsidies that are destroying our ecosystems out there. And these are the same people who financed this right-wing revolution on Capitol Hill and helped put Bush in the White House, and now they have their indentured servants in Washington all demanding that we have capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich.

I'll give you another example of how pollution is a form of corporate subsidy. When General Electric dumped PCBs into the Hudson River, it was avoiding the costs of bringing its product to market, which was the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. But when it avoided the cost, the cost didn't just disappear -- it went into the fish, it made people sick, it put people who depend on the river for their livelihood out of work. I now have 1,000 commercial fishermen, my clients, who are now permanently out of work. It dried up the river's barge traffic because the shipping channels are now too toxic to dredge. It forced local towns along the Hudson to invest in expensive water filtration systems. Every woman between Oswego and New York has elevated levels of PCB in her breast milk. And everybody in the Hudson Valley has PCBs in our flesh and our organs. All those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should, in a true free-market economy, be reflected in the prices of G.E. products when they make it to the market. But what G.E. did -- which is what all polluters do -- is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay the costs of its production.

G.E. was finally forced to pay some of the costs of the cleanup, wasn't it?

Well, they're going to do an initial cleanup, but that doesn't start until 2006. They'll never have to account for the true costs that they imposed on the Hudson River community. I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore; I consider myself a free marketeer. We go out into the marketplace and we catch the cheaters. And we say to them, "We're going to force you to internalize your costs, the same way you internalize your profits." Because when someone cheats the free market, it distorts the whole marketplace.

The Kennedy family and the Bush family are the two modern American political dynasties. How would you characterize the differences between the two families and what they stand for?

What I see is this. I think there's always been a tension in American history between two separate philosophies. One is the philosophy that was first articulated by Jonathan Winthrop when he made the most important speech in American history, in 1630, as he approached the New World with a convoy of Puritans. He was the Moses of the great Puritan migration. And he stood up on the deck of the sloop Arbella, and he gave his famous speech, which was called "A Model of Christian Charity." And he said this land is being given to us by God so that we can create cities on a hill, not so that we can increase our carnal opportunities or expand our self-interest or disappear into the lure of real estate, but so that we can build cities on a hill -- models to all the rest of the nations of what human beings can accomplish if they work together and maintain their focus on a spiritual mission. And even though he was a Puritan and an Englishman, what he said that day was integrated into the fabric of what became America.

Now that philosophy distinguished the European settlement of North America from the European conquest of Asia, Africa and Latin America -- where the Europeans came as conquistadors to subjugate the peoples, extract the metals, and enrich themselves and then keep moving. Here, in America, they came to build communities that were models to the rest of the world.

There is, of course, also a conquistador aspect to our American character, which really didn't take a strong hold in our nation until the Gold Rush of 1849, when people said, "Oh, this is a place where you can go and get rich quick and take care of yourself, and it's all about making my pile higher and whoever dies with the most stuff wins."

I think those two polarized philosophies provide the tension that has driven every major political conflict in American history. One vision is about building communities, and emphasizing that we can't advance as a nation by leaving our poor brothers and sisters behind, or by abandoning our obligation to the next generation. And the other philosophy is "just take care of myself," and that will somehow drive the economy and make us great.

So you think those clashing philosophies are what define the Kennedy family vs. the Bush family?

Well, I don't want to make generalizations about the whole Bush family, but I think it definitely defines the current president. He's got the conquistador mentality, that you take care of your friends, you enrich yourself, and that's the point of government.

I know you've been asked this question many times, but I'm going to ask it again. The legendary environmental activist Dave Foreman has said that what the movement needs is a leader with charismatic appeal to make these issues come alive for the American people. I can't think of any other environmentalist with as high a profile as you have -- and it's based not just on your name but years of hard work as an environmental activist. I think you did the right thing by keeping a low profile for many years and just letting your work speak for itself. And that's certainly a commendable thing. But at this stage, clearly what America lacks is a solid bench of talented, progressive leaders. The country is crying out for it now. I know there must be a number of personal reasons that have made you hold back from going into politics to espouse these ideas. But certainly if there were any time for a leader to articulate the environmental agenda -- which is a progressive social agenda, as you point out -- it would be now. So why haven't you run for public office -- is it something that you've ruled out forever?

No. But I would prefer not to run for political office, because of the costs it imposes on the rest of your life. I have six children. And my primary obligation is to them. Otherwise, I almost certainly would have run, if I did not have children.

What are their ages?

My oldest is 19, and my youngest is 2. But my aspiration is to try to be effective without imposing the costs of a political race on my kids. At this point I can travel a lot and bring my family with me, and I see them every night at dinnertime and I'm able to spend weekends with them, while at the same time I'm doing my best [in the public arena].

But in the last six months, I've made a shift -- I'm going to be doing more public stuff, because I believe that we win this debate if the public understands it. And it seems so overwhelming a battle a lot of the time, because industry has so much money to get their arguments out there, and we have so little. But as Winston Churchill said, you just have to keep talking about it, you have to keep telling the story again and again and again. And ultimately the public will realize the truth. And I see that as my role. I'm going to do everything I can to tell this story to as many people as possible, with the hope that at some point the public will recognize the truth, and when they do, they'll share the same kind of anger and indignation that I feel.

I believe that George W. Bush is stealing my country, that he is absolutely stealing the environment from our children, stealing the breath from my children's lungs and stealing the Bill of Rights, selling off the sacred places, and trashing all the things I value about America. Our reputation across the globe, the love and admiration that other peoples and nations once had for America, the safety of our nation, the security of our children, the economy, the ability of our children to educate themselves for the future -- it's all being liquidated by this president for his wealthy friends and contributors. And I am so furious at this man for stealing the thing I love most, which is America, my country.

As a young man, your father was among the first public officials to recognize the dangers of organized crime, how it was infiltrating and corrupting business, labor and politics and undermining the nation. This threat clearly brought out the passionate crusader in your father. And I'm wondering if there is a parallel between his crusade against the underworld bosses and your own campaign against corporate polluters?

I'm very comfortable with my father's philosophies, and I feel very strongly that my life in many ways is an extension of the battles that he was trying to fight. His book on organized crime was titled "The Enemy Within" -- and I think the enemy within is still the greatest threat to our country, but it's no longer the Mafia, it's corporate control of our country and our communities, it's the erosion of democracy. I'm not scared of Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein. They can never hurt America in any fundamental way. As Teddy Roosevelt said, American democracy will never be destroyed by outside enemies -- but it can be destroyed by the malefactors of great wealth who subtly rob and undermine it from within. And I see that process happening today. And just as there were a lot of people who denied that the Mafia existed at that time, today there's a huge lobby that is denying the fact that our democracy is really threatened by corporate control.

Before I let you go, I have to ask you about the latest elected official in the extended Kennedy clan, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Do you think Schwarzenegger, knowing him as you do, will prove to be the governor who cozied up with Ken Lay of Enron or, as he claims he will, the governor of the people?

I think Arnold will be good for California. I think that having a Republican in office is always a bad thing, because you're bringing in the people who got you elected -- the Chemical Manufacturers Association, the Farm Bureau, the American Petroleum Institute, and all of these kind of bad characters, the pirates of the American economy. But I think Arnold will be good. He said to me last summer, during an August weekend on Cape Cod, that he wanted to make the environment one of his key issues, that he was going to be the greatest environmental governor in the history of California. And he asked me then to help him put together a team. I didn't endorse him because I had a close relationship with Governor Gray Davis and Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, who had done decent things on the environment. But I helped Arnold put together an environmental policy, which Arnold read and then adopted. And it's probably stronger than Gore's policy. It's certainly stronger than anybody else who was running for California governor, with the exception of the Green Party candidate.

I'll be able to answer this question better in a little while, when Arnold will announce the new chief of California's Environmental Protection Agency. I encouraged Arnold to name a very strong conservationist, Terry Tamminen, who is the Santa Monica Baykeeper, to the post. And it looks like he's going to do it. And there's never been anyone with those kind of environmental credentials in that position. [Last week Schwarzenegger did indeed name Tamminen as his new environmental secretary.]

I know he was urged by very strong Republicans not to appoint Terry. I have a friend who was in the room with him when Arnold received a call from a Republican whom he's very fond of and who's in his inner circle [he was later identified in press reports as Schwarzenegger's powerful transition chief, California Rep. David Dreier], and he said to Arnold, "You cannot appoint Terry Tammimen." And Arnold said to him, "I deeply appreciate the work you did on my campaign and I value your advice, but I'm the governor and I'm going to appoint who I want." That made me extremely encouraged and proud.

Arnold still has one environmental flaw, his love of Hummers -- have you talked to him about that?

(Laughs) Yeah, extensively. He understands the issue and he's converting one of his Hummers to hydrogen. And he also understands that he needs to exert his influence on Detroit. And he supports the California fuel efficiency bill, which will make it the most progressive state in the country.

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