Environmental Justice for All

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Despite his bucolic home setting, Kennedy struggles with environmental concerns there, too. Three of his children suffer from chronic asthma. “I watch my kids gasping for breath on bad air days,” he says. “Asthma rates in the United States have doubled again over the last five years. We don’t know why we’re having this explosion of pediatric asthma. We do know that the source of half of the pollution in New York’s air is a handful of outmoded coal plants in the Ohio Valley that are burning coal illegally.” Under the Clean Air Act, these plants are supposed to install state-of-the-art emissions-control equipment whenever they expand or upgrade their facilities, Kennedy says, but few of them do. The Bush administration attempted to exempt the plants from the equipment-upgrade rule, but even after a federal court of appeals blocked this effort, the administration has dragged its feet on prosecuting the polluting culprits.

Mercury pollution is another issue Kennedy deals with at home: Most of the fish his family catch in the rivers near their home are unsafe to eat because of high mercury levels — public health officials now warn it is unsafe to eat freshwater fish in most of New York, and all of Connecticut; 38 other states from Wisconsin to Florida also have issued warnings against eating locally caught fish because of mercury pollution. Eating mercury-contaminated fish can lead to increased risk of heart attacks and neurological damage, especially among children and pregnant women. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 40 percent of mercury emissions in the United States come from coal-burning power plants.

Outraged by the mercury warnings in his state, Kennedy recently had himself tested and discovered toxic mercury levels in his body. “If I were a pregnant woman, my child would have cognitive impairment — permanent IQ loss,” he says. “That’s what Dr. David Carpenter of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York at Albany told me. I asked Dr. Carpenter, ‘You mean might have?’ He said ‘No, the science is pretty certain that those levels would impact a baby’s IQ.’” The EPA estimates that one out of every six American women carries unsafe levels of mercury in her blood, putting 630,000 newborns a year at risk of IQ loss, blindness and autism. Adults with high exposure to mercury, mainly from eating contaminated fish, are at risk of kidney failure, tremors, heart disease, severe liver damage and even death. Kennedy criticizes the Bush administration’s plan to weaken rules intended to dramatically reduce mercury emissions, and postpone the compliance date. (For more information on mercury pollution, visit cta.policy.net.)

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