GAMBIER — Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was in a feisty mood Wednesday night at Kenyon College, where he was slated to deliver a speech on environmentalism and human rights. However, the environmental lawyer and activist spoke off the cuff and ended up focusing more on the dangers of allowing corporations to control the government of this country.

He began by talking about environmentalism, dismissing those who portray environmentalists as “tree huggers.”

“We’re protecting nature because nature is the infrastructure of our communities,” Kennedy said. He deplored the politicizing of environmentalism, saying that the worst thing that can happen to environmentalism is for it to become the province of one political party.

Kennedy described how the 400 rollbacks of environmental policy that have occurred during the current presidential administration have been handled by departmental heads, most of whom were industrial lobbyists. These lobbyists, he said, who have ended up in control of such agencies as the U.S. Forest Service or the EPA Superfund, skew the policy of those agencies to favor the corporations to which they return after their public service is done, thus becoming richer in the process.

“It’s been a revolving door of plunder,” Kennedy said.

He spoke about legal struggles he has undertaken with corporate coal-mining interests which have been illegally dumping the results of strip mining in West Virginia in recent years. He said the companies flattened 460 of the biggest mountains in that state by cutting off the tops, taking out the coal, and dumping the leftover rock in the valleys and waterways surrounding the hills. Kennedy described the leftover, barren land as a moonscape, and said such operations have destroyed 2,200 miles of waterways in West Virginia.

Kennedy saved special scorn for “the negative and indolent press of this country,” which he said has become controlled by corporate interests in the last 20 years.

“Americans have become the best-entertained, least-informed people on earth,” Kennedy said.

He said five companies control 80 percent of newspapers and almost all radio, and those corporations are not in business to tell news thoroughly or fairly.

“The only ideology they represent is their own pockets,” Kennedy said.

He pointed out that early and mid-20th century politicians saw the dangers of mass media, particularly in how Adolf Hitler controlled it to help fuel his rise, and so Congress established the Fairness Doctrine, which required three things: News of public import — “Not Anna Nicole Smith three weeks in a row,” as Kennedy put it; opinion from both sides of the political spectrum; and local, diverse control. Since this policy was abolished in 1988, he said, corporations have consolidated most media outlets and replaced news with crassly commercial entertainment which appeals to the lowest common denominator and fuels corporate profit-taking.

“They don’t tell all the complex things, like global warming,” Kennedy said. “They appeal to the prurient interests of the most primitive level of our reptilian brains.”

Kennedy repeatedly pointed out the common ground that most Americans share. He said that among the numerous speeches he gives every year are speeches in so-called “red states,” states that voted Republican in the last presidential election.

“I get the same reaction in the red states,” Kennedy said, adding that he has come to the conclusion that most peoples’ values aren’t that different. The difference, he siad, is how aware they are in what is happening in their own government.

Kennedy said the sitting administration is the worst for the environment in history because corporations have a stranglehold on its policy. But, he said, the pollution which has been permitted by these policies are having a devastating impact, one which he has experienced personally.

An avid fisherman, Kennedy has stopped eating freshwater fish he catches in upstate New York because he recently got tested for mercury, a poison caused in fish by pollution. He found out he has such a high mercury level in his blood, that if he were a woman carrying a child, the child would be guaranteed to have developmental problems when born. He said that freshwater fish have been declared dangerous for consumption in 19 states, including Ohio, due to pollution from coal-burning power plants and other industries that have been given free rein by the government.

Kennedy cautioned people not to be taken in by the argument that one must choose prosperity or environmentalism. He this is a false choice, and that in the long run, environmental conservation and sustainability is always the best choice for economic prosperity. Anything else is short-term profit-taking that will hurt the country later.

“Environmental injury is deficit spending loaded on the backs of our children,” said Kennedy, adding that he believes that a true free market economy would go hand-in-hand with environmental interests, if it were ever actually tried, instead of offering subsidies which skewer the market and corporations which corner it. Kennedy then recited a litany of Republicans of the past who had warned of the same corporate dangers of which he was speaking, including Barry Goldwater, Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Abraham Lincoln.

Kennedy closed by talkng about spirituality. He said that although some might try to portray him as a pagan worshipper of nature itself, he said he simply realizes how important nature is within the world God gives humanity.

“I believe that nature is the most powerful way that God communicates to us,” said Kennedy.

He pointed out that the moment of epiphany in every major religion happens in the wilderness. Unspoiled nature is central to humanity’s values, he said, and ultimately, the economy must be in harmony with it.

“The economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of nature and we ignore it at our own peril,” Kennedy said.

His talk was sponsored by the college’s student lectureship program.