We really shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is what happens when a Hollywood actor and a Kennedy team up to save the planet. This month, the tenth anniversary issue of Men’s Journal features Harrison Ford and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a cover story called “The Eco Warriors.”
The Men’s Journal article’s premise is a familiar one: Han Solo flies the Milennium Falcon (in this case, his personal helicopter) in order to help Luke LawsuitWalker — that would be Bobby Kennedy and his anti-agriculture Water Keeper Alliance — to defeat the evil empire. In this version, the Death Star is a gravel quarry pumping sediment into waters near the Hudson River.
As the Men’s Journal story opens, a Water Keeper investigator looks out the window of Ford’s chopper and spies the offending pipeline. “Whoa,” he yells. “Oh man — That’s gotta be illegal.”
The story’s author kisses the Water Keeper Alliance’s collective derriere for 3,000 words, but eventually the charade comes to an abrupt end. “As it turns out,” we learn, “the quarry does have a permit to discharge eight million gallons per day of ‘pump-out water and storm water.’”
Oops.
And the state of New York, we are told — in the story’s next-to-last paragraph — says that the drainage in question does “not have a significant impact on the environment.”
Double oops.
Robert F. Kennedy is no stranger to the sort of lies and hyperbole required to portray a completely legal and harmless business as a 21st century Darth Vader. In addition to being the chief prosecuting attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (remember the baseless, deceitful Alar-on-apples scare of 1989?), Kennedy’s Water Keeper Alliance has vowed to sue the American pork industry out of existence. Kennedy himself called pork producers “a greater threat [to America] than Osama Bin Laden.”
In addition to fronting multi-billion-dollar lawsuits against legal businesses that he doesn’t like, Kennedy has recently become a visible backer of organic-only food businesses, and the most notable apologist for flawed (and widely debunked) science on Pfiesteria.
