Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to say he's been an environmentalist all his life. As a young boy, he kept pet snakes and raccoons, bred homing pigeons and pheasants in his backyard and learned to train hawks. He even considered becoming a veterinarian. Today Kennedy is widely recognized as the country's most prominent environmental attorney, working tirelessly to safeguard the environment and public health. He is the founder and director of Pace University's Environmental Litigation Clinic in White Plains, New York; president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an international coalition of 99 grassroots groups; and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The peripatetic Kennedy also crisscrosses North America several times a year, stirring audiences of college students, community groups and elected officials.
His op-ed columns appear regularly in The New York Times and other major newspapers. In 2004, he wrote Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy. The bestselling book fulfilled a lifelong dream: At the age of 10 Kennedy had told his father, then a United States Senator from New York, that he wanted to write a book about pollution. March 2005 brought another literary milestone: his first children's book, St. Francis of Assisi. He is also co-author of The Riverkeepers.
Kennedy's indefatigable drive is sustained by his personal connection to the outdoors --he's a master falconer, an accomplished kayaker, skier, sailor, and fisherman--and by fatherhood. His four sons and two daughters range in age from three to 20, which gives him the long view. Despoiling our air, land, and water may make corporations richer in the short term because they don't address the costs of pollution, he says, but it steals from the next generation. "Our children are going to pay for our joyride. And they are going to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor health and huge cleanup costs that they are never going to be able to afford."
Kennedy sees the lack of environmental protection under the Bush administration as emblematic of a much larger problem, "a kind of corporate crony capitalism that is antithetical to all the values that we cherish."
"Really all environmental injury is an assault on democracy," he says, "because the most important measure of how a democracy is functioning is how it distributes the goods of the land - the commons."
Excerpted with permission from "A Kennedy in Action" by Elliott Negin, published in OnEarth magazine. www.nrdc.org/onearth
Mike Papantonio says he has wanted to be a lawyer "since as far back as I can remember." When he read To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee's novel about a heroic small-town Southern lawyer named Atticus Finch, Papantonio says, "I understood that that's what I wanted to be."
Today "Pap" is certainly Southern and a lawyer, but he is hardly small-town. One of the most prominent trial attorneys in the country, he is renowned as the lead counsel in virtually every major product liability case against the pharmaceutical, industrial products, insurance and stock broking industries. Since 1983, he has headed the mass tort department of Levin, Papantonio in Pensacola, Florida and has won numerous million-dollar jury verdicts for plaintiffs. He is listed in Best Lawyers in America and Leading American Attorney. Mike Papantonio's law firm has consistently been listed as one of America's 15 most successful plaintiff's firms.
When he sees a cause he believes in, Papantonio gives it all he's got. In addition to co-hosting Ring of Fire, he also sits on the Board of Directors of Air America Radio.
Pap has been described as "part Revival preacher, part stand-up comic" - living proof that it's possible to be both laid-back and fired-up at the same time. He insists that his high-octane professional life takes a back seat to fun and his family -- he is the devoted father of a 10-year-old daughter and usually spends several days a week scuba diving off Pensacola's Emerald Coast.
A popular speaker at nationwide seminars for lawyers, Papantonio often bases his lectures on his three books: In Search of Atticus Finch, A Motivational Book for Lawyers; Clarence Darrow, The Journeyman; and Resurrecting AESOP, Fables Lawyers Should Remember. He is a co-author of Closing Arguments - The Last Battle.
Papantonio says he wrote In Search of Atticus Finch as a wake-up call to a legal profession that has largely lost its moral compass. "Seventy percent of kids coming out of law school want to represent corporations and get paid exorbitant amounts of money," he says. "They're willing to sell their souls to the highest bidder. We need to bring more quality to what we do as lawyers, we need to be better servants to the community and we need to have more political involvement for positive change in the country."
Although on Air America he frequently takes aim at the fundamentalist Christian movement, Papantonio is an active Methodist who admits that his moral compass comes from his faith.
"I come from a pretty strong spiritual center, but it doesn't change the way I judge people. Simply put, the Sermon on the Mount makes much more sense to me than the frenzied rantings of America's new 'religious right'. They have become an element of American politics that threatens our sense of decency as well as our democracy."
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