Environmental advocate Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. opened a three-part lecture series, “Environmental Science and Public Policy,” on Feb. 18 with an impassioned plea that students work on behalf of environmental stewardship and against environmental polluters.
The series is sponsored by the College's Environmental Studies Program, the Environmental Awareness Club and
the Minerva Committee.
Kennedy is credited with leading the fight to protect New York City's
water supply. The New York City
watershed agreement, which he negotiated on behalf of environmentalists and the
city's watershed consumers, is regarded as an international model in
stakeholder consensus negotiations and sustainable development. He helped lead
the fight to turn back what he considered anti-environmental legislation during
the 104th Congress.
Kennedy serves as chief prosecuting attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper, senior attorney for the
Natural Resources Defense Council, and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance. He is also a clinical professor and supervising attorney at the Environmental
Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law. Earlier in his career he served as assistant district attorney in New York City.
He has published several books, including The Riverkeepers (1997) with John Cronin.
Other talks in the series, both at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial, are:
March 4: Orrin Pilkey, an expert on shorelines, will speak on “Rising Seas and Shifting Shores: The Mix of Politics and Science at the
Shoreline.”
Pilkey, the James B. Duke
Professor Emeritus at Duke University's
Nicholas School
of the Environment and Earth Sciences, has devoted much of his career to the
study of coastal geology, focusing primarily on the
science and policy issues of rising sea levels on barrier coasts caused by the greenhouse
effect.
As director of Duke's Program for
the Study of Developed Shorelines, he has studied beach replenishment and other
forms of shoreline stabilization, mitigation of hurricane damage on barriers
and principles of barrier island evolution in Colombia,
South America. He also works with the Department of
Marine Science at the University of Puerto Rico and with the U.S. Geological
Survey in Woods Hole, Mass. He has more than 150 technical publications to his
credit.
Pilkey has received numerous
awards for his professional contributions, including the Francis Shepard Medal
for Excellence in Marine Geology and the N.C. Wildlife Federation Conservation
Educator of the Year award. He also has won the George V. Cohee Public Service
Award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. Pilkey is an
honorary member of the Society for the Study of Sediments and has been featured
in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire,
Smithsonian, Chronicle of Higher
Education and National Geographic.
April 22: Richard Bopp, associate professor of earth and
environmental sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will speak on “Mercury Deposition in New York and New Jersey:
From Geochemistry to Policy.”
Bopp studied chemistry as an
undergraduate at MIT, and has a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia
University. For the past 20 years
he has conducted research on various aspects of contaminant geochemistry in the
Hudson River, its tributaries, and other natural waters
of the Hudson Basin.
His research group at RPI uses
analysis of dated sediment cores to study the sources and distribution of PCBs,
pesticides, dioxins, PAHs, and trace metals. They also study atmospheric
deposition of contaminants, and in situ dechlorination of PCBs.
Bopp has been involved in several
major contaminant issues including the PCB problem in the Hudson,
dioxins in Newark Bay,
and disposal of contaminated dredge spoils.