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Stroud Center Streamhouse opens with rousing speech by Robert F. 'Bobby' Kennedy Jr.
Kennedy delivers keynote speech.
Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr. said the work of organizations such as the Stroud Center were key weapons in the struggle to save the nation’s polluted rivers and streams.
In an impassioned speech to a packed audience at the ceremonial naming of the Stroud Water Research’s $600,000 streamhouse, Kennedy said the kind of research and science done by Stroud was essential to the battle against short-sighted environmental policies.
Mr. Kennedy, whose namesake father was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for president, spoke nostalgically of his boyhood visits to the Stroud family in Chester County.
His return last fall for the streamhouse celebration was “bittersweet,” he said. Many of the landscapes and farms he remembered were paved over and developed.
“Development is destroying the soul of this country,” he said.
He also blamed residential development for degrading the streams and rivers.
“The major impediment to water quality is sprawl,” said Mr. Kennedy, an environmental attorney who helped lead the successful campaign to clean up the Hudson River through the courts.
Sprawl, he said, is also destroying traditional communities and culture. And the popular notion that more development means more taxes is an “illusion.”
In fact, he said, the opposite is true. The more development there is, the more roads, schools and other infrastructure have to be built - and the more taxes that need to be raised.
“We can grow a vital economy without destroying our landscape,” he said.
He pointed to his own involvement in the successful Hudson cleanup. Saving the river had also helped save the Hudson’s towns and communities whose economies had stagnated from the loss of fishing and other river-related occupations.
Mr. Kennedy gave as an example the people of Croton-on-Hudson — mostly working class citizens who depended on the river. Industrial pollution was ruining livelihoods and killing people. The townsfolk organized. These people were not, said Mr. Kennedy, pipe-smoking, long-haired, tree-hugging environmentalists. They were fishermen, electricians, plumbers and gravediggers.
But they were angry enough to become industrial saboteurs. Fortunately, someone discovered a forgotten New York statute that made it illegal to pollute any river.
With this old law under their arms, the people of Croton-on-Hudson went to war through the courts. Mr. Kennedy and the Hudson Riverkeeper, the organization he helped found, led the way.
Together, they helped turn the Hudson from one of the most polluted rivers in the nation to the cleanest - so clean that it is the only North Atlantic river that has attracted back all its traditional spawning fish.
“If you really want to stop [polluters], you can,” said Kennedy. “If there’s a polluter in your backyard, anyone in this room can prosecute and get money back from the defendant - even if it’s a government agency.”
While the Stroud Center was doing its part in the battle to clean up the streams, Mr. Kennedy said, “We also need advocates participating on the local level — on town boards, etc., and also at the national level.”
“We’re not protecting [the forests], as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, for the sake of the spotted owl. . . . We’re doing it for our future and our children and our communities.”
Destroying the things of nature, he said, is like tearing the pages out of the last copies of the Bible or the Torah or the Talmud.
Philanthropist of the Year
W.B. Dixon Stroud Sr. received the 1999 Philanthropy Award last fall from the Brandywine chapter of the National Society of Fund Raising Executives.
The award was presented Nov. 9 at the chapter’s annual Philanthropy Day lunch.
Mr. Stroud and his late wife, Joan M. Stroud, provided the initial grant that created the Stroud Water Research Center in 1966. Subsequently, he and his family were instrumental in building the Center that has become known internationally for its stream and river research.
His quiet and purposeful leadership has supported the scientific and educational mission of the Center. He has been the catalyst for attracting funding for more than 30 years.
Mr. Stroud and the Stroud Foundation were responsible for construction of the Center’s first building in 1968, and he supported 33 percent of the operating budget for its first three years.
