Mercury Pollution Impacting Recreational Fishing

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Addresses Concert for the Climate Group

Environmentalism has emerged as our nation’s most important civil rights issue, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney and Waterkeeper Alliance president-at-large. Government’s role is to protect the commons, he maintains, because natural resources are the nation’s social safety net.

During his Sept. 29 keynote speech at Concert for the Climate overlooking the confluence of the Missouriand Kaw Rivers in Kansas City, Kan., Kennedy addressed fishing, a pastime he claims is victimized by powerful political entities, and focused on rising mercury levels in American waterway-caught fish.

“Last August the National Academy of Sciences released a 10-year study saying that every freshwater fish now has dangerous levels of mercury in its flesh. This mercury is coming from those coal plants. We are now living a science fiction nightmare where my children, every child in Kansas, and most of the children in United States of America can no longer engage in the seminal activity of youth, which is going fishing with their father and mother at the local fishing hole and coming home to safely eat the fish because of the political power of these coal plant.

“According to the Centers for Disease Control, one of out every six women has dangerous levels of mercury in her womb. I fish a lot. I eat the fish. My levels were 10 times what EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels would have children with permanent brain damage. I said, ‘you mean she might have.’ He said, ‘no, science is certain.’ At my level, a child would be born with a permanent IQ loss of 5 to 7 points.

“So, today, according to CDC, there are 640,000 children born in this county every day exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mothers’ wombs that would cause them to lose an IQ point or have a grim inventory of other diseases including autism; blindness; mental retardation; or heart, liver, kidney disease. These are costs of coal imposed on us. They are telling us coal costs 11 cents a kilowatt hour. They are not telling us about these other costs we are paying because we are dependent on coal.”

Mercury contamination isn’t a new topic for Kennedy. But it’s one that has gained additional importance to him after this year’s international treaty negotiations regarding global emissions of mercury. In addition, a recent report by the Biodiversity Research Institute and IPEN, the network of 700 public interest organizations in 116 countries, documented mercury levels exceeding health advisory levels linked to pollution from coal-burning power plants, small scale mining, and other industrial sources.

In his weekly blog, Kennedy wrote: “The United States is only now starting to see progress in reducing mercury emissions. In America, citizen action forced EPA to adopt the first ever mercury and air toxics rule in 2012. This rule will prevent 90% of the mercury in coal burned at power plants from being emitted into the air.”

Read more from this blog entry (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/we-need-a-mercury-treaty-_b_2457376.html) and also Kansas’ 2013 revised fish consumption advisories (http://www.kdheks.gov/news/web_archives/2013/01082013a.htm)  set by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism.