When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his role model is the patron saint of ecology, he means it, literally. St. Francis of Assisi, a Roman Catholic friar who lived from 1181 to 1226, is renowned for his deep connection to nature. Similarly, Kennedy has made it his life's work to protect the environment, particularly as a fierce advocate for safeguarding New York's Hudson River. The devotion to the saint, handed down from famous father to famous son, extends to a common middle initial, standing for Francis.

"St. Francis understood the way that God communicates to us most forcefully is through the fishes and the birds and the trees and that it is a sin to destroy those things," explained Kennedy, a devout Roman Catholic, who penned and recently released his first children's book, St. Francis of Assisi; A Life of Joy.

At 53, Kennedy is one of the country's most prominent environmental lawyers and advocates; a charismatic figure who dances on the edge of New York state politics.

"I think we need positive role models," he said. "Protecting nature is much bigger than just saving the fishes and birds. It's about preserving our own deepest values and our children's basic needs. If we want to meet our obligation of creating communities for our children that provide them the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment and good health as the communities our parents gave us, we have to start by protecting our environmental infrastructure."

A devoted father of six, he has never considered venturing into the political arena. Until now. "I look at how badly our country has declined over the past seven years and recognize that the best thing I can do to protect my children's legacy is to get more involved in the political process. I don't have any concrete plans right now. I will wait to see what happens in the presidential election."

Kennedy has always felt a kinship with nature. The third of 11 children born to Robert F. and Ethel Skakel Kennedy, he assembled a boyhood zoo at his family's home in Virginia that included raccoons, possums, squirrels, mice, rats, and even some reptiles and birds.

When he was 11, he read T.H. White's Camelot tale The Once and Future King, and knew instantly he wanted to be a falconer. After a year of pleading, he succeeded in getting his father to buy him a red-tailed hawk. Ever since, he has been passionate about falconry, the sport of training wild hawks for hunting. Today, he is a licensed master falconer and shares the sport with his children.

In addition, at the family's 12-acre homestead in Mt. Kisco, N.Y., Kennedy operates a rehabilitation facility for injured and orphaned predatory birds like hawks, eagles, owls, crows, and ravens. Chickens and peacocks roam the property. A screech owl perches in the corner of Kennedy's den.

Adversity Leads to Motivation
Kennedy was 14 when his father, a U.S. senator and former attorney general under brother John F. Kennedy, won the June 6, 1968 California primary in his bid to become the Democratic nominee for president. After making a joyful victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Bobby Kennedy was shot by a disgruntled Palestinian American while cutting through the hotel's kitchen pantry. He died the next day.

The tumultuous and tragic decade for what had been popularly called "America's family" took its toll on RFK Jr. He managed to attend and graduate from Harvard University and the University of Virginia Law School, his father's alma maters. But drug use led to a downward spiral.

In September 1983, as a 29-year-old district attorney based in Manhattan, Kennedy was arrested by South Dakota police as he was leaving a plane in Rapid City on his way to a treatment center. Heroin was found in his bag.

In a chapter of his book, The Riverkeepers, Kennedy writes, "I had accepted as a child a very religious moral code which forbade dishonesty, and illegal activities in general. My addiction caused me to devote less energy to pursing the principles I was taught as a child. Following my arrest and during my early recovery, I began to rethink my life."

Sentenced to 800 hours of community service following rehab, he volunteered with the Hudson Riverkeepers, a group fighting industrial pollution in New York's Hudson River. The organization was so impressed by Kennedy during his community service stint that it hired him as chief prosecuting attorney.

Today, he is also president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an organization that promotes clean water throughout the world, and a clinical professor and supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law. Additionally, he is senior attorney and national spokesman for the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council), an organization that claims to have one client and one client only, the earth.

With the looks and take-charge charisma the Kennedy family is known for, he also possesses a riveting speaking style - despite a genetic neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia that strains his speech.

The condition, he said, will get neither worse nor better. "My voice actually gets stronger when I speak. The nature of this is when you speak at low volumes and there is less air being forced through your vocal chords, the defect becomes more pronounced. When I speak at high volumes to a crowd it becomes less pronounced; it virtually disappears."

Kennedy overcomes his disability in part with passion. When asked what the No. 1 priority for the planet is, he says, without hesitation, global warming.

His conviction stirs others. He gave a rip-roaring speech at the Live Earth concert this July at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

"Now we've all heard from the oil industry and the coal industry and their indentured servants in our political process telling us that global climate stability is a luxury that we can't afford," he told the crowd. But he called the argument of choosing between economic prosperity and environmental protection "a false choice."

"If we do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy," he told the concert-goers.

"But our children are going to pay for our joyride with denuded landscapes, with poor health, with huge cleanup costs and with climate chaos, which is going to amplify over time. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It is a way of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity on the backs of our children."

It is evident that he sees this as a struggle of good and evil, a struggle between short-term greed and a long-term vision of dignity and community building, of meeting the obligations of future generations. This is Kennedy's own expression of his father's passionate fight for civil rights.

Americans can do more for the environment by getting involved in the political process than by buying compact fluorescent light bulbs or hybrid cars, Kennedy argues. "Get rid of all these rotten politicians we have in Washington, D.C. who are nothing more than corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company," he said.

His passion quickly turns to outrage when he broaches the subject of the current administration. "Beginning with Newt Gingrich and culminating with this administration, they have very strong ties with corporate polluters. I wrote a piece that appeared in Vanity Fair two months ago that shows how the top 100 environmental officials in this administration are virtually all former lobbyists. Some are the worst polluters in America. The current administration has taken corporate cronyism to such unprecedented heights that it now threatens our health, our national security, and democracy. Environmental issues are intertwined with American democracy that I think is in greater jeopardy than at any time since the 1880s, when public power was displaced by corporate power."

His anger gets personal as he explains that three of his sons have asthma and he watches them struggle to breathe on "bad air days."

The biggest national security threat we face - far bigger than terrorism, according to Kennedy - is global warming. "We have crises like Katrina. Hurricanes will continue to get stronger. We're having catastrophic droughts all over the West. Virtually all the Western glaciers which provide the Western water supply are now melting. This is a continuing crisis."

The picture he paints is bleak. "Millions and millions of environmental refugees will be created over the next 30 years. They will lose their homes, be driven from their land, and that will create global and political instability that will threaten world peace. We already have millions of environmental refugees and soon we are going to have hundreds of millions."

Bleak, but not hopeless. He urges others to take positive action "for national security, for economic independence, for prosperity, to improve our balance of payments, to reduce national debt, and to have better air and water for our children." Even slightly improved fuel efficiency would prevent having to tap the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and "give us the leverage to remove ourselves from increasingly dangerous oil-based entanglements in the Middle East." The movie, "An Inconvenient Truth, " has pushed the issue of protecting the environment "over a tipping point and it has changed the debate entirely," according to Kennedy, who admires former Vice President Al Gore for "carrying the same message for 30 years. It's like Winston Churchill said: 'If you keep telling the truth, ultimately it will penetrate.' That's what he did, selflessly and persistently."

Kennedy's ability to readily quote Churchill comes from a lifelong interest in history's great figures. "My father was a brilliant military historian and he'd tell us about the heroes of the Civil War, people like Joshua Chamberlain and Daniel Morgan in the Revolution."

He carries on the tradition of broad, high-minded intellect in humanity that his family is known for as he ticks off the names of his role models. "The presidents I looked up to were Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I've always looked up to the great explorers, men like Alexander von Humboldt, Lewis and Clark, Livingston, Burton, and Speke, and the great anthropologists like Levi-Strauss and Charles Darwin."

Kennedy believes a successful leader "is somebody who has the discipline to use power but not abuse it. There's a discipline and restraint to it. They are willing to spend down their political capital in order to achieve great accomplishments for future generations."

One of his father's famous quotes was, "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation." RFK Jr. has clearly found his portion.

Meetings: Ideas Are the Currency of Exchange

"Meetings are a very ecologically expensive way of exchanging information," said David Suzuki, Ph.D., the Canadian scientist profiled in the December issue of Convene. "Meetings leave a heavy footprint on the planet."

While Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calls Suzuki one of his heroes, he can't agree with the notion of cutting back on huge gatherings where ideas are the currency of exchange.

"The meeting industry serves a really important public purpose which is to get people together who are normally so focused on their businesses and daily lives that they are not paying attention to important political trends. Meetings are an opportunity for them to sit back and learn something that they otherwise wouldn't have learned."

He says meetings have taken on added importance as "journalism declines and the role of the media and democracy becomes more and more contentious."

He noted by example a policy of the Federal Communications Commission that became known as the "Fairness Doctrine," an attempt to ensure all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. In the 1980s, the doctrine was revoked in keeping with President Reagan's deregulatory efforts to keep government out of the affairs of business.

 "The Fairness Doctrine, passed in 1928, required public airwaves be used to advance democracy and inform of issues of public import," said Kennedy.

"Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1988 and since, five corporations have taken over all 12,000 radio stations in America, all 2,500 TV stations, 80 percent of newspapers, all billboards, and most large Internet content providers. News departments have become corporate profit centers that no longer tell us the news. They now appeal to the prurient interests we have in the reptilian parts of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip. They are telling us a lot about Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, but they're not informing us of the issues we need to understand to make rational decisions in a democracy. Americans are the best entertained and least informed people on the face of the earth."

° Andrea Doyle is Convene's senior writer. The Leading by Example series is sponsored by the Canadian Tourism Commission. Visit its Web site at www.CanadaMeetings.com.