Interview: Kelly Slater, Robert Kennedy Jr. On Clean Water And The Presidency

Kennedy: Near where I live in Venice, they threw sand in the skatepark to keep skaters out. They went into Compton, and padlocked basketball courts, and the ones they couldn’t padlock, they removed the rims. So, you had all these kids locked indoors for a year, essentially. And you know, the one hot meal a day that some of these kids are getting at school, the one nutritious meal that they were getting, they closed the schools. The only social metric that improved during the Covid lockdown was that child abuse dropped dramatically. But it wasn’t because the abuse stopped. It’s because it stopped being reported—because most child abuse is reported in the schools. And when you close the schools, you lock the kids in with their abusers.

A lot of bad things happened to our kids during that period. There’s so much remedial learning that is now required to restore. And because all these kids missed their milestones, they’re talking, language and social interaction actually went backwards. The CDC has changed the milestones and target ages. They said that at 12 months a child should be able to walk, now that’s changed to 18 months. Or at 18 months a child should have 36 words, that’s now changed to two and half years old. So, they’re actually normalizing the injuries that they did to kids during the lockdown. 

The whole society had these totalitarian controls clamp down on us. And nobody would complain—Kelly was the first. And he was the first by about a year before the next well-known person would come on my podcast and talk about it.

And did that lead to broader conversations about water and the environment?

Kennedy: We’ve been having those conversations for a long time. But I think it deepened our friendship. It really deepened my love and respect for him because it takes a lot of courage.

Slater: Just to point out, I don’t think we really went down the rabbit hole on many topics. It seemed to me that Bobby was very happy just to have a conversation. It’s almost like, there was this lockdown, and you couldn’t go outside. But eventually you got to go back outside, and it was nice just to have a conversation and catch back up. We hadn’t spoken in a few years, but I’ve been following him for nearly 20 years since we first met. I actually have a picture of Bobby, Tom Curren and myself from that night we met at the SIMA awards. That’s a wall-hanger for me. But yeah, I’ve always respected what Bobby’s doing in terms of environmentalism.

He’s taken on big corporations head on and has been a huge force of change in certain areas. And obviously, as surfers, clean water is something that’s dear to our hearts. It’s something we all need to be aware of so we can make whatever changes we possibly can.

Mr. Kennedy, I was listening to the podcast you did with Rick Rubin, and you were talking about your history of environmental law, how did that get you where you are today in terms of entering the presidential race and getting more into politics?

Kennedy: I got into the environmental area primarily because I love the outdoors, and particularly water. I grew up on the water. I grew up in a maritime community on the Atlantic Ocean—Cape Cod. I grew up fishing and scuba diving. By the time I was nine years old I was spearfishing off the jetty, a mile and a half out there, all alone most of the time. And I’d bring fish home and sell them to the Portuguese fisherman at the end of the dock for comic book money. I grew up doing water sports, surfing, water skiing, sailing, all that kind of stuff. My family sailed almost every day. I would say every day, no matter what the weather.

I grew up in the water and my career was really about protecting water. I started the RiverKeeper organization in 1983 as a way to help. It was a blue-collar coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen who were trying to reclaim the Hudson River and challenge the polluters for control of the river. We eventually got a patrol boat and would track down polluters and sue them. I brought over 500 lawsuits against Hudson River polluters. We forced the polluters to spend about 5.5 billion dollars.

Today, the Hudson River is an international model for ecosystem protection. When I started working on it the water would catch fire periodically and it would turn different colors depending on what color they were painting the trucks at the GM plant. It was dead water with zero dissolved oxygen 20 miles north of New York City and 20 miles south of Albany. It was a national joke. Today, it’s the richest waterway in the North Atlantic. It produces more pounds of fish per acre, more biomass per gallon, than any other waterway in the Atlantic Ocean north of the equator. It still has strong spawning stocks of all its historical species of migratory fish. It's a species warehouse. It's Noah's Ark. It’s the last refuge for many of these animals that are going extinct elsewhere.

The miraculous resurrection of the Hudson inspired the creation of the Riverkeepers, which evolved into Waterkeepers. Now there’s 350 chapters in 46 countries, it’s the biggest water protection group in the world. So, I ran that and and was the senior attorney there for about 35 years. That led me into the public health issues. 

I got dragged kicking and screaming into the public health issues, and it kind of ruined my career for a long time, but I became an activist trying to get mercury out of fish for 35 years. It’s the one of the most potent neurotoxins in the world that causes all sorts of problems. During that time nobody called me anti-fish. When I tried to get mercury out of vaccines they called me any vaccine. I wasn’t, but that’s what they said about me to silence me and discredit me. I think Covid woke me up, and woke a lot of other people up, about how this was linked to this rise of medical and military industrial complexes that were really subverting democracy in some very, very essential ways. The short story, that propelled me into making the decision to run for president.

Slater: I think it’s important to put that in context, what you said about the mercury and fish and making that comparison to vaccines. It’s obviously a very triggering thing for people with vaccines, but in fish it’s sort of like, oh well, maybe I won’t eat that fish that much, but I'll eat it. Swordfish, everyone knows swordfish is at the top of the food chain, so it gets the the biggest bulk of the of the mercury. 

Bobby, at the SIMA banquet where we met, you were talking about cleaning up the Hudson and you mentioned something I thought was really interesting. You talked about a law from the 1800s about how if you pollute a body of water, even if it’s a single liter of pollutants, you’re responsible. It’s been so long, do you recall that law?

Kennedy: I can’t believe you remember that 20 years later.

Tune in tomorrow for the second installment of SURFER's exclusive interview with 11-time world champion Kelly Slater and 2024 Presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr.