Last
week, Robert Kennedy III, grandson of the late Robert Kennedy, spent
a day evaluating the ‘health’ of the Lambro River in the northern
Italian region of Lombardy. The 20-something Kennedy heir went on
canoeing excursion along the river, located near Lake Como,
in an effort to establish an ongoing relationship between the Valle
Lambro Regional Park and the Waterkeepers Alliance, an American
environmental organization that was established by his father. Working as the
spokesperson for the organization, the young Kennedy told reporters,
‘There was a lot of sediment, so it appears dirty, but it seems
fairly clean… it’s a nice river! I live in Milan and so I’m in
direct contact with the Lambro all the time. This is why I decided to
bring the Waterkeepers Alliance to Italy; it’ll be the first
country in Europe that has a relationship with Waterkeepers.’
The
Waterkeepers Alliance is currently committed to keeping 250 rivers
worldwide clean, and will now work to maintain the health of the
Lambro, the site of an alarming oil spill, caused by a nearby factory last February. Six new electronic monitoring
systems have been installed along the river to analyse
pollution levels in the river’s waters 24 hours a day. ‘Right now,
in the northern stretch of the river, the water is qualified as
having “passable” or “almost passable” pollution levels…
we’d like to change that to “good” by 2015,’ stated Emiliano
Ronzoni, president of the Valle Lambro Regional Park.
Robert
Kennedy III is staying busy in Milan; he will also star in a scenes
of a film, entitled ‘Ameriqua,’ on the trials and tribulations of
young Americans studying in Italy.
