ORONO – Hailing the University of Maine as “one of the country’s greatest academic treasures,” Robert A. Kennedy formally took his place as the 18th president of the flagship campus during a tradition-steeped installation ceremony on Friday.

Speaking at Unity College’s 40th anniversary celebration, Kennedy, 51, son of the late U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate, claimed President Bush and his appointees “have torn the ‘conserve’ out of conservatism” and undertaken “a deliberate, concerted effort to roll back environmental regulation.”

Speaking in a rapid-fire delivery with a hoarse voice, Kennedy covered global warming, acid rain, the influence of business on federal environmental regulations and the failure of news media to accurately report on the issues.

Kennedy is the chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper organization, which he said succeeded in suing polluters to restore the quality of the Hudson River in New York. He is also senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and president of the Waterkeeper Alliance.

His 2004 book, “Crimes Against Nature,” was a New York Times best seller.

Kennedy called the environment the “infrastructure of our communities,” and said protecting it is not for the fish and birds, but for the long-term health of human enterprise and prosperity.

Failure to do so is “deficit spending,” he said, leaving the next generation to “pay for our joy ride.”

The success of the Hudson Riverkeeper organization spawned 146 other such groups in the U.S., each with its own boat and a full-time licensed “waterkeeper,” he said.

Though the river is now a “species warehouse,” Kennedy said, unseen toxins such as mercury pose even greater threats. He related how he had the level of mercury in his body tested and found it to be dangerously high.

“My levels were double the levels that EPA considers safe,” he said. Women with those levels would give birth to children with cognitive delays, he said.

Some 630,000 are born each year to women with unacceptably high mercury levels, he said.

The Clinton administration labeled mercury, which is introduced into the air by coal-burning plants, mostly in the Midwest, as a “hazardous pollutant,” and created rules that would have eliminated 90 percent of the substance in three years, while costing plants less than 1 percent of operating revenues, he said.

But three months ago, the Bush administration announced it would scrap those rules.

“This administration has invited the lobbyists for the worst of the worst polluters to write the rules,” Kennedy said. “They have put polluters in charge of all the regulators.”

The administrator of the federal Superfund last held a job “teaching corporate polluters how to avoid the Superfund [rules],” he said.

Bush appointed officials are not motivated by public service but rather to “line the pockets of corporate donors,” Kennedy charged.

“I have three sons with asthma,” Kennedy said, and 25 percent of black children in cities also suffer with the condition, which he attributed to the 1,100 coal-burning plants in the U.S.

Then-President Clinton directed the Justice Department to take action against the 75 worst plants, but Bush, on being elected, ordered the lawsuits dropped, Kennedy said.

The industry donated $48 million to the Bush campaign in 2000 and $58 million in 2004, he said. It’s the first time a presidential candidate accepted funding from corporations under federal indictment, Kennedy claimed.

Though his attacks on Bush were strong, he claimed his views were not “partisan attacks on the president,” but rather a critique of policy. He said he has supported candidates of both parties.

Kennedy reserved some of his sharpest charges for the news media, tracing a decline from the 1988 Reagan administration’s scuttling of the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which required TV and radio stations to work “to advance American democracy.”

The notion of a liberal media is a lie, he said, with the largest news networks owned by conservative corporations.

“There is a right wing media,” with Fox News and conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh among them, he said.

“You couldn’t have a Fox News under the Fairness Doctrine. You couldn’t have a Rush Limbaugh 24 hours a day,” he said.

Citing polls that showed 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, Kennedy said democracy is in jeopardy with such an ill-informed public.

“We have to educate them, whether they want it or not,” he said.

Kennedy related how he persuaded conservative Fox News to broadcast a one-hour report on global warming by appealing directly to network executive Roger Ailes.

“We dragged him to a lecture by Al Gore, kicking and screaming,” he said, but Ailes came away convinced the threat is real. Recent weather trends make the case, Kennedy suggested.

In Glacier National Park in Montana, 157 glaciers have diminished to just 27.

“They’ll all by gone in 15 years,” he said.

Kennedy urged the students, alumni and others at Unity to sign a petition on the waterkeepers.org Web site to demand the federal government respond to calls for reduced carbon emissions.