Robert Kennedy Jr. returned yesterday from his rafting trip down the Alsek River to find he'd ignited a bit of a political firestorm.

On Thursday, Kennedy offered his perspectives on the Peel planning process as he understood it, suggesting the government took a model planning process and turned it into an undemocratic undertaking. He also urged the select committee on hydraulic fracturing to conduct scientific studies before submitting its direction on the practice to the government.

In response Yukon's environment minister publicly dismissed Kennedy's concerns and attacked his credibility.

Yesterday, prior to a giving a lecture at the Yukon Arts Centre, Kennedy responded to Minister Currie Dixon's comments.

"First of all I want to thank him for welcoming me to the Yukon,” Kennedy said.

"Some of the issues he talked about were personal issues that he was erroneous about. For example, I see he spent a lot of time saying I was anti-vaccine, which is just the opposite. I'm very, very pro-vaccine and have always supported the vaccine program in the United States.

"It's a strange thing to say, it's a personal attack which I understand generally people make those kind of attacks when they don't want to argue the case on the merits,” he said.

"What I would like to hear from the minister is why he believes that this process was democratic, because maybe I'm wrong and that's what I said at the press run when I first got here.”

Kennedy came to the Yukon to raft the Alsek River, which would take him past Mt. Kennedy.

His father climbed the mountain in 1965 in tribute to his brother, President John F. Kennedy who had been assassinated two yearsprior.

Robert Kennedy was later assassinated himself.

"It was a magical experience for me and the children to see Mt. Kennedy,” Kennedy said.

He told media yesterday that a number of his brothers and a few of the kids in the family have talked about trying to climb Mt. Kennedy, maybe even next summer.

"It was fun for me to kind of beat them to Mt. Kennedy,” Kennedy joked. "I kind of wish I'd gotten a helicopter pilot to drop me on the top for just a second and then have my picture taken, climb the last 20 ft or something.”

Following his talk, Kennedy was presented with a number of gifts from elder Alex Van Bibber, who also greeted Kennedy's father back in '65.

It wasn't only the view of Mt. Kennedy the environmental lawyer and activist enjoyed over the course of his rafting adventure.

"The trip itself was amazing,” he said.

"I've been on rivers all over the world, almost on every continent and this is one of the best rivers I've seen from many, many perspectives. The scenery was extraordinary, the hikes during the day time, the views of those glaciers, one after the other and the geological history you can see written in the rock as you go through these canyons and just the size of the landscapes,” he said.

Kennedy spoke yesterday to an attentive crowd at the Yukon Arts Centre. His speech, titled Our Environmental Destiny, discussed the intricate connections between environmental protection and preservation and true democracy, arguing that wherever there is environmental destruction there is also subversion of the democratic process.

Kennedy shared his experiences working to hold polluters to account as well as working with green energy tech giants. He discussed some of the major barriers to widespread green energy production including an irrational market place that doesn't account for the external costs of non-renewable energy and green energy

infrastructure deficits.

"We're going to win in the long run,” Kennedy said.

What we need is true democracy and a true free market, he told the crowd, arguing that true free market capitalism is not the same as the widespread crony capitalism we often see.

A true free market, he said, properly values resources and accounts for all the costs of pollution.