| THE HUMAN, THE ORCHID, AND THE OCTOPUS Exploring and Conserving our Natural World Jacques Cousteau Susan Schiefelbein Bill McKibben (Fwd.) New York: Bloomsbury, October 2007 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59691-417-9 | ||||
| ISBN 1-59691-417-3 | 305pp. | HC/FCI | $25.95 | |
Just as Rachel Carson, with Silent Spring, sparked a new awareness of ecological relationships on land, a Frenchman named Jacques-Yves Cousteau brought the beauty and fragility of the underwater world to the attention of the public. But their roles were very different: Cousteau was primarily an explorer and popularizer, sharing his deep love of the ocean and its creatures through books and film.1 For him, the sense that mankind's activities posed an imminent threat to the ocean's web of life came late in his career. But he was no less effective than Carson in driving home the urgency of the need for corrective measures.
Indeed, it can be argued that he was more effective, because he reached a wider audience — and because of the many contacts he made in his travels. Those contacts included high government officials in nations throughout the world, as well as influential scientists like Harold Edgerton, inventor of the stroboscope. As explained in this memoir, these contacts both facilitated his explorations and enabled him to present the findings he made to the world's policy-makers.
Those findings constitute Cousteau's legacy. On the one hand, he took the world inside its ocean — a mysterious realm seen before then as only a vast, undulating surface, by turns blue and placid or grey and stormy, but always the forbidding skin over a source of tasty fish, decorative shells and corals, and menacing monsters. Cousteau, empowered by his aqualung and other inventions, showed us those life forms as they are, full of beauty and strangeness. Oh, there are monsters there, all right, but few are by nature menacing.
It's truer to say that we are a menace to them. This is the other side of Cousteau's legacy. He first suspected, then documented, that human activities threaten the life of the seas in various ways. We thoughtlessly exhaust its fish stocks, then complain because fishermen go bankrupt. We discard plastic bags and other trash which cause sea life to choke or starve, and refuse to support alternative packaging. We pollute the seas with oil spills, with pesticides, with toxic and radioactive wastes, while politicians, with our blessing, work to nullify effective mitigating measures. Once he understood the danger, Cousteau strove to teach us the value of cleanup and conservation. It was no easy job. The story of the freighter Cavtat (See sidebar) is but one example.
Rammed by another ship, the freighter Cavtat sank near Otranto in 1974. Cousteau learned of this a year later, learned that her deadly cargo of lead compounds2 rested where it sank, three miles from the Italian resort's popular beaches. Absorbed through the skin, the undiluted liquid causes convulsions, insanity, coma and death. The toxins concentrate in fish; if eaten, they can cause reproductive harm.
The other ship3 sailed under a Panamanian flag. The Cavtat herself was owned by Yugoslavs who ducked responsibility by claiming the wreck was not a navigation hazard and therefore not in violation of law. The government of Italy held it was outside their jurisdiction, in international waters. International authorities were helpless because too few nations had ratified the pertinent codes. Everyone assured the public there was no danger.
But a young magistrate of the Otranto district, Judge Alberto Maritati, investigated and took action. When his two-and-a-half year campaign of writing letters to the appropriate ministries got no response, Maritati alerted the public. Tourism fell off. Eventually he won legal authority over the Cavtat and ordered a cleanup. This took ten months and cost $12 million. Decades later, the children of Otranto enjoy its beaches in safety. It seems like quite a bargain.
It was then that my life of exploration produced a personal discovery: Logical absurdities, I realized, were preventing the human community from what I consider reasonable utopias. I'd heard industrialists contend that they cannot afford the luxury of expensive toxic waste disposal—a superficially logical statement, but nonetheless absurd in its suggestion that we will enhance the economy by jettisoning deadly poisons into our rivers, lakes, and soils. And why not save the community the burdensome costs of repairing damage done, by raising the prices of the products in question in order to pay for proper disposal of the wastes generated during manufacture? Reasonable, but utopian. I thought of other social and environmental problems I'd encountered, and the list grew longer. The logical absurdity of fishermen who respond to declining fish populations by doubling their efforts for a catch, thereby wiping out the stock and proceeding from loss this year to bankruptcy the next. The logical absurdity of believing we must apply every single scientific finding we discover, of thinking that progress requires subordinating human interests to new technologies rather than using new technologies in the human interest. The logical absurdity of military officers who propose offsetting the dangers of their neighbor's towering plutonium and bomb stocks by augmenting their own stores. The logical absurdity of trying to bolster the world economy by institutionalizing the mass market, enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor. The logical absurdity of leaders' professing to support human rights while they ignore the rights of future generations. – Page 42 |
Cousteau was driven by the urge to explore. He recognized it at the age of six, when he trudged off alone on a railroad track near his home, heading for the distant horizon. His love of swimming came a bit later, around the age of ten. As a young man, his yearning to explore the seven seas led him to enroll in the French naval school. He served on ships that cruised to Shanghai, to Indochina (now Viet Nam) — but he never "connected" with undersea exploration until he took part in a survey to map Cam Ranh Bay. A native rowed the surveyors around. One day at noon, he slid off the boat, dived, and came back with a handful of fish. The interpreter explained that fish sleep around noon. Cousteau was transfixed. He writes, "here at last were the gateways to the last remaining unexplored expanse of earth, to the undiscovered world I'd always dreamed of entering, whose endless wonders, I sensed even then, would never quench my drive to explore but forever fuel it."
Cousteau's naval service gave him a very good grounding for his marine exploits. It also gave him a chance to develop leadership ability and coolness in the face of danger, which he demonstrated by helping the underground fight the Italian occupation in the south of France during World War II. It was during this time that he and Émile Gagnan conceived of the aqualung (or SCUBA, for self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). By 1943 they had a prototype built. Cousteau tested it in a secluded cove on the French Riviera, under the eyes of Italian troops occupying the country. Previously, divers had to wear full-body suits with bulky helmets from which hoses ran to an air supply in a boat on the surface. Not only did this tie the diver close to the boat, but the heavy gear kept him on the bottom and was hard to move around in. The hoses could easily snag and tear when exploring sunken ships, and there were other risks as well. The new SCUBA carried its own air supply pre-compressed in tanks, and automatically regulated air flow according to the diver's depth. The revolutionary device gave underwater teams the mobility to really explore that realm. Cousteau, a former naval officer, fully understood the danger of testing it in Nazi-occupied France: had the Axis captured his prototype, their military would not have missed its utility as a means of delivering weapons against ships. But the wily Captain escaped discovery; he and his associates went on to pioneer the underwater cameras and lights that let them capture benthic scenes, and battery-powered carts that let them cover more ground, so to speak.
Cousteau had an absolute passion for life, in all its manifestations. "Life cannot be assigned a cash value," he writes on page 87, "because, simply, it is beyond value."
I still feel rage when I recall a meeting during which a "risk evaluator" reviewed the community's losses during the infamous 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara, California. As he began to tote up the environmental damage, he made an offhand comment: "We'll appraise each dead bird at a dollar apiece, as a matter of principle." – Page 86 |
To sum up, Captain Cousteau was explorer, filmmaker, inventor, war hero, gifted amateur scientist, crusader for the environment. Cousteau sometimes overstated his case, as with his total opposition to nuclear power. And there were things he misunderstood. He had flaws, as all of us do. But he left us a priceless legacy: not only a new awareness of the life in the oceans, but a warning that all the life we know is threatened by our thoughtless acts, and most of all, some advice on how to do better.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.