Underwater explorer Cousteau talks about carrying on family tradition
Like grandfather, like grandson.
“I was never pressured into ocean exploration,” Fabien Cousteau told his Town Hall South lecture series audience.
But growing up hearing the same stories at the dinner table that the rest of the world learned through “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” made his career choice somewhat inevitable.
Just as inevitably, Fabien’s March 6 talk at Upper St. Clair High School focused on water.
“It’s funny how we forget why we exist, why we’re here,” he said. “The one element that makes all of these things possible is water. The circulatory system of our planet is exactly the reason we’re here, the reason we as a species have evolved as sentient beings and are sharing the same space.”
Fabien Cousteau
Of course, we’ve learned that water makes up more than 70 percent of the earth’s surface.
“But that’s only thinking in two dimensions,” Cousteau explained. “The ocean actually represents over 99 percent of the world’s living space when you take the third dimension into account.”
While we associate that living space with countless varieties of marine animals and plants, it might offer room for one more species.
About 60 years ago, Jacques-Yves Cousteau was among those who started thinking about how to address the problems associated with global overpopulation.
“So he proposed to build underwater habitats to test the feasibility of human beings living underwater,” his grandson said.
Several were constructed, the last of which still existing is the Aquarius Reef Base in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. In 2014, Fabien and a crew of six others spent a month living and working in the habitat for what he called “Mission 31.”
“It gave us the amazing ability to do things that certainly aren’t available from a ship,” he said. “Because your body becomes acclimated to the bottom pressure, we were able to wander out of this habitat 10 to 12 hours a day. We were able to actually do over three years’ worth of observations, of filming, of scientific research in that 31 days, as opposed to being relegated to a boat and diving down.”
Fabien Cousteau works with children in El Salvador on a sea turtle restoration project.
While his grandfather pioneered ocean exploration and still is practically synonymous with the discipline two decades after his death, the emphasis of his activities evolved over the years.
“It became adventure with a message,” Fabien said. “The more we learned about our interconnectivity, our dependence on this aquatic world, the impact that we’re having on that aquatic world, the more we as a family felt it necessary to tell the whole story, felt it necessary to bring an understanding that we are having a major impact on this life-support system.”
To help promote that type of understanding, the nonprofit Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center began operating in 2016 to focus on public awareness and education, along with special projects that include coral reef and sea turtle restoration.
The center’s objectives are inspired by words of Jacques-Yves Cousteau that his grandson likes to share: “People protect what the love. They love what they understand. And they understand what they’re taught.”
For more information, visit www.fabiencousteauolc.org.