Fabien Cousteau

Becoming One with the Ocean

We’re treating our oceans like we’re hunter-gatherers. It’s time to use aquaculture to fill the gap that we have created.

While things change around us with frightening speed in this digital age, the earth rumbles on in its slow revolutions towards some indistinct future.

Ocean explorer and advocate Fabien Cousteau says our planet will surely recover from the hard use it currently endures through industrialization, pollution and over-farming of aquatic life. But it may not do so during our watch if we continue on the path we set.

We are changing the earth in ways we may not like, Cousteau warns. It is time for a little foresight.

As the grandson of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the pioneering filmmaker and marine conservationist, Fabien Cousteau has been highly attuned to the natural world since childhood. His deep immersion—both literally and philosophically—in ocean life has given him an unusual perspective on a space that many of us tend to overlook.

“The planet is two-dimensional on a map,” Cousteau says. “We are chained to thinking on a two-dimensional plane because we are terrestrial beings. We go left, right, front and back. But the ocean is a three-dimensional system—it goes left, right, front and back—and also up and down.”

Most of the momentum of the environmental movement has been to “go green.” But Cousteau asks, why not go blue, too? If we can plant a tree, we can plant a fish while we’re at it. And we must, he says: “We’re treating our oceans like we’re hunter-gatherers. It’s time to use aquaculture to fill the gap that we have created.”

Some basic statistics provide eye-opening evidence of the need for ocean conservation efforts. Water systems represent 99 percent of our total living space. The oceans house some 97 percent of our world’s biodiversity. More than 70 percent of our daily intake of food is somehow derived from the ocean, even if we do not eat fish.

The immensity of our waterways creates a false sense of confidence that they will always sustain themselves—and us.

But a huge concentration of plastics weighing over seven million tons and covering an area the size of Texas is floating in the central Pacific right now. It is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it is not the only one of its kind, Cousteau notes: “Every day, a million tons of plastics are dumped into our oceans. We’ve been using our oceans as an infinite resource and as a garbage can.”

The oceans provide a stark mirror in which we can see the reflection of our human behaviors. Orca whales in the Pacific Northwest, for instance, are experiencing rising rates of cancer, spontaneous abortion, fetal deformation and behavioral problems that were extremely rare just a few decades ago.

“This just so happens to coincide with places where there’s a lot of human activity,” Cousteau points out. “The toxic on-loading of the orca is similar to what we are subject to.”

Cousteau creates a sense of urgency about our responsibility to the environment—a responsibility that often seems predicated on our own sense of convenience. But his greater concern is that we develop a holistic and intelligent accommodation to the natural world for our own sakes, as much as for the earth’s. He reminds us that our water systems are deeply rooted in the fibers of our bodies.

“Think of what you spend your first nine months of life in,” Cousteau says. “You spend it in water. Anyone who goes over a sand dune and sees the ocean feels a very calming effect. There’s a certain connection that we innately have with the oceans, and for me, it’s much more powerful in a sense that I feel more comfortable in a water body than I do on land.”

Cousteau might revise his grandfather’s famous motto, “People protect what they love,” to read: “People protect what is part of them.”

Safeguarding the oceans requires a total awareness of the way its material reality affects us. Losing a sense of how the oceans infiltrate our existence means that we are largely oblivious to a crucial store of knowledge that could even benefit future technological or organizational design.

What we can learn from the oceans, Cousteau suggests, is unfathomable. And yet, we have explored only five percent of them.

“We spend 100 times more effort going to look for little green men in outer space than we do exploring our oceans,” he says. “I love outer space, but a payoff there is about a thousand times less likely than in the oceans.”