Still in its infancy
Cousteau doesn’t blame just commercial and sport fishers for delays in the implementation of marine reserves, worldwide. Part of the blame, he asserts, rests on his own narrow shoulders.
The Cousteau family has been universally honored for its efforts to alert the public to the pending ocean disaster. His father Jacques brought the long hidden ocean environment to the movie theaters with his 1953 film “The Silent World,” and then to living rooms world wide with “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau,” which aired in the U.S.on ABC in the late 1960s.
Jean-Michel Cousteau has continued his father’s work with over 70 documentaries, including the PBS series “Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures.”
In early 1973, Jean-Michel and his brother Phillippe, who would die in a seaplane crash four years later, helped redirect their father’s efforts from marine exploration to marine education with the founding of the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life.
Since then, the Cousteau educational efforts have been brought under the umbrella of the Jean-Michel Cousteau Ocean Futures Society, whose motto is “Protect the ocean and you protect yourself.”
With his children Fabien and Celine, Cousteau is bringing the work begun by his father to a third generation. Still, the movement is in its infancy, he said
“We’ve done it on land. We’ve protected 14 percent of the earth that is not under water. But we are 100 years behind with the 70 percent of earth that is underwater. Only one percent is protected. We need five to six percent, primarily coastlines and reefs, where birds and fish feed,” Cousteau said.
Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society has 23,000 members. SCUBA divers, his most ardent block of supporters, number several hundred thousand. But for most of the other seven billion people on earth, Cousteau pointed out, the undersea world remains an abstraction.
“I’m tired of the controversies. But they persist because we haven’t been successful in communicating to the public that marine reserves are the only way the marine environment can regenerate itself. They are the only way fishermen will be able to continue to fish,” he said.
“Our weakness is we’re not reaching enough people. We need to reach millions, not just hundreds of thousands.”
