Jean-Michel Cousteau delivered an enthusiastic and uplifting talk Monday night at Penn State, touching on his life, family, the environment, and the future of sustainability in an interesting lecture.
The famed French explorer, environmentalist and filmmaker has a palpable love of life and what he does. Cousteau’s decades of experience have given the ecological advocate plenty of opportunities to work with world leaders. But all of his diving and exploration began at a young age.
Cousteau has certainly had an interesting life full of adventures and learning. Jacques Cousteau, his father, helped design the aqua-lung – better known as the first open-circuit SCUBA equipment.
At the age of seven, Jean-Michel Cousteau began scuba diving, and he hasn’t looked back since. Few, if any, people have as much experience diving as Cousteau, who has been at it for 71 years with thousands of dives under his belt.
Cousteau’s mother was the first woman to scuba dive, and both of Cousteau’s children are heavily involved in diving and filming for whatever project he finds himself working on.
After all of those years of diving, it’s no surprise that Cousteau has dedicated an immense amount of time and energy to the conservation of the oceans and ocean resources. He is the president of the Ocean Futures Society, a non-profit conservation group based in Santa Barbara, Calif.
“We are treating the oceans like a garbage can,” Cousteau told the crowd.
In 2006, President George W. Bush signed into law legislation making a specific stretch of ocean near Hawaii the largest protected area of ocean in the world, and Cousteau was present when Bush signed that piece of legislation. Last year before he left office, President Barack Obama made the protected area of ocean four times bigger. For Cousteau, this was an important example of Democrats and Republicans working together despite their obvious differences in ideology.
There were two central themes to Cousteau’s talk on Monday night. First, Cousteau repeatedly mentioned that today’s youth will be effective leaders of the future. With all of the discoveries made in recent years, he believes that young people now have the means to correct the mistakes that human societies have made for decades as a result of a lack of information.
Cousteau also holds the central belief that everyone has a “heart.” The noted activist will never lose the conviction that anyone – no matter their political views or past mistakes – can be convinced that our climate faces tremendous challenges and that we can act now to minimize these challenges. In Cousteau’s mind, sometimes all it takes is a personal, meaningful connection to make a major change.
