PATHFINDERS Straight talk with big thinkers
areas are protected If we increased it to 30%, all of a sudden we’d have these healthy sanctuaries.
Romancing the Deep
Fabien Cousteau, grandson of famed ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, says we need to treat the world’s oceans with the same affection that we do our national parks. By Matthew Power
GB: Clearly, the BP oil disaster is on everyone’s mind. As someone who travels the world making ocean documentaries, what are your thoughts? FC: Well, Earth Day started because of an oil spill in the Pacifi c. The Gulf spill is not the only one—although it’s very bad. There are many other spills we don’t hear about.
GB: Not to mention the plastics fl oating around. I’m thinking of the Pacifi c Gyre. FC: What most people don’t know is that there’s one of those [giant trash islands] in every ocean. A million tons of plastics a day are going into the oceans—that’s really just a diff erent form of oil spill. Plastics were a wonderful concept at fi rst, but as this trash breaks up it releases all sorts of toxins that enter the food chain. In the ocean, plastic becomes a sort of poisonous soup that lasts up to 500 years.
GB: Is our callousness toward the oceans because we can’t see what’s going on? FC: People use the oceans as a garbage dump. But everything that goes in there ends up back on our plate and in our bodies. The stuff is in about 70% of our food, products such as the ice cream we eat that contains kelp. Chemicals like Drano—although I hate to pick on just one—there are so many—or fl ame retardants in carpet are making their way to the ocean, and fi sh and mammals alike are showing increased levels of endocrine disruptors.
GB: Why don’t people protect the oceans more passionately? FC: That’s a good question. For one thing, there’s a lack of media focus on the beauty of our planet and why we should care.
GB: Can anything be done to reverse the harm to our seas? FC: There are many approaches that help. In some cases, the best policy is to have sanctuaries where marine life can populate, and we don’t touch them. If you look at land conservation in the United States, about 15% of our land is in national parks, doing wonderfully well on the whole. Compare that to worldwide national marine sanctuaries. Less than 1% of these sensitive
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GB: Can’t some marine species be rejuvenated? That’s what your new plantafi
sh.org initiative is about, right? FC: Yes. But the key is to get people wet and dirty and involved with the oceans. That’s the only way the restoration process really works. I was reading an article about how tree planting has helped U.S. forests, and I thought, “Why aren’t we planting fi sh?” Why not restore local important marine populations? For example, the Hudson estuary (near Manhattan) used to be a huge oyster rookery, something like 9 billion oysters, a key component of trade in the 1700s. Oysters do two things for aquatic environments:.They build reef systems, and they are fi lter feeders. Each one can fi lter up to 50 gallons a day. They can even fi lter some pretty harsh chemicals. Some local schools already have the restocking as part of their curriculum.
GB: But will restocking marine do any good if we keep consuming and polluting the same way? FC: We need to curtail many bad habits. We need to get off of oil-based plastics completely, especially single use and disposable products. We need to downsize.
GB: Other countries are now gearing up to produce millions of homes and automobiles. Won’t they make things even worse? FC: They want to have the American dream of yesterday. They don’t know what the long-term costs are. We need to share the knowledge we’ve gained with them. And we need to think long term. A lot of little actions from everybody can make a big diff erence. We forget sometimes the romance of nature, and how awesome it makes us feel when we do something good. GB
Fabien Cousteau is third-generation oceanographer and documentary filmmaker.His recent work can be found at
www.plantafish.org. Learn more about him at
www.fabiencousteau.org.
July > August 2010 GreenBuilder 21
Photo: Marc Evan
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