Photo courtesy Animal Planet
The grandson of legendary oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and son of Philippe Cousteau, Sr., Philippe Cousteau, Jr. co-founded EarthEcho International (www.EarthEcho.org) with his sister Alexandra in 2000 to educate about and promote sustainability of the ocean environment. He has been involved in a number of television projects, including an ongoing role as the chief ocean correspondent for Animal Planet.
Your family background obviously has a lot to do with your current work. Was there ever any doubt that you and your sister would end up working to promote awareness about the importance of the oceans?
We always felt it was a tremendous opportunity to do good, to travel, and communicate the wonder and the joy of life. My sister and I were fortunate enough to grow up experiencing that, and now we get to share that with the world and encourage the world to embrace its full potential, to create a sustainable future. I mean, what little boy doesn’t want to be a fireman or something like that? But as I got older I was naturally inclined to be involved in exploration and conservation. I have the best job in the world in that I’m able to do so many different things through that ethic. There’s nothing better.
What inspires people to care about environmental and conservation issues associated with stewardship of the oceans?
People relate to people—and story. Story is I think the greatest language of learning that exists. You can’t just hammer people with statistics and information. People don’t relate to information and they don’t relate to animals unless they’re anthropomorphized. They relate to people.
It’s very important to be where people are—to go where they learn. You can’t expect people to come to you, especially in this brand-driven world where we get over a thousand brand hits a day. We need to be where people are in multiple ways. That’s what EarthEcho International does, and looking back, that’s what my father and grandfather did so well. My grandfather said, “We need to be doing TV, we need to be doing education programs, we need to be on radio, we need to be doing books, we need to be in concerts with John Denver and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. We need to be in places where people already are—with compelling stories.”
If you look at a lot of the films that my father and grandfather did, it wasn’t just about the animals. It was as much about the team and that sense of adventure, relating to those people and their experiences. That’s what people connected to, and that’s what we’re inspired by.
What is EarthEcho International?
We are a non-profit, non-formal, free-choice learning organization with a strong emphasis on new media and great faith in the power of great storytelling to bring about great change. Our mission is to use media and experiences to empower people to use the resources that can restore and protect Earth’s ocean and freshwater systems.
One of EarthEcho International’s values is, “We believe that story is a language of learning and that well-told and well-crafted stories can inspire individuals to make positive choices in their daily lives.” EarthEcho International’s website invites users to tell their own stories. How have these stories from people around the world affected what you do?
There are tremendous challenges that we face. It’s easy to get down and depressed when you’re seeing such waste and death and destruction and greed. I’ve found myself reading these stories people post on the website about what they’re doing and how they’ve been inspired by our work or someone else’s. On a personal level, that gives me fuel and gives me hope.
At EarthEcho International, we read those stories and we learn from them in terms of what people connect to. Those stories inform our work and how we frame some of the outreach and education that we’re creating through developing new media tools. We pay attention and see what resonates with people—what do they remember and what do they talk about? What inspires them and how do we learn from that?
What types of media have you found to be most successful to reach large audiences?
There’s so much stuff out there, so much competition. In terms of reaching large audiences, television is still a great way to do that, just like it was 20 or 30 years ago, which is why I got involved in Discovery and Animal Planet. But you can’t just do a public service announcement, you can’t just do a television show.
Increasingly, the Internet is an amazing way to reach masses of people. The Internet is the democratization of information. It provides a great opportunity to create hope for the future, and the access to information gives us great hope. It’s a tool that wasn’t available to my father and grandfather. The extension of the Internet is mobile communication devices like cell phones. They are not just output devices, but input devices as well. That gives people the opportunity to report, to engage in a dynamic dialogue with each other and with us, not just a one-way stream of information. It’s a very exciting time. I think we’re just starting to realize the significance of mobile devices.
We have to be in multiple places. People learn in different ways, and you have to be consistent, and you have to be ubiquitous (which we’re not, but we’re building towards), and you have to be inspiring.
What were your goals for the “Ocean’s Deadliest” film on Animal Planet?
“Ocean’s Deadliest” was a one-hour special. We might have done more together, but Steve [Irwin, aka “The Crocodile Hunter”] died tragically right in the middle of the film. Steve was genuine, warm, humble, and a hundred percent committed.
The goals of that film were pretty radical. To Animal Planet and Discovery’s credit, I said, “You know, I’m not interested in just a show that’s talking about deadly animals in the ocean.” We said the message needs to be that these animals may have a lot of poison or be venomous, but they all play a very important role, a balancing role in their environment. At the end of the film, the conclusion is that these animals are important to the balance of the ecosystem; it is actually humans that are the deadliest creatures in the ocean. And that was a strong, radical conservation message.
Crocodiles and sharks are a great way to draw people in, but the message is that sharks aren’t killers. There was one shark fatality last year, a couple this year, yet we kill 100 million sharks a year. More people are bitten by other people in New York City in a year than by sharks worldwide. Humans are the deadliest creatures in the ocean—and the most unsustainable creatures in the ocean. At the end of the film, I said there’s a lot of daunting things that we face, but all of us have the power to make a positive difference. We all make a difference by the choices that we make and the things that we buy. We all have the power to be part of the solution—every single person on the planet, no matter where you live, no matter what you do.
When I was approached to be the environmentalist host of the series “Oceans,” that was a message that I made very clear I would be bringing across. The overall message of the series is that the oceans are changing and humans are a great big part of that change, and most of that change is not for the better.
The EarthEcho International website repeats the theme, “Everything you do makes a difference.” How do you make the issue of the ocean environment relevant to someone who does not live near an ocean?
I do a lot of public speaking with schools, conventions, companies, you name it. When I talk about the oceans, I really talk about how they are the life support system of this planet, and that oceans are the primary regulator of our climate and our weather, and that no matter where you live, you are being impacted by these global systems. All the water in the world ends up in the oceans, and all the rivers and streams flow eventually to the ocean.
Even immigration can be linked to environmental degradation of the oceans. We know that there are people in Latin America and certainly Africa, West Africa, and North Africa, that are driven to destitution because of over-fishing by developed countries. These people have nothing and they turn to illegal immigration or refugeeism, trying to get into the United States, trying to get into Europe. We know that there are people in Latin America that are driven to that because the resources that they’ve been fishing for generations are gone. So, if you’re in Denver, you’re dealing with the illegal immigrant issue. There are myriad ways that the oceans reach everybody, and that’s what we try to talk about.
What are your primary concerns regarding the ocean environment?
The biggest areas for concern are the destruction and the human-caused decline of fisheries around the world and, of course, climate change, which is causing myriad problems: the bleaching and death of coral reefs, ocean acidification, and melting ice caps, to name a few at the top.
One of the things that concerns me the most is shark finning. As we’re decimating shark populations for a Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup, we are destroying the predators that keep ocean ecosystems healthy. Much like wolves in Yellowstone, when they took wolves out, they found that the deer populations were exploding because the wolves weren’t picking off the diseased and the old. Then the deer populations collapsed and that had a massive impact on the vegetation that the deer traditionally ate, which in turn impacted all the other flora and fauna on down the food chain, and the whole system changed. The same thing happens when you remove sharks from an environment. They are the apex predators, and when you take those out, everything underneath begins to change and unravel.
Are there reasons for optimism?
There are indeed. You know that we are moving forward when a film like “An Inconvenient Truth” wins two Oscars. Society is changing. Society is waking up. We’ve seen peaks and troughs in the environmental movement over the past, but more than ever before I think people are engaging. We are seeing people more concerned about what they do. We are seeing governments start to wake up and be concerned about where they are getting their energy and their water. We’re seeing shifts in behavior. There is reason for hope and for optimism always, because in the absence of hope, there is nothing. And what good is living in a world with nothing?
