# Transcription

Source audio: [1981 Interview Jacques Cousteau - tagged.mp3](./1981%20Interview%20Jacques%20Cousteau%20-%20tagged.mp3)

Language: English

When we were young in school we were taught in history books about explorers.
The name Magellan, Balboa, Admiral Perry,
Amundsen, well it's a new kind of explorer today.
One who explores this organism called our environment.
One who explores deep down to the seas and sees the possibilities as well as
perils of its being abused. I think of course of Captain
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the most celebrated of our explorers.
Of course, all of us are acquainted with him through his
quite marvelous television series.
And he and his young colleagues have put together a book.
It's called The Cousteau Ormanac and the Sub-Title Inventory
of Life on our Water Planet.
And it's beautiful.
It's thrilling.
But also, it's full of advice how to save this
environment from those who were the predators.
And it's about ordinary people who seem to know what it's about,
though they're not given that credit for that.
And so this is the book published by Doubleday Dolphin.
We'll talk about the Dolphin in a moment, too.
So Captain Cousteau, my guest, his thoughts
about the Ormanack, about us and where we live,
and how we live, and how we can live.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Sailing down my golden river, sun and water all my own, yet I was never alone.
♪ Run man water, oh life givers ♪
♪ I'll have them wherever I roam ♪
♪ And I was not far from home ♪
- Just hearing those two verses of Pete Seeger's song
about the Hudson River where he lives
and that both the clear water.
Your thoughts, Captain Christof.
Well, Pete recorded for us a song along the Hudson River
for one of our films.
And it was very catchable for him.
He did this with my son, Philip.
And it's Philip who had the idea of this almanac.
So there's a connection, a good connection
between Pete Seeger's and this almanac, finally,
through the Hudson River.
And I was thinking about your book, The Orlemann Act, and he's in it, he and his olleagues,
ordinary people who live along the Hudson, trying to save it, to keep it clear nce more.
Your book is about people like him, millions in the world.
You call him wave makers.
Yes.
You know that I have steered my life entirely differently as soon as I understood that there was a problem.
I understood this in 1958-59.

Before that I was just a mere explorer.

And since then I think I'm a witness of the distractions and I am trying to attract attention

and yell and say, "Help, this cannot go on."

And this is the first sign.

After that you have to say, "Okay, attracting attention is a good thing, but you also have

to find ways."

And so this book is about ways.

about what has happened to the rivers, to the lakes, to the skies, to the forests,

the things you're for and those who were trying to say that. So where we begin? You say nowhere else

to go. You know in the old days no man, people could travel when things got bad and one to another.

And now there is no longer that frontier.

Well, I have a good example here with several examples if we have time.

First, when I was working on Greek archeology in the Mediterranean, the thing that strikes us now is that most of these beautiful Greek islands are bare of vegetation, almost.

It's very easy to understand.

Four or five centuries BC or even ten centuries BC, the world population was counted in a

few million people altogether.

These people had no reason to care for the environment.

But even so, they went to an island, settled down, exploited the trees, built boats through

the trees, cooked their food.

And after a number of years, or maybe a few centuries, there were no trees left, so they

moved to the next island and did the same thing.

When the Asians crossed the Bering Strait 17,000 years ago, or 10,000 years ago, when

both times the Bering Strait was dry, and they began to invade North America, there

There are traces in circles, almost circles, but curves that are almost circles, from,

with a center in the bearing state and wider and wider waves reaching into the United States,

into America.

And there, across this line, you find the -- you can date the destruction of the saber

tiger of such and such animals.

And people were moving only when they had exhausted the resources and went somewhere else.

And the earth was big and entire places were uninhabited.

Well, another history.

And the first islander is landed in Easter Island.

That's 600 AD.

That's more recent.

That's history, almost.

Landed there in an uninhabited desert island, but not so desert.

There were trees that we have identified from the seeds in the mud of the volcano.

And many other plants, because they're rich, island, not tropical, subtropical.

They landed there probably 200 people, two boats, men, wives, children, poultry, chicken,

pigs, seeds, whatever.

They arrived there very pleased to have found an island because they thought they were lost.

Then they began to settle to exploit the island and they multiplied from 2,700 in—no, in

1,670.

They had reached a number of about 30,000 on this small island.

They had eliminated all the trees.

They were short of food.

They were short of food.

The horrible land had been washed out by rains.

They had erected all these beautiful statues because they were governed by a tough, rolling

class, a class of the priests.

We know all these things from testimonies.

And finally, and they had invented the language and the writing, an alphabet that we still

don't understand.

Big civilization had developed with its culture, and because they had exhausted the resources,

they began to kill each other, destroy everything, fight themselves with big fires, with murders,

with rapes, with whatever, eating themselves.

And when the Dutch discovered the island in the 1700s, there were only 1,500 islanders

left.

So this havoc--

How did 30,000, only 1,500 left?

So in 1600.

So in 100 years, the population had been down from 30,000 to 1,500.

And this is, all these things are lessons for us.

If we put them all together, these three different things, the Greeks in the Aegean Sea, the Asians

in the Bering Strait, the--

>> Easter Island.

>> Easter Island.

If we put these three lessons together, what does that mean?

It means, A, that the fate of an overpopulated area is chaos and social disaster leading

to destruction of the culture.

B, that now that we have occupied all this island, we have nowhere else to go.

And those who say, "Oh, don't worry," some of them say, "We always can escape under

the sea," nonsense.

The others say, "We can build artificial planets, and we will have a perfect environment over

there."

Is it really a good thing when we still have a beautiful planet to say, "Well, all right,

this beautiful planet, let's sacrifice it and try to build another one," like if we

are God, if we are God.

All these things don't make any sense.

We are here to stay.

We have one planet.

We have to take care of it.

That's a few other few other societies.

Of course, you raised several questions here.

The need of these different societies have been destroyed over population or not, had

there been another way of living, of treating nature and themselves.

Someway in this book, we'll ask you about the olmanac itself, what's in it.

You speak of all sorts of reference to the decline of Rome.

And one reason it gives us interesting, the small farmer who was the base society went

because the big boys took over.

Well, today we have something called agribusiness,

and the small farmer is having a rough time

and is less of him and her.

So as though there is an analogy here too.

- There is an analogy.

And the small farmer of Easter Island

was also the one who had the older burden.

He had to feed the priests and the statue sculptures

and the statue transporters and the statue erectors

and all this crowd of parasites.

And the ones that were feeding them

- Well, they're small families.

- So we're talking, aren't we?

Because this book, at the beginning,

has almost what I call a dedication.

In the very beginning, you are saying that ordinary people

who so long have accepted the words of experts

who represent few people to begin with,

have the capacity, if they have the facts,

to make the right decision.

Ordinary people, and the books directed toward them.

Yes, you see, today experts are automatically specialists.

And specialists, by definition, are specialized.

And if they're specialized, they're cut away from most aspects of the daily life of everybody

else.

So they are not the people to make the right decision for the rest of the humanity.

Today governments like the former government of France, I don't know about the new one,

it was a technocracy.

It was not a political authority.

It was a technical, technological authority.

The magnets of electricity, the France French electricity company, nationalized, were deciding

what's good for the public, not the public.

And they were using, of course, all the possible media to explain their decision in their own

way.

But never were the people consulted.

And that is the reason why France is now stuffed with almost 50 nuclear plants that we don't

know what to do with and that are going to disrupt and outrage our landscapes for thousands

of years.

At the same time, we've come to nuclear plants in a moment here and all over the world in

certain developed countries, so-called developed countries.

In France, something happened, though.

And you took part, people called green candidates.

What was that?

Explain.

Something was happening, a grassroots movement.

There is a political environmental movement in France, in Germany also, and in Italy.

There were attempts here in this country to make such a movement, but it completely failed.

In England also it failed.

But in France the political party has been pretty strong, getting about four and a half

percent of the votes in general.

And that's just the beginning.

And if we make opinion polls in France, we see that 30 to 35 percent of the population

are environmentally minded. But only four or five percent want to vote for the Greens because

they don't have yet faith in the future of the political movement. But there is such

a political movement. I'm not sure it's a good thing because I think the environmental

movement could also, and probably better so, remain outside of politics and put pressure

on anybody, on everybody else.

Ah, this is a big question, isn't it?

It's a big question.

That is the environmental movement,

not forming a party as such, as in France,

but having influence on others.

That's what I am trying to do.

And the reason why I'm doing this is that

because of my past life,

the role of the Kusso Society

is more international than national.

We are dealing with the water system.

the water system by essence international.

And we think that we have to remain neutral politically

so as to be able to have the same influence, let's say,

in the United States or France as in Russia, if we can.

For the moment, we can't, but maybe we can someday.

And we want also to be listened to

in the developing countries,

where the problems are even more acute.

- So there's a problem, isn't it?

In developing countries, the need for industrialization

is in part the same time with industrialization

as practiced today in all societies

comes environmental pollution.

Come, then we'll see.

Needed be, that's the, now we come to alternatives.

- It does not need to be.

And you know, I have followed very carefully this thing.

Nine years ago at the Stockholm Conference, a representative of Pakistan made a very popular

remark at the moment that was reproduced everywhere, especially by the industrial tycoons.

He told the Pakistan man, "Pollution, pollution.

We would love to have pollution, meaning that it would mean that we are industrially developed."

So that's where we started from nine years ago.

Today, not so.

When you go to the developing countries, when you discuss in Nairobi at the United Nations

Environmental Program with representatives of the nations every year they meet, you're

finding people who are now aware that they must avoid making the same mistakes as we industrialized

country have done in the past, and that it is possible and it is economical for them,

for the community, if not for the plant, to build an industry that is clean to start with.

And that they are beginning to understand.

And next year we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference, and

we will be able to measure up.

The Stockholm Conference was the conference dealing with world environment.

Yes, and the conference that ended up with a creation by the United Nations of a new

agency about the environment called the UNEP, United Nations Environmental Program.

So next year is a very important date, year for environmentalists.

It's the 10th anniversary of the Stockholm Conference.

In 10 years, what did we do?

What is the state of affairs?

I would say, generally speaking, that things are worse than they were 10 years ago, but

the awareness of the people is growing.

So there is hope.

Two things are happening, aren't they?

Two things.

As you described the Pakistani spokesman's statement about "give us pollution" means

jobs.

We know for a long time industry was telling people who work.

If these environmentalists, they split up middle class environmentalists, blue collar

working people is if they win we'll have to close our factories you're out of a job.

Which is nonsense.

No, and then the atomic oil chemical workers you mean challenge them and they prove they

can still have an unpolluted end jobs.

So there's less of that blackmail succeeding.

The other thing that you describe is things happening.

There are many anti-nuclear movements throughout the world and as things are getting worse

The awareness is getting more on the part of people.

So there's kind of an interesting--

two things happening at the same time, aren't they?

Yes, you know, the nuclear industry, the nuclear problem

is sacrosanct in many countries.

In France, during the last government, you are not

allowed to speak about it on television.

In this country, if you do, you're in trouble.

I will not name the larger manufacturer who had promised to sponsor a series of our television

shows and has withdrawn at the last minute because of our anti-nuclear opinions.

Oh, really?

Oh, yes.

So, this is the kind of economic club.

Well, club, no.

I mean, blackmail.

Yes.

that is organized.

Well, things may be a little different now.

But the thing that we fear most is that in this developing

world where, if we go on with the development of nuclear power,

we may end up with a police state.

Now, some signs are already showing.

Recently, Newsweek, I read the following thing.

A noted, well-known journalist of Newsweek

testified at the Senate committee

that the environmental movements were paid by Moscow.

That's the beginning of the end, which means that we are almost

as with McCarty.

Well, as soon as you're going to say

I'm an environmentalist, you're good for jail.

- That stops conversation.

- It stops conversation.

If you're suspected of being paid by the Russians,

where can you go?

And we intellectuals, we feel this as the supreme insult.

So this is something--

- 'Cause there are the Russians themselves

on their nuclear plants, which is ironic, of course.

- Sure, but what was said by Elaine is that

by being anti-nuclear, they were weakening the West.

Oh, nonsense, what in nonsense?

- Isn't it, we're talking about how nuclear,

the Orman Act is so good, it's full of all sorts of facts

and anecdotes and incidents and these wave makers

in all the fields and nuclear energy

and the awareness of the part of a great many of its dangers.

A sight in Three Mile Island and Brown's ferret.

- You must admit that this Salmanac

is not an entire nuclear album.

- No, I'm gonna ask you about--

- It says this as one of the problems.

- Other adventures, other adventures,

but you also point out how, if anything,

nuclear energy weakens.

- Exactly.

- Like it does not strengthen it.

It causes a need for-- - The economy, yes.

- The tremendous expense itself involved,

and everything else. - Yes.

To create one job in the nuclear business, nuclear energy, not nuclear research, nuclear

energy, needs about more than $300,000 investment.

To create one job in any other field is 10 or 20 or 30 times less.

We talk about unemployment.

And here again, the Oman Act deals with all this, with the nature of livestock, the grains

they eat, the waste, the food we eat, and as well as the trip on the calypso, the ship,

various parts of the world and what is happening to them, your own experiences and adventures.

The book is the Cousteau Armonac and it's published by Doubleday Dolphin.

I've got to ask about the dolphin, lessons of the dolphin that we have to learn from

them.

And it deals with the events in different parts of the country, renewable energy of course,

alternative sources and roots and the food we eat and the rivers we'd like to

bathe in and fish in and swim in and the water we'd like to drink so well you've

been of course right smack in the middle of this you call environment an

organism yes exactly it's nature I should want to call it that way on earth

is a very intricate organism.

And when we are talking about the Pyramid of Life,

for example, saying that human beings

are the tip of that pyramid,

this pyramid is more than just a heap of stones.

It's an intricate organism with every species

playing its role.

Now this pyramid has changed over the millions of years, but very slowly.

And by no way is nature ready to cope with the speed at which we are modifying the environment

by suppressing species.

Species that have disappeared have been replaced by others at the rhythm of maybe one or two

every million years. And we are destroying them at a pace of 500,000 and 20 years. So

that's absolutely incredible and the damage is irreversible. It is irreparable. And we

have to stop it if we don't want to pass over a desert to our grandchildren.

My guest is Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the Archisto Armonach is the book. And I'm

I'm going to ask about the people active the world over,

how there's a direct analogy of what happened in Chicago

and in India, a specific case.

We'll talk about that, the tree huggers at Wuta Pradesh,

among other wave makers.

Here is something we might throw out the book,

as the perils are delineated and specified,

when it comes to the rivers, to the skies,

to the cities, to the communities,

there is always somebody active trying

to maintain a civility of sanity and save nature in its best form.

And so you have a chapter here, a sequence about the tree huggers, Wutda Pradesh in Northern

India.

The contractors came in, the people sat by, and they saw the whole environment destroyed,

and they said, "We're not going to let it be."

So they said, "We're going to hug these trees.

You're going to chop a town, chop us down."

In Chicago, about ten years ago, some housewives saved some trees along the boulevard at the

mayor at the time wanted to cut down to expand the expressway.

And they saved the trees.

I think of India, Chicago, the same kinds of people.

You know, in 1959, the French government had decided to dump a few hundred drums with radioactive

waste in the Mediterranean.

I raised hell with the help of municipalities, with unions, with fishermen's organization,

with tourist organization, et cetera.

And the train was stopped by mothers and kids lying down on the track.

And the train had to go back.

And the drums were never dumped in the Mediterranean.

So the people can't stop things.

they can have an influence when they're sure of their right.

It's they, it's, I'm looking at the various wave makers here

and it's someone saving one of the great lakes,

along Lake Erie, there was a business man

who decided to start a movement.

And they got 500,000 signatures.

And to some extent it was cleared up.

And throughout you have, throughout the book,

as you describe the dangers to the environment.

We also show that there are remedies.

Yeah, he's showing.

And you speak of alternative energies.

Naturally, you speak of the sun.

Yes.

And there's a marvelous cartoon in there.

How's that go again?

You want some oil?

I own the oil.

You want some coal?

I own the coal in this picture.

You want some sun?

I own the-- well, let's talk about something else.

It's not practical.

It's not practical.

That's practical.

But funny about renewable, the phrase renewable energy sources,

a good deal to the voter to that.

And so renewable energy sources.

- Yes, well the renewable energy sources

are of two kinds, three kinds.

And two of them are pretty safe

and the third one may be dangerous.

One is the solar energy under all its forms.

And there are many, many, many forms of solar energy

that can be exploited forever and ever and ever

for four billion years.

The second source is geothermal.

- Thermal.

- Geothermal, the origin of geothermal energy is nuclear,

but it happens in the bottom of the earth.

And the way we get the heat from the core of the Earth

by injecting water in the wells is safe.

It does not increase the radioactivity of the water.

The third way is to use gravitational force

between the moon and the Earth, the tides.

That we have made a pilot plant in France at the Rans River.

It works fine because it's a small plant.

But it has been calculated that if we were using all

the gravitational energy from the moon

on the surface of the Earth, that means in the ocean,

we could probably slow down the rotation of the Earth

by half a second every century.

Well, that seems very small.

But I don't think it would be very wise to do that.

So I consider this as potentially dangerous.

But all the other sources of energy are very safe and endless.

So when we are blackmailed with the idea that we have to go

nuclear because there's no alternative, this is really

nonsense.

To start with, we have fossil fuels for several centuries.

If we count the coal and the shale oil and the tar sands and

the peat and whatever. There are several centuries of fossil fuels. We have to be very careful

in using the fossil fuels, but we can't. So this will give us time if we want to, to

develop renewable and safe sources of energy like the solar energy, or maybe we are not

quite sure yet, fusion, which is nuclear. But the fission way for the uranium channel

is we made a bad choice.

Isn't fusion dangerous too?

We don't know.

Because the nuclear aspect of it is...

Well, we don't know really, because what do we call dangerous? If it is only radiation

in the vicinity of the heart of the fusion, and only during the fusion.

I don't see anything wrong about that.

It's something that can be easily overcome.

There is practically-- there will probably be-- I'm not sure of that.

Nobody's sure.

There will probably be very little waste, nuclear waste, radioactive waste from fusion.

If the calculations are right, if the thing

posed to be economical, it may be an acceptable

avenue for almost inexorable energy.

You've spoken about the unexplored aspects. Still is still an unexplored.

You explore under the water. The ocean floor

is still unexplored. You've gone about as deep as any...

Don't say unexplored. I would say little explored.

- Yes, because already many, many people have made--

- Well, you have, of course, and your colleagues.

- Yes, but many other people take for example--

- But there's still--

- There's still a lot to learn, yes.

- I mean, are there, I mean, sources,

I'm thinking about the sources.

The sources of energy and of food.

- From the bottom of the ocean,

we have little to wait for,

for as far as food is concerned.

And as far as minerals is concerned,

we know that there are great reserves

of specific materials that are very expensive

to get and to purify.

As far as energy is concerned, yes.

But if we are talking about offshore oil,

This is exhaustible.

It's not going to last very long.

But we can talk about other sources of energy in the sea.

And then we are talking about renewable, almost inexhaustible

sources of energy in the ocean.

There are many forms.

You know probably of them--

Otec, wind, currents, waves, salinity, gradients, etc.

All these forms of energy come from the sea.

They are of solar origin and they are inexhaustible.

At the same time you're speaking of a trip of the ship Calypso.

And the various bodies of water, most of our planet.

The Caribbean, the Amazon.

And what have you found?

The book is startling in your findings.

The, well, what are you really...

As to what is being done to these remarkable, you know, parts of our planet, the Amazon,

say the Caribbean.

Well, the Caribbean is in question.

The moment we are collaborating and trying to increase our collaboration with the United

Nations to organize – they are organizing and we want to help a vast enterprise of environmental

studies in the Caribbean, which the Caribbean is one of the most endangered areas of the

planet.

The UNEP has already done its job in Mediterranean.

After three or four years of hard work, the United Nations Environmental Program, together

with the Mediterranean Commission and the Crystal Society, we have ended up with a better understanding

of the pollution problems.

And the United Nations has succeeded in sitting together 18 Mediterranean nations.

They have signed the Mediterranean Action Plan by which all the nations commit themselves

to action and to spending such amount of money as they could.

It's funny you mentioned Mediterranean.

You have a sequence on the Mediterranean.

Yes.

I was in a French restaurant, a nice restaurant about a week ago, and a young waiter from

southern France from Marseille and he says don't eat that fish.

He says don't.

He says I'm from that region.

He says it's so bad.

I mean you were talking about what's happening.

So we're talking now about the perils and the battle to clean things up.

Yes, and the first step, the first major step ever taken in order to have an international

action in the original sea was in the Mediterranean.

We want to do the same thing in the Caribbean.

And that's why next year there will be a big effort of the United Nations in the Caribbean.

About the Amazon, I have not yet been there.

We are preparing a plan for next year to spend a full year in the Amazon basin with a score

of specialists.

But the Amazon is so tremendous.

Yes.

And we know there are certain developments taking place by the big multinational guys,

notably Ludwig, this great tanker owner and builder.

Now, what effect would that have?

Well, there are news from that enterprise, the big enterprise, that are at the same time

very catastrophic and at the same time encouraging.

You know, he has acquired a vast amount of land.

And I think in good faith, he thought that he could replace

without deforestation, that he could replace the original

trees that are slow in growing.

by fast-going trees to make the paper industry.

And he had spent really a big portion of his fortune

and made enormous efforts to have environmental studies made,

et cetera, et cetera.

Well, at the latest news showed that it is a complete failure,

that new trees refused to grow.

And so the future of this experiment is unfortunately

doomed.

At the same time, it is a lesson

that we must not play apprentice sorcerer.

- You know, as you talk about the sorcerer's apprentice,

coming back to home, fooling around with nature,

we know that man, we're not putting down inventions

that make life more livable, of course.

But we question sometimes,

living is better through chemistry.

You have a sentence I call living better through chemistry,

what the chemicals do.

But you pointed some early homes of those we call primitive

people or not.

Early American Indian homes, Hogan's and others,

were built to fit in with nature and not against it.

And as a result, it was livable in real sense.

Absolutely.

It's striking to see, for example, in Italy how

artistically the old villages were blended with nature.

It's absolutely amazing when you see--

in some parts of France also.

But Italy is maybe more striking.

People had time to think.

They started to erect a wall and said, well,

this is too high.

Stop it there.

And here on the contrary, near the church,

I can make such and such roof.

And this was not decided by people coming out of the

university and knowing nothing about the place.

and being also under pressure of time and money.

So there's an entirely divorce of attitude,

the whole nature.

- Yeah, I know that you and your colleagues

are not putting down technology as such.

- No, no, no, on the contrary.

- You're thanks to misuse of it.

- Misuse.

- Here, for example, I just point, as we're talking,

I turn to the Almanac, page 249,

GNP, Gross National Product, you know, how we build,

not counting what counts.

In the opening paragraph I underlined before,

the gross national product GNP measures money.

It doesn't measure how clean water is,

how literate a population is,

where the children have shoes to wear,

where the infants die before their first birthday,

where the workers are satisfied with their jobs and homes,

whether they receive more than a week's vacation a year.

In fact, the GNP leaves out a lot.

- It leaves out life.

It's completely, oh, you know, you know another thing.

I don't know if we say it in the Almanac or not.

But you know what is included in the GNP?

Gross National Product.

The medical expenses.

It means that the more you're sick,

The worst your health is, the greater the GNP.

So they're starting to get you out of there.

- So anti-human. - Oh, absolutely.

- Something anti-human is included

as though it was something good.

- That's right.

Which is absolutely nonsense.

- So we come back to what,

if there is a subtext for this book, it is that.

It is the fact that here's the world of so many possibilities

and as a result, so many cumulative dangers.

And they're saying, the emphasis has been on the ledger,

rather than the flesh and blood person.

That's what we're talking about.

- That's what we're talking about.

And who want to be those damned humanists.

- Oh, those damned, by the way, this is one of the,

first time in years that the word humanist

hasn't some quarters become pejorative.

A big of secular humanists, a humanist.

I thought a human was a compliment.

I thought it was a compliment until this year.

I thought it was the greatest compliment to make to someone.

When we said that Leonardo da Vinci was a big humanist,

we thought we were making a compliment.

Not so.

So we're talking about a perversion of our own interests,

aren't we?

The Orman Act deals with all aspects,

with the food, the food we're eating and how it can be, must be better, of the

of the wave makers who certainly finding certain corporate interests, so the army

engineers who are doing something, or just fighting just predators generally.

You also have what happened as a result of certain oil spills, like the Tari

Canyon and the Resith, but throughout you've got the positive negative. I mean

You have underneath, you've got somebody,

it could be a housewife, it could be a young guy,

an old retired man who leads a movement

to improve a community to save a river.

- We have to spread the seeds so that many of these people

get active and help us.

- And the question is who owns here,

since who knows the sea better than you?

One of the questions, who owns the sea?

Well, now some crazy diplomats sitting on the table

at the low of the sea conference have decided

to cut up the sea as they would the meat of a pig

and saying, "Well, this piece is yours, okay?

"And this is yours."

And without thinking that instead of being a meat or a ground,

It's a fluid, and it flows from one place to another,

and nobody owns it.

I tell you a story that recently happened to me.

I went to Canada in this expedition

in the St. Lawrence River, and at the Mangon River,

I was invited alongside the river for dinner

by an Indian chief, and we sat down,

a few friends of mine and a few Indians around the fire on

the river's edge in the evening.

And across the river, we could see a beautiful villa hidden

in the trees.

And I knew of the difficulties that the Indians had to get

permission to fish in the rivers as they always had in the

past.

Most of the time, it's because of the tourist organization,

Canadian tourist organization, who wants to

attract tourists fishermen from America as tourists.

And in order to do so, they want to keep as many salmon as

possible and forbid the Indians to fish their salmon.

In other cases, the rivers have been acquired by owners who

claim that they own it.

So around that fire, we talk about these problems.

And then finally, he suddenly raised his voice.

And you see that house over there,

there's an American living there.

He claims he owns the river.

And I told him, "If you own the river,

"take it back with you to the United States."

(laughing)

Because the Indians do not understand

how one person can claim to own a piece of land because throughout the years they have

never owned anything. They were taking advantage of the land on which they were. But this land

did not, it was their mother, it was not their property. And you know that famous word, how can

you plow the land, how can you do this once in your mother's flesh? And this respect for

the earth that was ingrained in the earth. Mother earth. Mother earth. Mother earth.

And if you hurt your mother, she will not accept you in her womb when you die. And there

are beautiful traditions. Since that story is very moving, but also

so it's very filled with insights.

Mother, how can you do this to your mother?

- That's right.

- You know, the slang phrase used by kids today,

that's precisely what we're doing to our mother,

the earth, these guys who are doing it.

- That's right.

- The MFs, you see?

That's precisely what they're doing to the earth.

And it's this marvelous insight that this old Indian,

that you have, and the Oral Manac of Christo,

the Crestor woman, I filled with, as you were talking about that, I just flipped to a page,

578, and the courageous judge of Otranto, these are the way the makers again.

Ah yes, Naetati.

That's my friend Naetati.

That's my friend Naetati.

Now, what's remarkable about this judge is, this, he was the hero of Henrik Ipsen's play,

"Anime of the People", written a century ago, I mean the same kind of man.

It's about a town he lives in, and he says the waters polluted.

Now, people in the town make their money from tourists.

You'll be angry, but he won the battle.

That's right.

Now, in enemy of the people, in a small town in Norway, there's a distinguished doctor

like this judge, Dr. Stockman.

The town is known for its spot.

Dr. Stockman?

That's a...

I know, it's an unfortunate choice of name at the moment.

He has no relation to young Dave, who has more than a slingshot on his side right now.

Anyway, Dr. Stockman is respected in the community.

The community makes its money as a spa for the tourists.

He's the spa, he makes a discovery one day.

The spa's poisoned.

- The spa's poisoned.

- Yeah, so he says we must close it.

The doctor made this discovery that this poison

in the waters, and they didn't know it, polluted.

And so he says, this is the play.

And he says let's close it, you know, until it's clear.

People are furious 'cause their profits will be taken away.

So they stone him.

So he makes a speech at the end.

He's just because you're the majority at this moment.

Doesn't mean you're right, you see.

But he was sticking to his guns,

even though he lost respect and security.

So here's in real life Judge Maratati.

- He's doing exactly that.

- And who won, so there's hope.

- He won, there is hope.

- So this is what, so the--

- You know, the end of that story

is not in the Almanac because it's recent.

After Mauritati had won the battle,

with our help to a certain extent, we helped to a thing.

Another ship sank off Sardinia,

loaded with terrible poisons.

It was less than three months before the Italian government

decided to spend millions of dollars

recovering the poison from the bottom of the sea.

So it has created a precedent, at least in Italy.

And I am trying to get the Italian precedents

to the rest of the world so that if something like this

happens elsewhere, the governments

will feel obliged to do at least as well as the Italians.

- You know, this book is a hopeful book.

It is a book of warning.

- Morning and hope, yeah.

- Because you speak of Donora, Pennsylvania,

and the smog and the deaths in London and Love Canal

and the oil spills of the ships

and the food and the, at the same time,

it is dotted throughout with Judge Moratate's

"Peets and Others."

And so I was thinking at the very end,

we're just touching very lightly on the Ormanac,

you speak of the dolphins.

We touched on the strategy of the dolphins.

If you would read that, perhaps,

oh, we've done a touch on this book, the Custo Ormanac,

and it's a double-day dolphin, the publishers,

and my guest is Captain Jacques Cousteau.

Suppose you were to read the strategy of Dawkins from that into Pete's song, and we have a

combination of the two that ordinary people can by working together and learning what

it's about.

It's easy to learn or two.

You could perhaps save our environment.

Before that, anything you feel like saying we haven't talked about?

You want me to read this?

Yes.

But before that, anything, any, we've just...

Well, we are betting.

we are betting, we are making an enormous bet at the Christos Society, or betting on

the wiseness of the intelligence, of the sensitivity, of the courage of people. We

are not betting on any other thing. We are not loving anybody else than the men in the

street. So if they agree, I would love them to become apostles, to preach around them,

to spread the ideas, to spread some of the information in the Salmanac and others, wherever

they can get, write information, spread it throughout the world. Well, here we have ended

with the strategy of the dolphin.

It is an unavoidable fact of international life

that the decision makers in governments everywhere

are most influenced by vested interests

with extravagant lobbying budgets and by organizations

with enormous memberships.

Those of us who love the sea or recognize the blood

relationship of all Earth's being,

who see on this water planet a growing threat

to our most fundamental biological machinery,

to not command the money and power

of even a single major multinational corporation.

But we can wield the formidable power of our numbers,

the strength of a great unified crowd

of citizens of the planet.

How sad and how alarming is the rate

of environmental devastation,

we ourselves are increasingly threatened

by toxic debris and lethal miscalculation.

It is unbelievable, it is unacceptable.

We must stop this stupidity,

and the most effective weapon we have as citizens, as parents,

is the sheer force of our numbers.

That is the strategy of the dolphin,

when threatened by an animal armed with greater strength

and size, pursued by a large shark,

A pack of dolphins will suddenly turn en masse, dive below the shark and dive their blunt

noses into its belly one after another.

It is the perfect strategy.

With no ribs or diaphragm to protect its vital organs, the shark is vulnerable.

For all of its power, the shark is defeated by intelligence and the force of numbers.

It is the weaponry of the peacemakers and the common people throughout history.

Let me offer a final thought for all the darkness that presently confront us and our descendants.

There is no reason to give up.

There is every reason to take up the fight because we have within our grasp the power

of the people to force the right decisions.

The more people, the more power, the more hope.

[MUSIC]

Down this winding highway, Travellers from deer and far

Yet I was never alone

exploring all the little byways,

sighting all the distant stars.

And I was not far from sailing.

♪ Sailing down my golden river ♪

♪ Sun and water all my own ♪

♪ And I was not far from home ♪

From home.

(gentle music)

[Music]