Granddaughter of Jacques Cousteau Talks Water Conservation with Students
November 22, 2010
“I was born into a family that is a little peculiar,” Alexandra Cousteau (C’98) explained to students at the third of this semester’s Dean’s Lunch Seminars.
Throughout the academic year, the Dean’s Lunch Seminars bring together Georgetown College students with prominent alumni and leading members of the Washington, DC community for lunch and conversation. Cousteau—who is the granddaughter of ground-breaking filmmaker, ecologist, and inventor Jacques Cousteau—returned to her alma mater to discuss her own journey as an adventurer and environmentalist.
Her interest in conservation began at a young age, Cousteau told students. She went on her first “expedition,” her grandfather’s term for his now famous research trips, to Easter Island at only four months old. “When I was seven, my grandfather taught me to scuba dive,” she recalled. For years he educated her about the environment, biodiversity, and underwater ecologies, but he also kept her guessing. “If you want to know about the world, you’ll have to go see for yourself,” he told her.
After graduating from Georgetown she did just that. Cousteau worked in television and film production, studied dolphins at the Harvard Oceanographic Institution, dove with humpback whales in Maui, and helped fisherman in Costa Rica engage in sustainable fishing practices. Although Cousteau’s degree in Government seems incongruous with her environmental projects, she said that her coursework at Georgetown affected her future profoundly. Her international relations classes, she explained, taught her about global cause and effect, which proved to be “the greatest tool I have used in everything I’ve done.” Cousteau emphasized using “systems thinking”—the consideration of how everything from politics to ecology has a global effect—to combat the “fragmentation” of knowledge that arises when people don’t connect daily practices with their environment impacts.
Cousteau’s recent projects have been aimed at raising awareness about the human impact on the global water supply. In 2008, she founded Blue Legacy, an initiative that explores and documents environmental change and “the story of our water planet.” This year, Cousteau and her team spent four months travelling over 14,000 miles across North America as part of Expedition Blue Planet, investigating global water issues in the United States and Canada. Combining blog posts, photographic essays, and short web documentaries, Expedition Blue Planet is helping viewers understand their own place in the story of America’s changing watersheds.
“When you poison your water, you destroy your community,” Cousteau explained. In the United States, “Over half of our rivers are neither fishable, drinkable, nor swimmable.” She pointed to the Gulf of Mexico is as a prime example of an ecosystem in extreme distress. Even before the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill, she said, there was a dead zone the size of New Jersey in the gulf as a result of agricultural runoff. “We thought that was the worst,” she said. Now the oil spill has irreversibly ruined the marine ecology, and generations of people who relied upon those waters have lost their livelihoods and family identities. The Gulf Oil Spill is “an intergenerational issue that we’ve stopped talking about six months after the fact,” Cousteau lamented. The consequences of the spill are environmental, economic, and industrial, and they affect local and international affairs. For this reason, public discourse about the environment should not be “the environmentalist against everyone else,” Cousteau argued. “The environment needs to stop being a special interest.”
Cousteau turned out to be the most popular Dean’s Lunch speaker of the semester, and drew students from diverse majors. Junior Amy Burns (C’12), who is majoring the new Environmental Biology program, has attended several luncheons previously. “They’re alumni and they’ve gone out and done something—it’s very inspiring,” she said. With her was Iveta Bakalova (C’12), a Government major who aspires to be an environmental lawyer. Bakalova said she was originally drawn to the talk because of Cousteau’s famous name, but was happy to learn that neither Cousteau nor her grandfather were trained marine biologists. Bakalova was heartened to learn “you can still have a passion for something and reach out from different sectors.”
Cousteau encouraged students to become involved in their local water issues, finding out where their water comes from and where it goes. Writing yourself into the water story, Cousteau explained, helps you understand your own role in the ecosystem. “If we don’t write ourselves into stories, we don’t internalize them,” she explained. “That’s what my grandfather did….he told us stories and helped us connect the dots.”
--Jessica Beckman
Photos by Kuna Hamad.
Watch "Ocean of Doubt: Polluted Waters, Broken Communities," a short documentary produced by Expedition Blue Planet here.
Click on the icon below to hear a Podcast of Alexandra Cousteau's Dean's Lunch Seminar.
