Two Generations Commemorate Jacques Cousteau’s 100th Birthday in Chile

Originally Published on the Front Page of the Santiago Times

Tuesday, Nov. 23, 2010

Pierre-Yves Cousteau fumbles with his dive gear as he hurriedly prepares to join the rest of the divers in the frigid waters of the Chilean Pacific just off the shores of Quintay.  Certainly not inexperienced in comparison with the average 28-year-old diver, (but perhaps slightly so alongside his team Cousteau elder Henri Garcia), Cousteau carries the torch of the newest generation of the Cousteau family legacy.  And he does so with an energetic sense of ambitious pride.  

Pierre-Yves Cousteau and Henri Garcia had arrived at the Universidad Andrés Bello marine biology research compound, where Cousteau would meet and speak to a group of young marine biology students before he and Garcia would submerge below the surface of the sea for a quick dive.

This particular dive commemorates a special year for the Cousteau organization, celebrating the 100th year since the birth of legendary innovator and undersea explorer, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Pierre’s father.  The occasion had been met with respectful recognition from the Chilean Ministers of Environment and Economy who earlier had presented gifts and short speeches for Cousteau, and the following day was to be followed by further acknowledgement from the President of Chile, Sebastian Piñera, as he would dub Pierre-Yves Cousteau "Forjador Ambiental de Chile."

The Cousteau presence in Chile is not foreign.  Many a time has the team explored the Pacific waters along Chile's sprawling coastline, most notably filming “The Cousteau Odyssey: The Blind Prophets of Easter Island”, where Garcia has lived for the last 26 years.  

Pierre has also been no stranger to Chile.  He has visited Garcia in Easter Island three times.  He visited the country twice while doing studies in the Atacama Desert with NASA, where he and his crew discovered microorganisms in areas that were though to be void of multi-cellular life.  

Now meeting with government officials as they pay tribute to his father, Cousteau speaks his message with hopes to influence Chile to push the envelope for its environmental agenda.

“Let's place [my father’s vision] of sustainability because the world needs to have a model, a country that it can use as an example for how we can all live together.  It's very important that governments and companies start doing this, because environmental issues are very much global issues, and [those issues] don't know any borders, most of the time, when you're talking about water, or air.  So it's very important, I think, that Chile leads the way into a sustainable world - positions itself as an example for the world.”

Nearing 60 years of age, Garcia first began working with Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1973 during the birth of the Cousteau Society, and knew him throughout most of his life.  Now approaching old age, a spry Garcia appears rugged with a gash under his left eye, yet still lively and fit, and is wearing his original timeworn red cap in Captain Cousteau tradition.  

With the tattoo-laden, sun-browned skin of a man of the sea, he excitedly gears up for the day's dive, (still using his original 1961 model regulator), with the youngest of the Cousteau sons, and his newest exploring companion.  

“I worked with Cousteau from ’71 until ’84, but we met in ’71 … I knew him for most of my life,” Garcia said, his expression turning from cheery to dutifully serious. 

Cousteau and Garcia have a spark of energy bouncing between them as they prepare to dive, seeming to foreshadow a special relationship within the future of the Cousteau Society.  When asked if he intended to embark on future missions with Garcia, Cousteau replied, "absolutely." 

"For the past ten years, [Garcia] has been scouting out all of Chile, and preparing 12 expeditions, which we're now looking into the feasibility of doing," said an enthusiastic Cousteau. 

Youthful Cousteau doesn't quite resemble the sort of sea-dog appearance of Garcia, but a spitting image of his father – very lean, handsome, and spirited.  Physicality aside, he also carries the same remarkably strong-willed spirit to do only what he loves, which aside from a serious interest in space sciences, currently revolves around pressing onward with the family tradition of protecting the ocean.

The Cousteau legacy began to take form in the late 50's and 60's as Jacques-Yves Cousteau co-invented the Aqualung, along with other technologies that opened up an entire newly exposed aquatic world, one which Cousteau and his fellow adventurers put on display for millions of curious eyes.  With a passion for the written word, and a strong screen-presence, Cousteau and his team wrote books and produced documentary films that changed the world of marine and environmental awareness. 

But the Cousteau team wasn't always a setting an example of unprecedented ecological preservation.  It was exploring an evolution of ideas. Those early golden-days were marked by new technology and unsure discoveries.  As Pierre humorously put it, they were the "children of the new world" as they embarked upon the seas to film renowned documentaries such as 1966’s The Silent World, as the young and spirited adventures that they were.

"I watched The Silent World again recently, and it's shocking," Pierre said with a grin that acknowledged slight irony of what the team had been in comparison to what they had become, "they are blowing up coral with dynamite, harpooning whales, killing sharks..."

But Captain Cousteau and his team hadn't gone out to just blow things up and stir up trouble on the sea.  They were just crawling towards an ideal; one of thorough education of the aquatic world.  And it wasn't long before that crawl became the walk of the Cousteau society, as it were, into the heyday of the ever-progressing environmental discoverers.  

Those wild days of yesteryear had passed, and the Cousteau Society spent decades researching and educating, slowly molding the Cousteau Society to rise to great heights in the world of environmentalism, garnering much respect along the way as they produced over 115 television films and 50 books that revolutionalized the way people considered pollution, environmental sustainability, and ecological responsibility. 

Captain Cousteau believed in the essential decency of the human race. He used his words and images diligently as a proponent of his ideals for decades as he and his crew pressed on through the 70's and 80's accompanied by both success and tragedy; perhaps the greatest tragedy being the loss of his son and fellow visionary, Phillipe Cousteau, in a fatal sea-plane crash.

In 1977 Jacques-Yves Cousteau was awarded the United Nations International Environmental Prize.  In 1985 President Ronald Reagan presented him with the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.  In 1988 he was included on the UN Environmental Program's Global 500 Roll of Honor of Environmental Protection, and also received the National Geographic Society's Centennial Award. 

Perhaps his greatest achievement, in 1990 Cousteau launched a successful campaign to prevent mineral exploitation in Antarctica, which secured the Antarctica's safety for 50 years.

As Cousteau pressed onward and into his latter years leading up to his death in 1996, he spent more time with his family, and kept his pen to paper, knowing the mission was not over.  It was during this time that Pierre-Yves Cousteau got to know his father and began to appreciate the legacy that the Captain would be left behind.

"During those years he was mostly at home and he was mostly writing. And his words had the power to protect an entire continent - the power to protect nature,” Cousteau proudly recounts the 16 years he spent with his father.  “I was there and witnessed that. That's the father I know." 

Pierre-Yves sits with Garcia's arm around his shoulder as they joke around before plunging over the edge of the small skiff in Chile, 100 years after the Captain’s birth.

Cousteau and Garcia submerge, splashing backwards over the side of the boat, along with a small dive crew and an a high-tech underwater video camera, just as Cousteau’s father would have been doing alongside Garcia nearly 40 years ago. 

Pierre has set out to take his name in the Cousteau history, and has hit the ground running as he graduated his biology and space science studies, working with NASA and the European Space Institute, and has already embarked on a major Cousteau team expedition in June on the Mediterranean filming with National Geographic. 

The Mediterranean expedition was somewhat symbolic in nature.  The team used original footage from his father's Mediterranean voyages to visually compare the success of preservation efforts - sort of a before and after, father-son use of original Cousteau relics.  The voyage proved fruitful as the team discovered that many of the damaged areas of the dying Mediterranean were actually surviving – thriving. 

Pierre is also campaigning the newly created Cousteau Divers Program, which deploys recreational divers all over the world as educated observers of the environment, in an attempt to document human impact on the ocean via skilled documentations and photographs that group members post to the internet. 

"We're designing this to first target the population of divers, that niche there of people who are already sensitized to the environment, who love the environment ... to ask those people to become, in the name of my father, protectors, active agents of conservation through participative science and participative multimedia." 

Long term he hopes to work collectively with hundreds of thousands of recreational divers around the globe to create a groundbreaking database of ecological and environmental documentation.

As the divers surface from the icy waters, Cousteau and Garcia tread water together and talk for a few minutes as they wait for the skiff to come pick them up.  It is interesting to watch; they are two peculiar products of the Cousteau Odyssey.   Garcia was 21 upon meeting Cousteau, who was 51 at the time.  Pierre wasn’t even born until roughly 21 years later. Garcia and Cousteau swimming together here on the Chilean coast almost represent an oddly paired team – but they also represent the beginning to a new era for the Cousteau society.  

This new era is marked by the doctrine of the old one, that which sees promise, hope, and teamwork within the relationship of human beings and the environment.  That promise must come from visionaries - people who have the bold optimism and passionate spirit to inspire progress.  Captain Cousteau had that.  His crew had it. And his sons have it. 

"Although we [humans] can be extremely efficient at destroying the environment, we can also be engineers of paradise on earth," Pierre-Yves Cousteau says steadily as the boat dips and dives over the waves, returning to the shore of Quintay.  

The crew undresses and packs up equipment, and Henri and Pierre part ways.  But surely it won't be their last dive together - likely the contrary: the first of many more for the Cousteau Odyssey.