Aquanaut, oceanographic explorer, conservationist and documentary filmmaker Fabien Cousteau sat down with SeafoodSource on the last day of the SeaWeb Seafood Summit in New Orleans.
The first grandson of Jacques-Yves Cousteau works to protect and preserve the planet’s endangered marine inhabitants and habitats through his efforts with Mission 31.
Wright: In your explorations, what do you believe is the most easily correctable problem concerning the world’s oceans? And what is the most difficult?
Cousteau: I think the most easily correctable problem is education and spreading as much of that information out there to the general public as possible. with that we can then make better dec in our every day lives whether we’re individuals or corporations or what have you. The most difficult are sometimes just changing our bad habits. I say difficult because as beings we sometimes get complacent and loathe change. But change sometimes brings about quite a bit of innovation and other opportunities.
W: You speak of environmental discipline. What does mean to you and how can that be achieved?
C: Environmental discipline sounds awful but it’s actually just a natural part of us. Way back in history and if you look at traditional cultures, we’ve always had environmental discipline in that we’ve lived in symbiotic relationship with our life-support system on this planet and all the resources that are on it and all the sentient beings that are around us. I think we’ve lost our way in some ways because we had a bit of rapture of development and that kind of led us on a path of unsustainability, uncontrolled growth. In many ways we forgot to make better decisions during that growth period. We’re now correcting the course. A conference like SeaWeb’s is one of those platforms that gives great hope that seemingly opposing teams, if you will, NGOs and corporations as well as government and so on, are now getting together and having productive discussions and are cooperating together for better decisions.
W: True change on the water will take political will. What political developments, globally, have you feeling encouraged about the future health of the world’s oceans?
C: Political will is driven by a number of things isn’t it? On the negative side those in politics typically are facing very short-term relationships with their jobs. And so a lot of the decisions that are being made are with that kind of shortsighted path. I think if we can as a global community encourage those decision-makers to make longer-term decisions for the benefit of society, for the benefit of our long-term future, will go a long way. That said there have been really good signs of change, between marine protected areas being expanded, between better fishing practices and enforced regulations in certain countries and hopefully many more to come, we can look to a lot of positive impact on the environment as well as on business.
W: You’re feeling optimistic?
C: I do. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few years with folks originally arguing with each other and now sharing ideas for a better future.
