Stories From a Blue Planet, w/ Alexandra Cousteau

by Jon Bowermaster on

In 2009, Alexandra Coustau’s Blue Legacy Expedition took her and a small team of documenters to five continents in one hundred days, in search of clean drinking water. Though occasionally far from the ocean, she found herself constantly seeing the link between the sea and mankind’s sustainability, as well as to her grandfather, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who would have been one hundred years old this year. Below, as excerpted from OCEANS, The Threats to Our Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide she reflects on her career.

The ancients told of water. Carved deeply in stone and crafted carefully in story and song, their superstitions and histories and wisdoms cascade across centuries and flow through our lives today: “From the heights of a mountain…” “By the banks of a river…” “Upon the shores of a homeland…” and so the stories go. And so we tell them still. For history has always been written in water.

And yet, for all the wonder and worship, throughout most of human history, the mysteries of this water planet were out of sight and beyond understanding. The oceans were vast unknowable surfaces across which ships sailed bravely in search of wealth or distant lands and adventure. Beneath this plane lay a mysterious void filled by the wild creatures of myth, an inexhaustible supply of fish, or some combination of both. Rivers cradled civilizations, nurturing the evolution of societies while carrying away the waste and transgressions of communities. And the rains came as they would for reasons most everyone could explain but seldom in the same way or for the same purpose. So man spoke of water as one who sees without knowing- hoping somehow to explain the wonders beyond and beneath the water planet he called home.But as time passed, the siren call of exploration tempted the hearts of both pilgrims and wanderers to pierce the dark night of ignorance and see the planets spinning-to step beyond the binding traditions of mortality and think the thoughts of gods. And they too told of water. Some throwing sheets into the wind would rush to the edge of the world to drown echoes of scorn beneath a bending horizon. Some would chart water’s course through our veins and some would harness its steam to build a bigger and better life. So story follows story as man wielded reason and exploration to unravel the mysteries of his world.

But in spite of centuries of charting the expanses of her boundaries, no one had yet searched out the depths of her oceans and this frustrated my grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Tethered to shallow, short dives by the aching in his lungs he longed to see more, to know more and so, as centuries of explorers before him had done, he sat down with a friend to rewrite the boundaries. The invention they would call the “Aqua Lung” in 1943, allowed humans to explore the underwater world for the first time, opening new fields of study and changing how we understand much of our natural surroundings.

The thrill of what he saw-of what he discovered-was more than he could contain and soon, he was back at the drawing board to design gear for my grandmother Simone and eventually even for my father Philippe.

Just four years old when his father taught him to dive, my father was so exuberant about all he saw beneath the calm surface of the water – a darting school of fish here, a brightly colored coral there, a waving forest of life just beyond – that he repeatedly tried to call out to my grandfather. He was blissfully unaware that each exclamation caused the regulator to fall out of his mouth, which my grandfather deftly and repeatedly replaced to keep his small, excited son from drowning.

When they finally got back aboard the ship, my grandfather scolded my father for his reckless enthusiasm saying, “You must be quiet underwater because it is a silent world.” My grandfather’s description of the new world to which he had introduced my father that day later became the title of his best selling book and Oscar-winning documentary The Silent World. And so we Cousteau have joined the generations of those who tell the stories of water.

Twenty-six years, a host of inventions, discoveries and awards would pass from that day. President John F. Kennedy would bestow the National Geographic’s Gold Medal on my grandfather at a White House ceremony honoring his work. The award-winning series he developed with my father, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, would be welcomed into living rooms around the world. His storytelling would launch a new generation of environmentalists and forever change how we see the oceans. And then Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I remember my grandfather telling me that the day he saw the headlines “Two Men Walk on the Moon” (knowing my grandfather, probably not without some healthy envy) was the day he knew our perception of the world would forever change. For the first time, we saw ourselves from outer space and realized unmistakably that our planet is in fact blue. Finally, people would see what he saw everyday from the deck of the Calypso: We live on a water planet.

The World Is Blue, w/Sylvia Earle

by Jon Bowermaster on

Sylvia Earle’s ocean experiences span seven decades and have taken her to every corner of the ocean planet. She is the first to remind us that we know very little about ninety-five percent of the ocean and its undersea world. When she talks, all of the world’s ocean lovers listen.

A National Geographic Explorer in Residence, founder of the Deep Search Foundation, and former chief scientist of NOAA she was dubbed “Her Deepness” by the New Yorker, a living legend by the Library of Congress, and Time magazine’s first Hero for the Planet, Sylvia has led more than 100 expeditions and been awarded more than 100 national and international honors, including the 2009 TED Prize for her wish “to explore and protect the ocean, blue heart of the planet.”

This month she led Mission Blue, a TED-sponsored gathering of ocean experts in the Galapagos. In an excerpt from my new book, OCEANS, The Threats to the Seas and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide, Sylvia discusses her love:

Diving into the ocean is rather like diving into the history of life on Earth. Nearly all of the major divisions of plants, animals, protists and other forms that have ever existed have at least some representation there, while only about half occur on the land. In a single gulp of plankton-filled water, a whale shark may swallow fifteen or so of the great wedges of animal life — fish, copepods, arrow worms, flatworms, jellyfish, comb jellies, salps, the larval stages of starfish, sponges, polychaete worms, peanut worms, ribbon worms, mollusks, brachiopods — and more.
Some think of the ocean as a great basin of sand, rocks and water, but it is really more like an enormous bowl of blue minestrone where all of the bits and pieces are alive. During thousands of hours suspended in the ocean’s embrace, I have been wreathed with jewel-like chains of luminous jellies, glided side by side with dozens of dolphins, been nose to nose with humpback whales, had close encounters with curious squids, and been followed around coral reefs by large, inquisitive groupers.

I have come to understand that every drop of ocean has carbon-based life in abundance, although most are too small to be seen without powerful magnification. Thousands of new kinds of microbes recently have been discovered thriving in each spoonful sample of what appears to be clear, lifeless seawater. Some miniscule blue-green bacteria are so abundant and productive that they generate the oxygen in one of every five breaths we take, but their existence was not detected until the 1990s.

More has been learned about the nature of the ocean – and its importance to all that we care about – in the past half century than during all preceding human history. A turning point came with the view — first seen by astronauts — of Earth as a blue sphere gleaming against the vastness of space. With increasing urgency, people wondered, “Are we alone? Is there life elsewhere in the universe?”

The quest begins by asking, “Where is the water?”

That’s the first question astrobiologist Chris McKay poses in his on-going search for life on Mars, the moons of Jupiter, and beyond. “Water,” he says, ” . . .is the single non-negotiable thing life requires. There is plenty of water without life . . .but nowhere is there life without water.”

No water, no life; no blue, no green or, as poet W. H. Auden points out, ” Thousands have lived without love – not one without water.”

Where blue meets blue

by Jon Bowermaster on

The upcoming Earth Day (April 22) will be the 40th; I’ve been lobbying, quietly, that this time-round the day be labeled Ocean Day instead. In part because this is without statistical question more of an ocean planet than a continental one, and because I think right now around the world there is a tsunami wave of interest in all things “ocean,” particularly the threats to its health and its fisheries.

(To that end, my new book is called simply OCEANS, Threats to the Sea and What You Can Do To Turn the Tide. Companion book to the new Jacques Perrin/DisneyNature film of the same name (OCEANS), both are officially out on Earth Day/Ocean Day. )

Who isn’t made blissful sitting at water’s edge staring at the horizon, hypnotized by that delicate, nearly imperceptible-yet-somehow-distinct line where blue meets blue? Who among us doesn’t count those solitary, sun-washed moments – whether afloat on a boat or feet dug deep into the sand — as among the favorites of a lifetime?

Cliché? Perhaps. But if the views off land’s edges are not the most soothing, the most renewing on the planet, why do so many of us flock there to live, to work, to rejuvenate? Which raises the issue of why is it that this planet is called Earth, when seventy five percent of it is Ocean? That this is not known as Planet Ocean speaks only to the ego of man, since it has nothing to do with reality. It also raises the question of exactly how many oceans there are. Go get your atlas. Inside you’ll find five mildly distinct bodies with labels (Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and Southern). I, like most whose writing graces these pages, believe there are no real distinctions, that this big body of water encircling the planet is just one ocean.

Put me on the edge, on or in the ocean at sunrise, sunset, under a blazing midday sun or even a small storm and I am content. For the past twenty years I’ve managed just that countless times. A wide variety of explorations have given me a unique perspective on both the health of the ocean and the lives of people who depend on it, a meandering route leading me from remote Bering Sea and Pacific islands, down the coasts of Vietnam and all of South America, around the various seas that surround Europe, parallel long sandy beaches in Gabon and India and rocky ones in Croatia, Tasmania and Kamchatka. At each stop I have spent time with the people whose days are most defined and shaped by the ocean.For all the differences each place offers – from browsing forest elephants and surfing hippos along the beaches of Gabon to eighty-mile-an-hour winds raking the Aleutian Islands, from horrifically-polluted bays off the South China Sea to centuries-old ritual celebrations still practiced on remote South Pacific atolls — similarities link them all. The same is true for ocean people. Though their cultures may differ – dress, food, religions and more – the people who live along coastlines have far more in common than they have differences. Instinctively, the very first thing each does in the morning is scan the horizon line, the seascape, checking the morning sky for what it might portend. Increasingly too, each is impacted by a handful of environmental risks now impacting the ocean, its coastlines and both its marine and human populations.

As the human population grows, headed fast towards nine billion, the planet’s coastlines grow ever more crowded. Fourteen of the planet’s seventeen largest cities are built on the edge of the ocean. Nearly half the world’s population – more than three billion – lives within an hour’s drive of a coast. The rich go for the views and refreshing salt air; the poor for jobs and big dreams; holiday-goers for a brief respite. But we humans are a rapacious species, seemingly incapable of taking good care of any place; over the past five centuries or so we’ve done a very good job of taking from the ocean without pause to consider its fragility and the damage we’ve done to it by our indifference.

How many of those billions who glimpse a sea with frequency, I wonder, stop to ask, How is this big, beautiful ocean of ours doing? While it has long seemed limitless, its resources infinite, there are myriad signs that we’ve now abused the ocean to the point of no return. The list of harms is long and includes threats from climate change (rising sea levels and acidification), various pollutions and over fishing. Eat fish? If so, you have to be concerned about the ocean; experts predict that by 2050 all of the fish species we currently survive on will be gone. Like tuna sashimi? Get it now since all of the world’s bluefin is anticipated to be gone by 2012. Forever. Fresh water supplies are endangered globally, with new reports suggesting that even in the wealthiest of nations (the U.S.) twenty million people drink polluted water every day.

There is some room for hope and optimism, with marine reserves and both national and international laws in the works that may help make a difference. Let’s hope they are enacted and enforced quickly enough that they can have an effect rather than just preceding an inevitable demise; around the globe, for example, far too often marine reserves have been set up only after the last fish was taken.

At each of my coastal stops during the past twenty years I have paused for long minutes, sometimes an hour and occasionally more, often far off the coast in the middle of the vast ocean, to ponder the horizon line, to watch the sun fall into the sea, or rise again. In each of those scenes I have found an incredible renewing energy. And it is the memories of those horizon lines – and the people I’ve met along the ocean’s edges — that keeps me going back for more.

Brush your teeth with bottled water – International travel tip

by Gadling Staff on

When traveling in certain countries, it’s important to drink bottled water in order to prevent illness, right?

What many people don’t realize is that they should also brush their teeth with bottled water. Even though the water from the tap is usually not swallowed when brushing, dangerous bacteria can still enter the mouth through contact.

Photo of the Day (03.06.10)

by Mike Barish on

I’m one of those people who believes that it’s OK to pee in the ocean. And in lakes. And pools. Basically, bodies of water bigger than my bathtub are fair game for urination. But, I’m always worried that pools will have that dye that activates when urine is introduced into the water. Can you imagine how embarrassing that would be? Anyway, I was reminded of how nice it is to just pee in the water when I saw this picture by Flickr user JasonBechtel. This sea lion is hidden so perfectly in the dark water. Even if that pee dye were activated, who would notice? Lucky sea lion.

Have a picture of some public urination? Or, even better, any great travel photos? Submit your images to Gadling’s Flickr group right now and we might use it for a future Photo of the Day.