Photos Courtesy: EarthEcho International Philippe Cousteau Sr. MISSION: WATER 38 HEADLINE WATER HEROES Q. Tying back to your family roots – what was it like growing up in a family of explorers? Philippe: My father passed away six months before I was born. So, there was both inspiration and some tragedy from an early age, but thank goodness I had my grandfather and my mother there to support me. My mother spent 13 years on expedition with my father. So, between the two of them, and my father's films and books, I was inspired. People may not remember, but [my father, Philippe Cousteau Sr.] filmed, produced, and directed 26 episodes of the series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which was popular at the time. He had his own award-winning series, Oasis in Space and was as much of a pioneer as my grandfather… he was the right hand to so much that [Jacques Cousteau] did. He led conservation efforts and was a global environmental advocate in his own right. So, I was in that environment growing up and it was a huge inspiration. I always like to say first and foremost, I believe my father and grandfather both left behind a legacy of problem-solving. People think of my grandfather as this tall, lanky, Frenchman - as a global visionary, and leader in conservation, an explorer, a filmmaker, and all of these things, and he certainly was all of those. But for me, he was a problem-solver. When he started out as a young man, he had no ambition to explore the oceans. His goal and ambition, initially, was to fly with the Naval Aviation Program. Unfortunately, he broke his back in a car accident, which I like to call the most fortuitous or luckiest car accident in history – both for the world because it eventually changed history by setting him on a different course, but also for me because all of the remaining members of his Naval Aviation class were killed in the early days of World War II. If it wasn't for that car accident, I literally wouldn't be here, so I'm grateful for it. And… the world would be a very different place because he was told to swim in the Mediterranean every day to rebuild his back strength. He was struck by this [undersea] world that he saw and a friend gave him a pair of homemade goggles to use. Those weren’t things you could go down to the store and buy back then. And he used those goggles to start freediving and he became frustrated that he couldn't spend more time underwater. Some people may forget the only way we could explore the oceans in the early 1900’s was through hard helmet diving that you see in the old Jules Verne movies…or through freediving. That was a problem [for Jacques] so he sought a way to solve it. To make a long story short, he met an engineer and they co- invented scuba diving as we know it today. Then he wanted to figure out ways to film what he was seeing underwater to share the experience with others, so together they figured out ways to create underwater cameras. So, every step along the way, there was a problem that he sought to solve. Eventually, over the course of a decade or more of diving and exploring the Mediterranean, he saw all of these aquatic environments for the first time and he was the first to show it to the world. At this point in time, most people knew very little about the ocean. They only knew what we pulled out of it and ate, and the trash we'd dumped into it. Over the course of a decade or so, [my grandfather] witnessed a precipitous decline in the health of the environment. In the Mediterranean, in particular, the population explosion post-World War II and corresponding trash, waste, and overfishing threatened the ocean. It was shocking. His thinking evolved from exploring the oceans to recognizing he had a responsibility to protect them. So that's it...it's a long answer, but it kind of gives a little bit of context to our family’s thinking and how I grew up. A young Philippe Cousteau Sr. with his father, Jacques.