Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910 – 1997)
French naval officer, inventor, explorer and researcher.
In the last few decades, a terribly pernicious rumor has been circulated by the press. It claims, exhibiting a level of stupidity heretofore considered impossible, that a human being could crawl through the arteries of a blue whale. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth. I do not know why this deleterious rumor has been systematically repeated, but its very existence is an ugly cancer upon the face of science.
The real cure for our environmental problems is to understand that our job is to salvage Mother Nature. . . We are facing a formidable enemy in this field. It is the hunters... and to convince them to leave their guns on the wall is going to be very difficult.
Farming as we do it is hunting, and in the sea we act like barbarians.
To yackety-yak about the past is for me time lost. Every morning I wake up saying, "I'm still alive — a miracle." And so I keep on pushing.
The future is in the hands of those who explore... and from all the beauty they discover while crossing perpetually receding frontiers, they develop for nature and for humankind an infinite love.
I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.
Buoyed by water, he can fly in any direction — up, down, sideways — by merely flipping his hand. Under water, man becomes an archangel.
From birth, man carries the weight of gravity on his shoulders. He is bolted to earth. But man has only to sink beneath the surface and he is free.
We must plant the sea and herd its animals … using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing hunting.
The awareness of our environment came progressively in all countries with different outlets.
Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.
Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.
No aquarium, no tank in a marine land, however spacious it may be, can begin to duplicate the conditions of the sea. And no dolphin who inhabits one of those aquariums or one of those marine lands can be considered normal.
And let us remember too that life, in its exuberance, always succeeds in overflowing the narrow limits within which man thinks he can confine it.
If we were logical, the future would be bleak indeed. But we are more than logical. We are human beings, and we have faith, and we have hope and we can work.