The Magazine of The Sierra Club
The fab Fabien Cousteau
Fabien Cousteau, ocean explorer and Plant a Fish founder
Fabien Cousteau, ocean explorer and Plant a Fish founder | Photo courtesy of Carrie Vonderhaar/Ocean Futures Society
"There is no Planet B. We can't trash this place and go somewhere else."
—Fabien Cousteau
Fabien Cousteau—third-generation ocean explorer, swashbuckling underwater filmmaker, and Renaissance environmental man—had a brainstorm late one night while reading an article about a tree-planting project. "Why does restoration stop at the waterline?" he wondered. "Why aren't we planting fish?"
He launched the nonprofit Plant a Fish in June to commemorate his grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau's 100th birthday and World Oceans Day—just as oil was gushing into the Gulf. PAF's first project was planting oysters in the Hudson River with students from the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School. Next up: planting mangroves with high schoolers in Florida, restoring hawksbill populations with turtle-egg hunters in El Salvador, and cultivating coral reefs in the Maldives and the Florida Keys.
Q: It seems appropriate that you'd be involved with the New York Harbor School for the oyster project. Was your life outside the classroom like an international ocean school?
A: Absolutely. It's funny how so many people think of the world as countries—these political lines on a map. Nature doesn't care about these invisible lines on a piece of paper. Everything that goes on in nature affects everybody regardless of where you live, whether it's in the atmosphere, on land, or in the water. Fish don't have passports.
Q: How do you select projects for Plant a Fish?
A: Oysters was an easy one, because I'm based out of New York City and felt it was imperative that I give back to my own backyard. The key elements are education, getting people to connect with the ocean, to understand why it's important and why they should care, whether they're on the oceanside or not; empowerment, saying, you can make a difference, and come with us, let's go do it together; and, of course, restoration.
Q: I saw a video clip in which you said the water in the Gulf was akin to a "vinaigrette."
A: I compared it to a vinaigrette because everyone thinks, "Why can't we contain this oil spill with booms?" If [the ocean] were a bathtub, oil would have the tendency to float, and we could skim it off. But it's not a bathtub. It's a dynamic system, with storms, wave activity, currents that churn the oil down deep and up above. It's like opening Pandora's box. So, yeah, it is like shaking up a vinaigrette. And that's maybe more of the way we should look at this.
