The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus
Appeared: 01/19/2008
The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World. Jacques Cousteau and Susan Schiefelbein. Bloomsbury USA.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau has gone on to his work in the Abhá Kingdom, but for some of us fond childhood memories include eagerly awaiting his next TV show. At the age of eight, from my grandparents' house in Florida, I imagined an exciting career in oceanography, featuring trips to the bottom of the Marianas Trench and months living in Sealab. Well, everybody knows I didn't become an oceanographer, but I still love Jacques Cousteau and the marvelous gift he gave us all—the knowledge of our very own Ocean.
Yes, I say Ocean, because there's really only one. Great and wide, it girdles the Earth, and its separation is only illusion. Cousteau understood this, as he also understood:
The visions science bestows us can guide us into a bright new age. But first . . . we must stop using the powers of science to threaten other nations and begin using them to heal our global divisions. We must finally learn that one nation's turning against another is like a hand turning against a heart, two living elements of one living body, trying to damage its own parts and thereby destroying its whole. 1
Cousteau and his collaborator worked on this book for some twenty years. Its title refers to the two creatures that biologists consider to be the most complex vertebrate and the most complex plant; to this duet Cousteau adds a third, his vote for the most complex invertebrate. And while the book is filled with what most of us expect a "Cousteau book" to be—marvelous descriptions of the creatures inhabiting the sea—it is equally an autobiography and a warning. I learned that Cousteau nearly died when, as a young naval officer on leave, rushing to visit his fiancée, he sustained a horrific car accident that nearly killed him and rendered his left arm weak for years (it had been transfixed by a tree branch and doctors feared the loss of it, and Cousteau's life, to gangrene). I watched Cousteau, again as a naval officer, witness the bombarding of Italian civilians by his ship during World War II, and felt his anguish and helplessness in the face of total war. Cousteau writes, "I listened to the sounds but I did not watch the sights." 2
The destruction of war and the promise of peace is only one of the subjects Cousteau touches on in what is almost a compulsively readable book. He discusses what he calls "saccage"—the indiscriminate wasting of the Earth by those to whom profit is the only motive; as one of the foremost marine explorers he is in a prime position to describe the tragic effects of overfishing. He devotes the fifth chapter of his book, "The Holy Scriptures and the Environment", to an examination of religious teachings on the subject of man's relation to the planet on which he lives. The quotes he uses are drawn from every major religion and then some, and Cousteau asks pointedly, "How many instead behave as latter-day Peters, vociferously attesting to their belief in God but denying Him when the opportunity arises to protect the environment as holy writings mandate?" 3
Jacques Cousteau died in 1997. His co-writer Susan Schiefelbein has supplied an afterword that details both progress and delay (and sometimes downright sabotage) on the fronts dear to Cousteau's heart, ecology and peace. Her reporting is sobering. We have far to go, but I'm sure that Jacques Cousteau is somewhere there in the Abhá Kingdom, reunited with his son Philippe, continuing to be "the pure leaven that leaveneth the world of being, and furnisheth the power through which the arts and wonders of the world are made manifest". 4
1. Jacques Cousteau, The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, p. 202-3.
2. Cousteau, p. 188.
3. Cousteau, p. 117.
4. Bahá'u'lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, LXXXII, p. 161
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