jean Michel cousteau - Lux Magazine

Features, Leaders & Philanthropists

Jean-Michel Cousteau: Choose Life

Jean-Michel Cousteau and his father, Jacques, onboard their wind ship, Alcyone. © Jean-Michel Cousteau Private Collection

Darius Sanai speaks to Jean-Michel Cousteau, the French ocean explorer, film maker, educationalist, philanthropist and founder of the Ocean Futures Society, about how he is connecting with people globally to make a difference; and about his celebrated father, Jacques Cousteau

LUX: What are the objectives of the Ocean Futures Society?
Jean-Michel Cousteau: I set up the Ocean Futures Society to honour my father after he passed away. His philosophy – now our philosophy – was that if you protect the ocean, you protect yourself. We are a not-for-profit company, but if we have the resources to do it, we will get specialists from all over the world to go and do everything to preserve and protect the ocean.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

LUX: What are the greatest challenges that the oceans face today?
JMC: Acidification, and the impact that it has on every species. CO2 emissions are contributing to rising temperatures and ocean levels, and it is affecting nature’s ability to protect itself. Controlling our acidification depends directly on the consumption of oil and gas, which we are now recognising as a mistake and working to stabilise. We have an opportunity to ensure that we are using and creating other energies to replace those things.

Cousteau dives with a hammerhead shark in the Caribbean Sea. © Richard Murphy, Ocean Futures Society

LUX: How are biodiversity and climate resilience linked?
JMC: When I was diving in the Maldives, I was surprised to see the number of dead corals. Corals are a very important part of the protection of the coastline, because they help to feed and protect thousands of species around the Maldives.

The diversity of our species on land and in the ocean contributes to the stability of the entire system on the planet. Every species, plant and animal, is capital. Every time we lose that capital the system gets weaker, because other species are dependent on that particular species for survival, for food, for protection. It is our responsibility to ensure they don’t disappear. We now need to take advantage of our capacity to learn new technology, which can be used to help every one of us.

Jean-Michel Cousteau with Amazonian children at the Pilpintuwasi Butterfly Farm and Amazon Orphanage in Iquitos. © Nan Marr, Ocean Futures Society

LUX: What innovations are you seeing?
JMC: There are people analysing the difference in temperature between the shallow ocean and the deep ocean, and using that difference to create energy. I used to be worried about the currents these technologies were producing, but not anymore. Water is not compressible, and the propeller only rotates three times per minute, so the fish can go right through it.

LUX: How is your work with luxury resorts driving ocean conservation?
JMC: The Maldives is a treasure to me. The Ritz- Carlton Maldives is working with my Ocean Futures Society, and we want to make sure that this structure and space and knowledge is being preserved. We have to do everything we can to protect the coastlines, and that means stopping whatever goes into the ocean. We often talk about plastics, but that problem has been mostly addressed in the Maldives. What I am most concerned about are the chemicals and heavy metals, which we never talk about. When you take an aspirin for your headache, that chemical goes right into the ocean. What does that do to the environment? If we protect what’s around the Maldives, we will protect the people who are on the Maldives.

black and white picture of children diving

Jean-Michel Cousteau with his mother, Simone Melchior Cousteau, in 1945; a family dive; Cousteau’s father, Jacques, helps him strap on a tank. © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society. Courtesy of the Jean-Michel Cousteau private collection

LUX: How important is a just transition?
JMC: We need to stop consuming nature like we have been doing. We need to convince the president of Brazil to stop destroying all these beautiful forests, which are critical for our environment. We never talk about the thousands of local people who live in those rainforests, and who have no identity or land ownership. Stopping deforestation is not only in the interest of those people in the Amazon, but it’s in the interest of every one of us, because every species out there depends on those rainforests.

black and white image of family and woman with dog

A family portrait, including Jean-Michel, second from left; Simone on the family’s research vessel, Calypso. © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society. Courtesy of the Jean-Michel Cousteau private collection

In order to slowly stop industries like this, people involved in that kind of production are going to have to learn to switch from what they were doing to what they can do next. There are a lot of people willing to do that, and it is fascinating to see all this progress taking place today.

LUX: How do we bridge the gap between research and policy creation?
JMC: There are many things we are learning that we didn’t know 20 years ago, and we need to pass on the message to decision makers and young people. When I started the society, I was doing 10 or 20 lectures a year all round the world, but now that is not enough. I decided that I needed to sit down with the decision makers. It is critical – as long as you don’t criticise. I want to sit down with these people and try to help them ensure that our children have the same privileges that we have had.

LUX: Which policies should we prioritise?
JMC: To manage the ocean properly, we need to sit down with leaders in the fishing industry. Cargo ships consume a lot of oil, which ends up in the ocean, evaporates, and creates the CO2 that drives ocean acidification. There are many solutions to the problems we have created. We need to have more protected marine areas, in order to preserve wild populations and biodiversity. In 2006 we convinced President Bush to protect 1,200 miles of a north-western Hawaiian Island [Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument], President Obama then agreed to multiply this by four. It is now the largest marine-protected area on the planet. This is not just about the survival of life, but also for us to discover and do better. There are thousands of species in the ocean that we don’t know about. How can we protect them if we don’t know they are there?

Cousteau became the first person to represent the environment in an opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, 2002. © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society. Courtesy of the Jean-Michel Cousteau private collection

LUX: Is it the responsibility of individuals, corporations or governments to take the lead in protecting oceans?
JMC: I never point a finger. It is everybody’s responsibility: to ensure the preservation of these places, we need to have movement on a global level.

We need to approach each group differently, however. Young people are amazing. They are the ones, today, saying that we need to be careful. We want to educate young people by showing them that it is in their best interest to preserve every species on land and in the ocean.

Business people are there to make money, but if we eliminate species, there will be no money coming in. We warn them about the importance of making sure that capital is not destroyed, to think about their children and grandchildren. We have to build the bridge between what we are doing now and our responsibility for the future. Likewise, if you want politicians to build a bridge for future generations, then you have to tell them what they can do with their responsibility – whether it is in their own country, or in partnership with other countries, to make a difference. I’ve done it with the presidents of the United States, Mexico, Brazil and France. “e public will often want to keep them and that’s what it is all about.

Working with the Ritz-Carlton on his Ocean Futures Society. © Nan Marr, Ocean Futures Society

LUX: How do you educate people without being didactic?
JMC: For me, it’s about just sitting down with someone, whether it is a truck driver or a pilot, having a conversation, and helping them make better decisions. Reach for the heart instead. Because we didn’t know the damage we were doing then, but we have learnt along the way, and we need to do better than what we have done up to now.

Education is number one, but it can be fun and entertaining. Film is great because our primary sense is vision, and it enables you to connect with thousands of people in an instant. I produce films to get people to sit down for 20 minutes and hear stories and understand how everything is connected; then, if they want to, they can show the film in schools or online. (See bottom of the page for a selection of some of the groundbreaking and definitive films Cousteau has produced, directed and been involved with over the past five decades.)

Cousteau on Laysan Island, where debris litters the shoreline. © Carrie Vonderhaar, Ocean Futures Society. Courtesy of the Jean-Michel Cousteau private collection

LUX: How has your relationship with film evolved since you began?
JMC: The beauty of what’s happening today is that we have nearly 8 billion people on Earth, who are all connected with each other if they want to be. We have a communication system now that didn’t exist when I was a child, so we have no excuse to get away. We need to show, show, show.

LUX: Are you optimistic about the future of ocean conservation?
JMC: I’m totally convinced we can do it. The human species has the capability to do it. Let’s not forget that we are the only species that has the privilege to decide not to disappear. That’s our choice. I will do everything I can for the rest of my life to make sure that the next generation’s children have the same privileges that I had when I was their age.

I am the world’s most enduring scuba diver – I am celebrating 75 years [this year]. But I want to celebrate 100 years, so I have to continue diving for another 25 years.

Jean-Michel Cousteau’s filmography highlights

The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1968) Jean-Michel Cousteau was associate producer on this seminal television documentary series of which his father was the host

Cousteau: Alaska – Outrage at Valdez (1989) Frank Zappa was commissioned by Jacques Cousteau to write the music for this documentary on the environmental disaster by a leaking oil tanker, directed by Jean-Michel

Stories of the Sea (1996) Jean-Michel Cousteau starred in this docu-series on humans’ involvement, past and present, in the sea

Exploring the Reef with Jean-Michel Cousteau (2003) This animated short documentary film starred Jean-Michel Cousteau and featured the main characters from Finding Nemo

Coral Reef Adventure (2003) Cousteau contributed to this Greg MacGillivray-directed documentary on endangered coral reefs

Deadly Sounds in the Silent World (2003) Alongside Pierce Brosnan, Cousteau starred in this underwater documentary

Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures (2006—2009) About 30 years after his father revealed the mysteries of the ocean to the world, Jean-Michel Cousteau and his team of oceanauts continued to explore global waters

Wonders of the Sea 3D (2017) With Arnold Schwarzenegger as the narrator, this docu-film follows Cousteau – who was also co-director – and his children as they learn about the threats the ocean faces

Find out more: oceanfutures.org

This article appears in the Deutsche Bank Supplement of the Summer 2022 issue of LUX

Reading time: 9 min

Features

Darius Sanai’s California Art Diary

artist standing between a blue and red painting

Meeting art doyen Jeffrey Deitch at his gallery in West Hollywood

Part One: Art & rediscovery in LA

When I was spending a lot of time in LA in the 1990s, there were some areas a visitor would avoid at all costs unless they had to. Three of these were South Central, Downtown, and the web of roads behind the boardwalk at Venice Beach.

I am due to visit all three. Heading to LA mainly for Frieze LA, where I am meeting with our partners at Deutsche Bank Wealth Management, the long-term partners of Frieze, I have added a full California schedule on to the three-day art fair itinerary. LA, from Beverly Hills to South Central, is just the beginning.

Partly this is for sustainability reasons, to minimise future flights, and also because I have not been to California since before the pandemic, and as ever it is home to many of the world’s thought and opinion leaders, some of whom are on my schedule, as well as a thriving art scene in LA itself.

I spent the ten years before the pandemic commuting many times a year to Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as on short haul trips to Europe for Condé Nast, my other alma mater. Meaning I built up a British Airways Gold membership and accompanying dependence. I had not been to the Virgin Clubhouse for years. The feel is as much private club as airline lounge, with the key differentiator of excellent customer service. I had a wonderful chat with a manager at the lounge who was bemoaning her inability to return to her native Hong Kong, and we exchanged tips on restaurants there (hers, mainly). When the chairs, food, and champagne are largely the same, this makes a difference. I silently wish Virgin had short and mid-haul operations to my frequently visited European and former-Soviet destinations.

Editor’s note: LUX paid for its flights to California in full and received no support from any airline.

We met with Forbes 30 Under 30 curator, Emilia Yin, at the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge at Frieze LA

Central LA is a grid of warehouses, yards and unmarked buildings. Nowadays, inside some of these there are artists’ studios, the artists driven here from around the Americas and elsewhere by then cheap rents. As ever, the artists move in, hipsters get the vibe and start to gentrify, and the artists are forced to move out. That hasn’t happened yet in central LA, but it will. So I enjoyed the moment of visiting a few studios, buried behind delivery yards and run-down buildings, with real working artists inside them. No cafes, no galleries, no bars. Give it two years. It’s a cert that the property investors are already there.

A friend with homes in LA sends me a WhatsApp suggesting I visit Gjelina, on Abbot Kinney Boulevard behind Venice Beach, for dinner. I last knew this street as needle central, with a few porn and pawn shops thrown in (homophones that go together), in the late 90s. But my friend has taste, and many homes, so I take his advice. The food is vibrant, trim, focussed and beautiful, like the clientele. Like nothing anywhere else.

Follow LUX on Instagram: luxthemagazine

The street is now lined with (expensive) independent fashion boutiques and teenage TikTokkers wander around making TikToks. They fit the TikTok profile of being blonde, white and wealthy. The porn and the pawn have now moved and multiplied online, but where have all the junkies gone, I wonder? Elsewhere in Donald Trump’s ‘American Carnage’?

Ross Caliendo is among numerous artists from around the world who have set up in the warehouses around downtown LA

Meeting with ocean conservation icon Jean Michel Cousteau in Santa Barbara

I host some clients at the pre-opening event at Frieze, created by Deutsche Bank, in Michael Jackson‘s former mansion above Beverly Hills. People are happy to be able to meet and mingle after two hard years, which seem to have hit LA hard. There is a sense of anticipation about the fair. People have travelled, and people in LA have prepared. It’s the first major cultural event in the city for two years. Art really can catalyse human change.

At the fair the next day, everyone is waxing lyrical about the lounge. Deutsche Bank’s team have created an indoor-outdoor space with garden and water, a few footsteps from the fair and linked by a private walkway. Many guests comment that it should be permanent. Meetings in the lounge are bound by Chatham House rules, but there are plenty of guests, our own and others, who have come from afar, and are loving both fair and lounge. Bravo to the creators, although the Deutsche Bank lounge at Frieze London, with its creations by Idris Khan and events on ocean conservation, was still the more artistic and focussed. In my view.

I drive to West Hollywood to see Jeffrey Deitch, an art world force since the 1970s. In his private gallery, which is probably three times the size of the Serpentine Gallery museum in London, he has put together a museum-grade show, entitled Luncheon on the Grass. Works from Mickalene Thomas, Jeff Koons, Kehinde Wiley and Paul McCarthy line the walls. I am taken by Tschabalala Self’s response to Édouard Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ in particular. A few of the interpretations are quite explicit.

Which is quite honest, as the idea of a summer lunch on the grass probably brings that out in many people. Any romance aside, I make a mental sketch of my dejeuner sur l’herbe: it would involve rosé champagne from a small producer like Chartogne Taillet and might ask a question of why people enjoying the countryside in my adopted homeland of England are so predominantly white. I decide the reason I like Deitch’s show so much is that it reveals so much about the artists, and how they want to be perceived, or appear to want to be perceived. I will leave the topic there to avoid falling into the trap of the dreaded (and banned in LUX) language of ‘artspeak’.

Deitch tells me it is his busiest day for meetings for years, another sign of what a good art fair can bring to a city.

The Rooftop at the Maybourne Beverly Hills

The next morning, I drop in on a new friend I made at the fair, Emilia Yin, who was introduced to me by a major collector I invited to the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management lounge. I meet her at her Make Room gallery. Also in West Hollywood, it is in a little building behind a car park off the main drag, Melrose Avenue. There is a sense of both Zen and intent inside, and the paintings in her show, by young Brussels-based Italian artist Jacopo Pagin, all sold within days. I buy the last remaining work, an intriguing sketch. I wonder if she is one of the Jeffrey Deitches of the future.

After three days of intense art and meetings, I take a morning swim in the rooftop pool of the Maybourne hotel in Beverly Hills. The Maybourne, grand but laid-back, has a part-city, part-resort vibe and the view from the roof terrace is surprisingly restful. I pick out my favourite mansions in the hills over a green juice.

I have meetings lined up in the afternoon in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Santa Barbara’s main street, State Street, has been pedestrianised at its seafront end and it’s abuzz with cafes, bars, restaurants and an outdoor market. A positive outcome of the pandemic. A little further up the street I meet Jean-Michel Cousteau, octogenarian sage of the oceans, at his offices, which are lined with pictures and souvenirs of his decades in ocean wildlife conservation and filmmaking. There’s a touching picture of him as a small boy with his father Jacques, giving him instructions on how to dive.

Details of our conversation are saved for a major feature in the next issue of LUX, so stay tuned.

Ten minutes’ drive from Santa Barbara is Montecito, the chichi coastal community which plays host to Harry and Meghan, as well as many other members of the world’s rich and famous. It’s supposed to be a low-key place, I am told. I drive past bijou small shops and cafes, created in a faux-rustic style, all perfect. Perfect children walk past holding immaculate ice creams. On the road to the Rosewood Miramar Beach resort, where I am meeting my contact, three police cars, lights on full colour strobe, have formed a triangle, partly blocking the road. As I drive past, I see one individual sitting slumped on the spotless pavement. I wonder what his crime was. Perhaps not owning a Tesla?

My meeting takes place in a wood-panelled drawing room overlooking the beach, with a couple of islands visible in the slash of gold from the setting sun. I feel I am George Clooney in the last scene of a feel-good movie, concluding Bourbon in hand in a highball glass. Except this is the first scene of a (admittedly potentially exciting) business deal, I am not George Clooney, I do not live here, and I am drinking tea.

Back to LA in the dark, the traffic has died down, and I have a calming Margarita in the bar of the Maybourne to prepare me for the drive north the next day.

To be continued

The Virgin Clubhouse at London Heathrow has a members’ club feel

Reading time: 11 min

Try again

Jean-Michel Cousteau: Choose Life

Darius Sanai speaks to Jean-Michel Cousteau, the French ocean explorer, film maker, educationalist, philanthropist and founder of the Ocean Futures Society, about how he is connecting with people globally to make a difference; and about his celebrated father, Jacques Cousteau

Darius Sanai’s California Art Diary

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta

Popular Posts

Go East Young Man

it’s a small World

Bar Hopping in Bali

Categories

Tags

Recent Posts

Protected: Spirit Now London Acquisition Prize Winners Announced

Protected: Women and Speed: Art curation by four female art collectors-curators in London

Daria Blum at Claridge’s ArtSpace

Search

Protected: Spirit Now London Acquisition Prize Winners Announced

Protected: Women and Speed: Art curation by four female art collectors-curators in London

Daria Blum at Claridge’s ArtSpace

Isabelle de la Bruyère on taking over the Opera Gallery