A few months ago I happened to pick up a copy of Jacques Cousteau’s classic first book, The Silent World, less from a burning desire to read it than for the mysterious and evocative cover photo, and out of a sense of comradely solidarity with this pioneer submariner. It gathered dust on my bedside table for a while, as books often do, before the opportunity arose to read it, in this case during a week on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, a place, appropriately enough, dominated by the edge of the Ocean.
What a book. I would be the first to admit that Cousteau is not the most talented writer — the prose is often pedestrian and the organization a bit clunky. But this is not a novel to be read for the art of its language. This is the real McCoy. It is a tale of exploration of a fabulous new world hitherto almost completely unknown. After reading The Silent World, I’m left with the powerful sense that Cousteau was an explorer in the classical mold, in the company of Columbus, Lewis and Clark, and the early astronauts.
It’s fashionable in some professional circles to dismiss Cousteau with a condescending wave. He was not a “real oceanographer”, they might say, and this is true enough. He had no formal training in marine biology, though he did have the naval Captain’s years of practical knowledge of the Sea. And he had some engineering background. Many passages in the book describe activities that the team undertook in the name of research to learn about animal behavior and diving physiology and so on, which seem quaintly sophomoric to us in the modern world where we’re accustomed to seeing the wonders of the universe in high-definition while we loaf on the living room sofa.
But that is part of the point. Cousteau was not an egghead product of the universities as many of us are know. There was essentially noone to teach him the skills and understanding that we take for granted today, either as marine biologists or sport divers. He was, to use the old cliche, a student in the school of hard knocks. He and his buddy Emil Gagnon invented underwater breathing, something that humans had been trying to figure out for literally thousands of years. That alone is enough to qualify him for heroic status.
But there’s more. The human stories behind the Cousteau saga are fascinating. The aqua-lung, as they called their creation, was cobbled together from scrounged parts while Cousteau and his homies were laying low in Nazi-annexed France during the war. They tested the thing out in a hidden cove to escape the attention of Italian occupation troops. They fed themselves in those lean times by spearing fish. Everything was trial and error, including terrifying dives to great depths, in caves, and such places where divers not infrequently passed out or lost their bearing from nitrogen narcosis. Some never came back.
After the war, as a naval officer, Cousteau was detailed to Marseilles to run “a collecting center for returning sailors in a commandeered castle.” He convinced his superiors that the aqua-lung had promise in a variety of naval applications and wheedled their permission to conduct a series of explorations. His buddy Taillez quit his job as a forest ranger, and a motley crew was assembled as the “Undersea Research Group.” Their activities included location and salvaging of wrecks, which led them eventually to the wrecks of cargo ships from classical times, the merchant marine of Greece, Phoenicia, Carthage, and Rome. The treasures they found had been sitting on the bottom of the Mediterranean since they sank two millennia ago, and offered unprecedented insights into the life of those times. Cousteau was, without a doubt, larger than life.

“I have recounted how the first goggles led us underwater in simple and irresistible curiosity, and how that impulse entangled us in diving physiology and engineering, which produced the compressed-air lung. Our dives are now animated by the challenge of oceanography. We have tried to find the entrance to the great hydrosphere because we feel that the sea age is soon to come.”
Reading these tales of high adventure half a century or more later inevitably brings the wistful sense, all too familiar nowadays, of what has been lost from the oceans, which were still comparatively virgin in the 1940s and 1950s when Cousteau first penetrated them. The descriptions of schools of gigantic fishes moving placidly among colorful reefs, which Cousteau and company were the first humans to see in their natural habitat, are almost nowhere to be found in the world oceans of today. But I am willing to bet that the situation would be far worse had the mysteries and beauty of the Ocean world not been brought to such wide popular attention by Cousteau’s lifelong passion.
What “professional” ocean scientist today can claim that kind of victory?










Consider the impact that this single unsung man (so unsung, in fact, that the pixelated snapshot above is the only one I could find of him online!) has had on the environmental awareness of an entire generation — perhaps even two or three generations — of American citizens. Who can say how many kids in the 50s and 60s and 70s decided, while browsing through one of these little books, to spend the afternoon outside hunting for caterpillars instead of yielding to the seductive stupor of the cathode ray tube? Who can say how many of today’s alternative energy entrepeneurs and scientists and educators and conservationists caught fire as a result of a spark generated by one of these books? I can’t, but I know one: me.
When I was a kid, my family drove cross-country (in a van without air-conditioning that was prone to overheating in the desert and climbed the Rockies at about 18 mph, etc.), from Arlington, Virginia to LA, every three years, where we spent the bulk of three weeks visiting my aunt and her family. When I tell people this they think my parents were crazy. But it was a the adventure of a lifetime and an incomparable learning experience for kids. We saw a lot of the country, did a lot of camping, and my parents occasionally allowed us to visit the cheesy fake Indian trinket shops that were common along the dustier stretches of Route 66 in the olden days. One day when I was probably about seven (this would have been the late 1960s), we were visiting Walnut Canyon, which is somewhere in the southwest, and I convinced my parents to buy me the Golden Nature Guide to Rocks and Minerals. I felt so grown up to have a real book instead of a kid’s book. It was an early watershed moment in my life as a bookworm and naturalist.
Nevertheless, I was not destined to be a geologist. For one thing, rocks are dead. Or so they seemed to me. I found animals much more interesting. Second anecdote: Around the same time, in second grade, I became obsessed with turtles. I take this herpetophilia to be a common, though poorly understood, genetic trait located somewhere on the Y chromosome, since it is so commonly expressed among young boys. This is despite the fact that my white-bread suburban neighborhood turned out, to my dismay, to be nearly devoid of reptiles. I saw maybe two or three box turtles, and no snakes at all, in the wild while I was growing up despite frequent expeditions mounted for that purpose to the local park where I spent much of my youth. But I can remember sitting rapt with the pocket-sized Golden Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, studying the pictures, memorizing what they ate, looking at the ingenious maps that showed purple where the summer (pink) and winter (blue) ranges overlapped. This genetic propensity has in fact been transferred to my son, who latched on to my antique Reptile guide in an uncannily similar way and spent a lot of time with it (it is now bound with duct tape).
It appears that I’m not the only one with such fond memories. Evidently the original versions of the Guides have recently become “
[Editor’s note: This just in — and in time for Earth Day (barely). I reprint below an extract from the new, second edition of
An emerging body of scientific knowledge links nature time to longer attention spans, better cognitive functioning, reduction of stress, and strengthened family bonds. What better way to enhance parent-child attachment than to walk in the woods together, disengaging from distracting electronics, advertising, and peer pressure?
1. Go for a family walk when the moon is full. There’s a whole new set of animals, sights and sounds out there. Listen to animals calling. Owls and bats are looking for prey. Watch for things glowing, like worms and fungus on trees. And look up at the stars.
3. Tell your children stories about your special childhood places in nature. Then help them find their own: leaves beneath a backyard willow, the bend of a creek, the meadow in the woods. Let it become their intimate connection with the natural world.
5. Invent your own nature game. One mother’s suggestion: “We help our kids pay attention during longer hikes by playing “find ten critters” — mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, snails, and other creatures. Finding a critter can also mean discovering footprints, mole holes, and other signs that an animal has passed by or lives there.”
[Editor’s note: Few have employed the Spanish language so masterfully as Pablo Neruda. I’ve often felt that an important incentive to improve my own rudimentary Spanish would be the ability to read and appreciate Neruda’s poetry in his native tongue. For now, alas, I have to be satisfied with the translation of by Alastair Reid, who has been called “Neruda’s most talented and imaginitive English translator”. This is from Neruda’s poetic autobiography, written in his elder years as he reminisced down his long and eventful life from his remote home on the coast of Chile. As winter winds down here in Virginia, and I can already see in the woods the subtle wash of red maple buds, I’m waiting for the earth too.]
Return me, oh sun,
199 years ago on this day, the 12th of February 1809, a child was born in the town of Shropshire in the West English midlands, and grew up to change the world.
Darwin is of course most famous for the revolutionary idea that grew out of his uniquely comprehensive experience with the earth’s inhabitants: evolution by natural selection. The idea was revolutionary because, for the first time in history, it provided a mechanistic explanation for how living organisms develop the characteristics that suit them so astoundingly to their environment, an explanation based on simple and well understood physical and biological processes (indeed, so simple that his colleague and defender Thomas Henry Huxley observed after reading the Origin, “how extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”). And because the explanation fit such a motley range of previously inexplicable observations. One of the types of observations that were unified by his theory was the strange similarities in structure among wildly different kinds of animals, such as whales, mice, and bats — all of which share a basic anatomical structure. The reason of course is that they are descendents of a common ancestor, whose parts have become modified, as Darwin would say, to different ends. We are all, in a very literal sense, family.
Of course, Darwin’s materialistic explanation of life’s diversity crashed headlong into the Biblical story of creation that had reigned since the beginning of time, with implications so fundamental and far-reaching that the anthropologist Ashley Montague aptly observed:”Next to the Bible, no work has been quite as influential, in virtually every aspect of human thought, as The Origin of Species.” The reverberations continue to this day, as is clear from reading the newspaper in almost any given week. Darwin is arguably the superlative example in human history of the power of a scientific idea to change the world.
But what is perhaps less widely appreciated about Darwin, and what I admire most about him, is that he was a consummate naturalist. After literally overturning the philosophical foundations of human thought with the Origin, Darwin did not go off to play golf or spend his life on a celebrity tour. He spent decades in the tedious and methodical tasks of minute dissection and description of the world’s barnacles (yes, barnacles), eventually producing a
Dear friends, colleagues, family members, sparring partners, lost souls, and passers-by,
So there you have it. Sorry I can’t throw a wild birthday party — I’ve learned a surprising amount of HTML and other arcane geekana in the last year, but haven’t yet figured out how to do that online. But if you happen to feel inspired about a birthday gift, there’s no need to send cash, baked goods, or expensive merchandise (although I will surely not turn them down). Instead, it would warm the cockles of the Natural Patriot’s heart if you simply tell a friend about the site (something good, I mean), subscribe by RSS if you haven’t already, and . . .
Right, I promised something about pumpkin pie, or at least some fare less likely to produce indigestion than
Interestingly, the menu at that first Thanksgiving almost certainly did not include corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie, ham, or even cranberries, all of which are considered staples of the feast in various parts of the USA today. Instead, the table was likely laden with Cod, Eel, Clams, Lobster, and even perhaps . . .
“I am on this account not displeased that the Figure [the eagle adorning the recently adopted Great Seal of the USA] is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America . . . He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on.”
Yes, that Newt Gingrich. I admit this is hard for me, as a lifelong Democrat. But bear with me.
Probably many of us who remember him from his Speaker-of-the-House days have forgotten, or were never aware, that Gingrich is a bona fide environmentalist. So much so that conservative think tanks have found it necessary to keep
So I have now finished reading his book, A Contract with the Earth, co-authored with Terry Maple, Professor of Pyschology, Behavior, and Conservation at Georgia Tech and former Director of Zoo Atlanta. The book is pretty easy going, really an extended essay. And it is excellent. Much of this stuff has been said before, but rarely from a voice that carries (or carried at one time) so much weight with the large conservative American constituency that “environmentalism” or “creation care” or whatever you want to call it so desperately needs. The proposed Contract with the Earth consists (presumably not coincidentally) of Ten
There is a lot of good stuff here, along with, inevitably, some fluffy rhetoric and some substantive issues I would question. The wonkish details of how such a revolution might transpire have been expressed better elsewhere (e.g.,
During my idyllic vacation two weeks ago, I pulled out a book that had been sitting on my table for some time: Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods. Based on the somewhat off-puttingly pedantic subtitle (”Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder”) I had been procrastinating. But once I started I could hardly put it down. I think it will prove to be a seminal work in environmentalism.
There are of course many aspects of life that have changed in recent decades, and fingering any one of them definitively as the culprit would be difficult. But Louv makes a compelling case that a major part of the problem, an ultimate cause underlying many of the proximate symptoms, is the estrangement of kids from nature and the outdoors.
Claudia Alta (Lady Bird) Taylor Johnson, former First Lady of the United States and pionering conservationist, has passed on. But her multifaceted legacy of beautification and restoration of native American landscapes and cities will live on.