Jacques-Yves Cousteau

UNESCO Courier, Nov, 1991 by Bahgat Elnadi, Adel Rifaat

* How did you become interested in environmental problems?

-- It was an interest that developed slowly. Right at the start we coined a slogan: "Know, Love, Protect". That is exactly what happened to me! I began by exploring. When I saw all this beauty under the sea, I fell in love with it. And finally, when I realized to what extent the oceans were threatened, I decided to campaign as vigorously as I could against everything that threatened what I loved. My story forms a cycle. I hope my children can follow the same path.

* What are the main dangers that threaten the Earth today?

-- After travelling the world as I have for years on end, and seeing it from helicopters, as a diver, from on board ship . . . I would sum up my feelings by saying that the resources of our planet are finite, that there is a limit that should not be exceeded, a habitability threshold that must not be crossed.

We should ask ourselves how many animals and people our planet can continue to support before the quality of life deteriorates, before all Earth's beauties fade. Fifteen years ago, when I was in the United States, I tried to construct a mathematical model to find out how many people our planet could support with the income, purchasing power, and amenities enjoyed by the average American at that time. The data at my disposal were not very precise and right from the start I knew that the approximation would be of the order of 40 to 50 per cent. At that time I was friendly with the director of the Oceanographic Laboratory of the University of Southern California, whose researchers served my colleagues and myself as advisers. With the parameters I had at my disposal, I came up with the figure of 700 million. Seven hundred million people enjoying a standard of living comparable to that of the average American! Fifteen years ago our planet was uanble to provide an agreeable life for more than 700 million people! World population was then four billion!

I was alarmed by the results of my research and told the laboratory director about it. Do you know what he said? That my results were highly optimistic. He had constructed the same model as I had and had come up with a figure far lower than mine! Since then I have been obsessed by the problem of the habitability of the planet.

World population currently stands at 5.7 billion, a figure that is rising at dizzying speed. Every six months, a population equal to that of France is added to the current figure. And every ten years a population equal to that of China is added to that of our human ant-hill.

Everyone is convinced that population growth cannot go on in this anarchic, cancerous way. But when the question arises as to what should be done, nobody wants to know. People make out that nothing can be done, that it's all too complicated, that things are even more difficult because of ingrained habits, religions and whatever. In fact, religion has nothing to do with it. Italy is the world's most Catholic country and yet it has the world's lowest birth-rate. Spain, which is also Catholic, is in a similar position. Its birth-rate is dropping vertiginously. In Indonesia, the world's biggest Islamic country, a birth control campaign in the last ten years has reduced the birth-rate by almost 50 per cent.