A Time To Rally: When Ted Turner Gave Jacques Cousteau An End-Of-Life Pep Talk
Cousteau, once the most famous conservationist in the world, was a father figure to Ted Turner. In old age, Cousteau became cynical. Here's what Turner told him
EDITOR'S NOTE: This was among the first profiles in courage Mountain Journal published shortly after its launch in August 2017. Ted Turner is one of the largest private property owners in America and is a proud resident of Greater Yellowstone who manages his ranches for conservation. But you don't have to be a Ted Turner or Jacques-Ives Cousteau to make a difference. This speaks to to the ethos of why wildlife conservation is important, why protecting nature involves everyone doing their part, and that when you feel down, which is normal, it's essential to pick yourself up and keep going. Doing that is what makes you a hero to your community and a good ancestor. You matter.
by Todd Wilkinson
There was a time at the end of his life when the most famous living environmentalist on Earth wanted to throw in the towel. Ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, left despondent by the behavior and attitudes of humanity, decided to quit his activism—surrender, capitulate, concede there was little hope for saving what remains of our wild planet from destruction.
The very thought that Cousteau, an inspiring hero to millions of American Baby Boomers and billions around the world, might turn cynical seems heresy. But that is exactly where Cousteau's mental state was when he had a confrontation with Ted Turner.
Jean-Michel Cousteau, the eldest and only surviving son of Cousteau's, says the pep talk Turner gave his father was one for the ages and it holds special context now as the effects of climate change are deepening, as the problems of ocean acidification, pollution and overfishing are growing worse, and as the world moves closer than ever to the brink of a nuclear weapons exchange.
Only a few years after Turner founded CNN in Atlanta on June 1, 1980, he was invited by Cousteau to join him aboard his research ship, Calypso, in the Amazon River.
Cousteau and Turner had been introduced to each other by the late folk singer John
Denver. The French diver, known for pioneering scuba and the aqua-lung, had received funding from Turner to keep making his conservation documentaries, and Turner, who lost his father to suicide, got a nurturing parental figure in Cousteau.
Those years, at the time of their rendezvous in South America, were bleak ones for
people worried about the future of humanity and the environment. They bear remarkable similarity to the present state of affairs.
Ronald
Reagan was in the White House and he selected James Watt, a Sagebrush rebel from Wyoming, to be his
Interior Secretary. The Reagan Administration very publicly announced its
intention to roll back and weaken federal environmental laws, sell off public lands and open up the interior West and coastal areas to more intensive natural resource development.
Along with these radical actions on the homefront,
troubling ecological indicators were surfacing around the world. Amid it all,
Reagan and his cabinet were rattling sabers with the Soviet Union. With the
nuclear arsenals of both rivals on hair-trigger alert, the specter of a
nuclear exchange caused by computer or human error had never been higher.
Turner flew to Brazil with his sons, Rhett and
Beau, with the family three-some joining Captain Cousteau as his crew was making a documentary nature film about the wonders of the Amazon Basin for TBS.
One evening after his sons had gone to bed,
Turner and Cousteau sat together on the prow of Calypso, listening to
the twilight sounds of the jungle and the gurgling river. Fish
jumped. Howler monkeys and birds vocalized in the canopy. They
could feel the Amazon’s power flowing beneath them.
Cousteau mentioned disturbing things he and his
diving crews had observed over the years since his first documentaries were
made. Based upon those disturbing trends, he presciently began to extrapolate with
deadly accuracy today’s destruction of coral reefs, the expansion of dead zones
caused by pollution in the ocean, the toppling of rainforests, humans being
poisoned by eating fish contaminated with mercury and PCBs, the decimation of
high-end bellwether species like sharks, ocean bottoms being destroyed through
commercial trawling, and the toll of driftnets and bycatch on species.
Soon enough, Cousteau, too, would express his concern about climate change.
On land, he said events foretold a
precipitous decline of amphibians, the widespread effects of freshwater
shortages and droughts, increased desertification and the over-pumping of the
Ogallala aquifer on the high plains of the United States. The result of
accumulating abuse and neglect, Cousteau warned, will be an ever-expanding
crisis, the ecological interconnections no less entwined than the international
economy and banking system.
As Cousteau rendered his assessment, Turner was
left speechless. He had come to the Amazon "to be inspired and pumped up," he told Cousteau.
Cousteau’s authoritative litany, however, jolted him and drove up his pulse rate. “Captain, not only am I depressed, but now I’m discouraged.," Turner said.
For the much younger Turner, then barely into middle age, the implication
was, “Why even bother?”
Cousteau told Turner to look him in the eye. “Ted, we cannot afford to get discouraged. Even if we
know the end is coming for certain, which we do not, what can men of good
conscience do but keep trying to do the right thing until the very end?”
Cousteau told Turner to look him in the eye. “Ted, we cannot afford to get discouraged. Even if we know the end is coming for certain, which we do not, what can men of good conscience do but keep trying to do the right thing until the very end?”
If an asteroid were streaking on a collision
course and Homo sapiens had a few decades to plan ahead, would humanity accept
its fate with indifference, he asked. The environmental challenge, Cousteau said,
is no different.
Turner, now a white-haired elder himself, returns to that
conversation often, calling it a defining one in his thinking. For the first time, he remembers, he came to understand what Thomas Babington Macauley had meant when he penned one of Turner's favorite epic verse, "Horatius At The Bridge," that he learned to recite by heart.
Macauley's heroic poem is all about individuals rallying in the face of overwhelming odds, condemning those who sit on the sidelines and are unwilling to rally the courage to take action.
For Ted Turner, his passion for environmental protection blossomed during his days racing boats on the ocean. And it became galvanized after he met Jacques Cousteau.
“I think of Macauley's words and those of Captain Cousteau and I press on,” Turner says. “Failure
cannot be an option here. We’re talking about the survival of the human race
and of all the major life forms on the planet.”
Cousteau handed Turner a
challenge that night—to use his influence, resources, and place in media to raise awareness about the
environment based on his assumption that human society had little time to
act. It is, Cousteau noted, what an ethical, responsible business person does.
Cousteau and Turner agreed on something else that is even more timely today. They believed the documentary wildlife film industry has a moral and ethical responsibility to step up—to help save the natural world rather than only treat it as a resource to exploit for high ratings and commercial profit.
In fact today in our time, with so many serious environmental problems converging, never has the nature documentary industry and mass media in general come under greater ridicule and scrutiny from scientists and conservation activists. Many of the biggest players in wildlife filmmaking stand accused of dumbing down the social discourse on environmental issues and natural history,
More than a generation ago, Turner at CNN created the world's first major environmental reporting division on TV and he green-lighted documentaries for airing on TBS, on topics ranging from the destruction of clearcut logging to predator control and ocean pollution, that he knew would alienate advertisers. When they complained, he aired them anyway.
Cousteau and Turner agreed on something else that is even more timely today. They believed the documentary wildlife film industry has a moral and ethical responsibility to step up—to help save the natural world rather than only treat it as a resource to exploit for high ratings and commercial profit.
Turner told me not long ago that network TV, cable channels and film production companies have lost their way, rationalizing their bad decisions based upon a faulty premise that their foremost duty is to "entertain". Turner says that if nature filmmakers aren't leaving millions of viewers smarter about the challenges facing the environment, then it is failing in its obligation to leave the world better. He says mass media needs to up its game.
° ° °
In 1971, Cousteau had calculated that humanity had a fifty-year window of
opportunity to commence corrective action in how it consumed and stewarded resources—or face dire consequences.
Given today's mega issues—climate change, rising human population, the extinction crisis and increasing threats of
terrorism—Turner believes we have until the middle of
this century to alter the trajectories of troubling trendlines or risk calamity.
What Cousteau recognized in his student, what he admired about Turner, was an uncanny ability to see into the future. It’s a skill Turner demonstrated with media, and even in
seeing bison ranching as a tool for re-wilding the West in a way in which profits
pay for better conservation outcomes.
A decade passed after the first Turner-Cousteau encounter on Calypso. Eventually, he started a family foundation that supported hundreds of different conservation causes, bought up large tracts of land and put conservation easements on them, and was on the cusp of committing almost $1.5 billion to support the United Nations and a group devoted to ultimately eliminating nuclear weapons.
Cousteau, whom Turner called "the father of the modern environmental movement," influenced leaders around the world, including presidents of both political parties ranging from John F. Kennedy, pictured here, to Bill Clinton who was in office when Cousteau died.
Late in the 1980s, George Herbert
Walker Bush had succeeded Reagan as president. The Bush Administration, heeding the conclusions of leading scientists, acknowledged that human-caused climate change linked to the burning of fossil fuels was real.
Meanwhile, as he watched him age, Jean-Michel Cousteau says his father became increasingly depressed almost bitter about the direction of
the world.
Overwhelmed by the magnitude of growing environmental and human problems, Cousteau was frustrated by inaction from governments and the prevailing consumptive culture of society.
Part of him had abandoned hope
that the oceans could ever be saved. Also, after decades of activism, Jacques Cousteau was simply burned out.
The fathers and mothers of social movements are products of their own time and can only carry them so far, Jean-Michel says. That's why they need to be constantly reinvigorated with fresh blood.
The issue would soon come to a head in the form of another pivotal meeting between Cousteau and Turner. With his mentor in decline, Turner reached out by inviting him to share in the premiere of the motion pictureGettysburgat the National Theater in Washington, DC. Turner had bankrolled the project, and considered it an achievement of personal importance in telling the story of one of the bloodiest battles in US. history.
That night, Turner helped usher the old oceanographer to his
seat and together they watched. On one side of Turner was Cousteau and on the
other Turner’s daughter and son-in-law, Laura and Rutherford Seydel, as well as other
members of his family. Nearly an hour into the screening, the reel broke and
the film needed to be spliced back together. Lights in the theater came on.
'Ted," Cousteau said to Turner, "you worry too much. My advice to you is to not let it get to you. Enjoy the time you have, because it is already too late. We’ve passed the threshold. The beginning of the end has started."
People for several seats around pressed closer
to hear the conversations playing out between one of the architects of the
green age and one of his prized students. Jacques-Yves had become so
distressed by the trend lines he witnessed that he no longer had any fight
left in him.
“Ted,” Cousteau said, “you worry too
much. My advice to you is to not let it get to you. Enjoy the time
you have, because it is already too late. We’ve passed the threshold. The
beginning of the end has started. Man may, or may not be, part of the
plan nature has for the Earth in the future. Life will be reborn, but first the
world as we know it now will die.”
Those around Cousteau could not believe what
they were hearing. They looked to Turner for his response.
“I thought Ted would be crestfallen,” Turner’s
son-in-law, Rutherford Seydel, recalled.
But Turner remained quiet for a few
seconds. Finally, he put his hand down on Cousteau’s, defying his
reputation for not being touchy-feely.
“Captain, you are a great scientist, you’ve
been a friend who was always there for me, but isn’t there a possibility, say,
even a 3 to 5 percent chance that you are wrong? It may be a long shot,
but that’s what I am going to focus on. I’ll take those odds. You know I
admire you, that I love you, but I can’t accept what you are saying.”
Turner’s family members were touched by the
expression of warmth, and they waited for the answer.
“I’m sorry, Ted but I can’t agree,” Cousteau
responded.
To those witnessing the exchange, it was almost
as if a transference had occurred. “Ted is ever the eternal optimist
because the alternative—the prospect of being a failure because you didn't work hard enough — is part of the personal pain he has carried forward all
these years whenever someone has sold him short,” Seydel told me. “If there is an infinitesimal reason to
have hope, he will choose to search for it rather than resign himself to the bleak
future Captain Cousteau told him was inevitable.”
“My Dad told Ted in the beginning, during their
visit along the Amazon together, to never give up,” Jean-Michel Cousteau explained. “For Ted, I know that my father represented a role model whom
he did not want to let down. And he has managed his life in a way to make
certain it never happens. But what I don’t think Ted realizes is that he is
doing what my Dad did not possess the strength and endurance to do, which is
maintain optimism to whatever end.”
"Captain, you are a great scientist, you’ve been a friend who was always there for me, but isn’t there a possibility, say, even a 3 to 5 percent chance that you are wrong?" Turner asked. "It may be a long shot, but that’s what I am going to focus on. I’ll take those odds. You know I admire you, that I love you, but I can’t accept what you are saying."
In reflection, Turner says it always meant a lot to him whenever Cousteau expressed personal praise. It is important for elders to place confidence in the next generations, to let them know their backs are covered when they step forward and act on what their conscience is telling them.
Turner is not one to lecture but he says there is no retirement age for citizenship and that senior citizens who believe they have already given enough to leave behind a healthy environment are shirking their obligation as humans. At the same time, he says elders have a lot of wisdom, based upon personal experience, to share. All generations need to do a better job of listening to each other—oldsters and the young alike embracing the call to rally together.
People get tired, Turner says. Individuals may feel like they are out there blowing in the wind alone but, in fact, millions of others feel the same way. Environmental protection shouldn't be a partisan issue, nor should the media treat environmental destruction as a topic that has two equally-valid sides.
° ° °
When the Captain died in 1997 at age eighty-seven, Turner paid homage by calling Cousteau “the father of the environmental movement,” a reference that newspapers around the world cited.
Jean-Michel Cousteau has pondered the meaning of that epitaph, and the symbolism of Cousteau the elder passing the torch to a handful of protégées. Jean-Michel and Turner were both born in the same year, 1938, and they’ve regarded each other as brothers in conservation.
While his father became cynical, Turner kept going. “He has fulfilled the challenge my Father placed upon him and
succeeded in a way my Father himself never could. Ted started as a follower
and he has become a leader of the pack. My Dad used to tell me that the
American dream isn’t about money. It is about the possibility of
exceeding a person’s own expectations of himself.”
"My Dad used to tell me that the American dream isn’t about money. It is about the possibility of exceeding a person’s own expectations of himself.” —Jean-Michel Cousteau
Jean-Michel pointed to a troubling me-first, apathetic attitude that today is rampant in the world. “When you lose hope, you become a pessimist,”
he notes. “Instead of believing in brighter possibilities, you
accept the things that are wrong and surrender to them. Rather than
working to change them, you pray they don’t become worse or impact you
personally even as they harm other people. I think that’s why Ted feels
drawn to the parable of Horatius at the Bridge.
In the year before his father died, Jean-Michel
says that he and his patriarch would get into intense arguments. “When he
told me he didn’t believe that we could win the battle to save the earth, I
told him that, of all people, it was an unacceptable conclusion coming from
him.”
All hope, however, was not lost for
Jacques-Yves Cousteau. Jean-Michel shares the details of a conversation that
his father had, while on his deathbed, with Jean-Pierre Cousteau, the attending
physician and Jean-Michel’s cousin.
The world’s most famous aquaman looked
into the approaching dusk and had a final statement of conviction. "My Father didn’t say, 'I don’t want to die, I want to live,'" Jean-Michel notes, but
rather, “I haven’t finished my work.”
That work is the epic challenge of awakening society out of its technology-addled stupor and making the environmental crisis real and tangible for average people before it is too late.
Turner wonders how Jacques Cousteau would be responding to climate change, more real than he could have imagined. He would not be marveling at the prospect of a new commercial shipping lane opening through Arctic waters, Turner says. Cousteau would be in a wetsuit with camera, accompanying desperate polar bears that literally are having their footing melt away beneath their paws and, as a consequence, must swim hundreds of miles further to the find seals and walruses—their sustenance—on waning sea ice.
Most definitely, he says, Cousteau would be pushing back harshly against those who are waging attacks against science and scientists on behalf of special interests, trying to confuse the masses by spouting "alternative facts". Together, they would be leaning on media to do a better job.
Turner remembers Jacques-Yves Cousteau only with deference, humility and gratitude. “He was my first hero and I’m grateful for having known him. The legacy of activism that exists in Jean-Michel and all of the Cousteau grandchildren is inspiring.” Turner also recited a long list of others in politics, science and the private sector who are putting their rally caps on.
Jean-Michel Cousteau who, like Turner, will soon become an octogenarian adds, “Every time that I get depressed I look into
the eyes of a child and I think to myself, ‘We can’t let you down.’ Ted
has the same set of values with his grandchildren and all young people he
meets. That’s why young people like him. He doesn’t sell them short. He is
telling them to go out and change the world. There is not time to think about
‘what ifs” as in ‘What if we do nothing?’ With the limited time we have,
we can only be thinking about brave solutions.”
Jean-Michel agrees with Turner that fighting for the public good is the most admirable thing a human being can do. That's not their mantra. It's one taught to them by Jacques Cousteau who, at the very end, was, like Horatius, willing to rally one more time.
POSTNOTE: Part of the above is excerpted from Todd Wilkinson's book, Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet. The book tracks not only Turner's evolution as a businessperson who embraced conservation, but the impact that having private land in Greater Yellowstone played in shaping his thinking as both an advocate for wildlife and humanitarian.
About Todd Wilkinson
Todd Wilkinson, founder of Mountain Journal, is author of the book Ripple Effects: How to Save Yellowstone and American's Most Iconic Wildlife Ecosystem. Wilkinson has been writing about Greater Yellowstone for 35 years and is a correspondent to publications ranging from National Geographic to The Guardian. He is author of several books on topics as diverse as scientific whistleblowers and Ted Turner, and a book about the harrowing story of Jackson Hole grizzly mother 399, the most famous bear in the world which features photographs by Thomas Mangelsen. For more information on Wilkinson, click here. (Photo by David J Swift).
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