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A review by kevin_shepherd
The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World by Susan Schiefelbein, Jacques Cousteau
4.0
“Often in airports, on sidewalks, in restaurants, children and adults alike stop me to ask about barracuda and sharks, killer whales, the deadly sorcery of the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness Monster… I believe that the seas most monstrous force doesn’t live in Loch Ness. It lives in us.” -Jacques-Yves Cousteau
This is so reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Where Carson foretold of empty skies, Cousteau warns us about the looming specter of empty oceans. While I’m encouraged by the positive impact Silent Spring has had, I fear that The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus has largely fallen on deaf ears. Our point of no return seems to have come and gone. We could still potentially postpone the coming catastrophe, but it feels as though we can no longer prevent it.
Being an American who came of age in the 60s and 70s, I am intimately familiar with the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. My Mom, knowing my enthusiasm for the subject matter, bought me every Cousteau book she could find. I had Dolphins and The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea and Life and Death in a Coral Sea. Thanks to Jacques I became a kid who would astonish friends and neighbors with his knowledge of the oceans and his mastery of rudimentary marine biology, all while residing over five hundred miles from the nearest seashore. Jacques was my hero. He still is. That’s why reading this, written just before he died and published posthumously, was so hard for me. He saw firsthand the decline of the oceans and his optimism at the end was all but gone. This is Cousteau’s heart breaking, set in prose.
“..a man may live long, yet live very little.” -Michel de Montaigne
This is so reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Where Carson foretold of empty skies, Cousteau warns us about the looming specter of empty oceans. While I’m encouraged by the positive impact Silent Spring has had, I fear that The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus has largely fallen on deaf ears. Our point of no return seems to have come and gone. We could still potentially postpone the coming catastrophe, but it feels as though we can no longer prevent it.
Being an American who came of age in the 60s and 70s, I am intimately familiar with the television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. My Mom, knowing my enthusiasm for the subject matter, bought me every Cousteau book she could find. I had Dolphins and The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea and Life and Death in a Coral Sea. Thanks to Jacques I became a kid who would astonish friends and neighbors with his knowledge of the oceans and his mastery of rudimentary marine biology, all while residing over five hundred miles from the nearest seashore. Jacques was my hero. He still is. That’s why reading this, written just before he died and published posthumously, was so hard for me. He saw firsthand the decline of the oceans and his optimism at the end was all but gone. This is Cousteau’s heart breaking, set in prose.
“..a man may live long, yet live very little.” -Michel de Montaigne