Consumer Society Is the Enemy

Anyone within range of Western television during the 1960s to the 1980s was likely a fan of Jacques Cousteau's famous "underwater adventures" launched from the Calypso research vessel, which roamed the seven seas.
Not surprisingly, as an explorer immersed in the natural environment, Cousteau became a radical ecologist in his later life as the costs of industrialization and consumerism began to take their toll. In the summer of 1996 I sat down with the famed oceanographer at the Paris offices of the Cousteau Society.