Truly, we do live on a 'water planet.' For us, water is that critical issue that we need. It's the most precious substance on the planet, and it links us to pretty much every environmental issue, including climate change, that we're facing.
Interpretation
Water is essential for life and interconnected with environmental challenges.
This quote emphasizes the vital role of water in sustaining life on Earth and underlines its significance as a central issue in environmental discussions. Philippe Cousteau, Jr. suggests that water is not only precious in its own right but also serves as a crucial link to broader environmental problems, such as climate change, which impact all living beings.
In practice
In a speech about environmental conservation, one might say, 'As Philippe Cousteau, Jr. reminds us, we truly live on a water planet.'
As our technology evolves, we will have the capacity to reach new, ever-increasing depths. The question is what kind of technology, in the end, do we want to deploy in the far reaches of the ocean? Tools of science, ecology and documentation, or the destructive tools of heavy industry?
My grandfather pioneered exploration of what he called 'our water planet,' then my father sought to understand the human connection, and now, as part of the third generation, I'm dedicated to not only raising awareness but also to empowering people to take action.
Since oceans are the life support system of our planet, regulating the climate, providing most of our oxygen and feeding over a billion people, what's bad for oceans is bad for us - very bad.
Despite their lack of visual impact, headline sex-appeal, and their 'out of sight, out of mind' nature, we should all care about aquatic dead zones because we are all connected to their causes and we all feel their impacts.
There's this terrific kid in Maine who saw all the waste generated by straws handed out in restaurants. So he made up these little pop-up cards and asked restaurant owners put them on the tables to explain why straws wouldn't be handed out unless requested. Of course, the restaurant owners couldn't resist a 9-year-old kid, and so it worked.
Targeting women is key in developing countries. It allows them to go to school, to say how many children they're going to have, which drives the issue of population and how their children will be educated. Women are the best investments in developing countries.
The highest treason, the meanest treason, is to deny the holiness of this little blue planet on which we journey through the cold void of space.
Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.
When I would re-create myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter as a sacred place, a Sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.
Trees go wandering forth in all directions with every wind, going and coming like ourselves, traveling with us around the sun two million miles a day, and through space heaven knows how fast and far!
We cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
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