Philippe Cousteau explores the Great Barrier Reef during a recent expedition. (Image: EarthEcho)
The modern environmental movement means many things to many people, but to Philippe Cousteau, it still doesn’t mean enough.
As the heir to one of the most recognizable family names in oceanography and exploration, Cousteau has embraced environmental causes as his life’s mission, and he sees plenty of room for improvement. “There’s no real strategy in the environmental movement right now,” he says, “and there’s a lot of duplication of effort.” Cousteau acknowledges that organizations like the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy do important work, but there is a critical missing piece that threatens the long term viability of the movement: a youth strategy, with education and activism at its core. “In many ways these conservation organizations were underinvesting in building the constituency,” he reflects, “but innovative leadership always comes from the younger generation.”
To grow the cause, Cousteau founded EarthEcho, an environmental education organization that develops curricula and career guides for schools across the country. Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of the group’s educational materials is the videos that take students on virtual field trips. One module, “Beyond the Dead Zone” examined the threat posed by agricultural runoff to the Everglades and nearby coral reefs. Lessons related to acid-base chemistry, natural resources, climate change, plant physiology, and ecosystem dynamics were built into the agenda, along with a service learning component that tries to move seamlessly from awareness to action. Because curricular requirements are built into the videos, schools under pressure to reach testing benchmarks can justify their inclusion in the classroom; with adventurous themes and documentary-level production values, the clips are a welcome change of pace. Other projects like the World Water Monitoring Challenge synthesize past lessons and crowdsource data collection, giving students ownership of the scientific process and a tangible link with environmental causes.
Ultimately, Cousteau hopes that the video field trips offer the carrot of aspirational interest in exploring new places, as well as the stick of threatened ecosystems – all in the service of inspiring action. But EarthEcho has not always been so steadfast in its mission or so confident in its underlying purpose. “It’s been a decade long learning curve,” explains Cousteau, after recounting years of false starts and wrong turns. “I initially thought that awareness was enough, but then I started to realize that we should learn about behavior, things like behavioral psychology.”
As he delved into the issue, he soon realized that the missing link was hiding in plain sight: media-driven storytelling – dominantly used for entertainment or news – could be re-purposed as a powerful educational tool. It was a natural direction and a key strategic advantage for Cousteau: few people are as well positioned within the spheres of education, conservation, and entertainment. With a range of TV hosting gigs on the resume and several more on the docket, the potential for productive cross-fertilization was clear: a more integrated educational component of his documentaries would leverage the resources of the entertainment industry and the educational storytelling tools Cousteau and his team have optimized.
“The barriers between media and the classroom are just tumbling down,” Cousteau explains, and a more explicit link between the two realms is an obvious next step. He chastises the Cosmos team, for example, in failing to see this: “The most successful science-based program in years,” he says, “and they didn’t get anything into the classroom? That’s a missed opportunity.”
Cousteau doesn’t plan on making the same omission. With his show Xploration Awesome Planet, “education is part of the planning and production process rather than a post-hoc thing,” he says. Curricula will be developed for each episode, along with teacher guides and a range of supplementary resources that allow each classroom to customize their involvement based on specific needs.
Through such endeavors, Cousteau hopes to remove the “eat your vegetables” stigma from educational material and inspire action in the process. “Entertainment, education, and action – these don’t need to be separate spheres,” he explains. “We can break down these barriers.”
No comments:
Post a Comment