Alexandra Cousteau: A Legacy Lives On

If the average human body is two-thirds water, Alexandra Cousteau's is arguably a few percentage points higher. The granddaughter of legendary underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau, and daughter of filmmaker Philippe Cousteau, she went on her first watery voyage at just four months old. "I accompanied my parents down to Easter Island for that trip, and was pretty much on expedition with them until I was four years old, and my father passed away," she says.

A bit of background here: The Cousteaus are used to doing everything rather early. Alexandra learned to swim at just a few months old, and her father, Philippe, a documentary filmmaker with a background in oceanography, had become a professional diver by the time he was seven, having taken his first dive in an aqua-lung at four or five. He died at just 38, in a flying boat crash in Portugal. Up until then, Alexandra and her mother had followed him and her grandfather, aboard his research vessel the Calypso, around the world, filming for the popular TV show "The Underwater World Of Jacques Cousteau".

Jacques Cousteau taught his granddaughter to dive in the Mediterranean when she was seven. "That was obviously special and a gift, and it shifted my perception of the water," she says. At 11, she went on expedition with her grandparents to French Polynesia. "We'd sleep on the Calypso at night, but for the most part it was docked in port, usually at a Navy yard for security and so my grandparents wouldn't get mobbed, and because of the expense. For the most part we went out on the Zodiac during the day."

Despite her nomadic upbringing — between expeditions she spent time in California, Paris, and Connecticut — she says her childhood was really quite normal. "I remember traveling a lot but I don't remember dinner table conversations being all about the expeditions, or what the Calypso was doing. My mother never had a problem pulling me out of school to go traveling," she laughs. "She always made sure I made up the work when I got home, but she thought traveling was an education in itself."

Given a childhood that was spent as much in water as on land, it's hardly surprising that Cousteau only ever wanted to work in something related to the family business. After studying political science with a focus on environmental justice at Georgetown in Washington, DC, she spent several years traveling the world, making films about sharks in French Polynesia, dolphins in the Bahamas, and whales in Maui, among other things. That was followed by two years in Central America working on an anti-shark-finning campaign, and lobbying heads of state to protect marine mammals.

"When I came back to D.C. in 2007, I realized I could spend all my time looking at what was happening in the ocean, but if I didn't realize what was happening on land first, then we'd never really solve anything. I started thinking about how all of our water is connected, and how we need to get people to value their everyday relationship with water no matter where they are." That led to her creating Blue Legacy, a D.C.-based non-profit initiative in 2008, to inspire people to take action on critical water issues.

"All the ways people love the water, whether they're boaters, or swimmers, or divers, or fishermen, the places they can go to have those experiences and their water-quality are dwindling. I've come to understand that we all live on the waterfront. Even if our house doesn't back onto the ocean, or a lake, or river, our water's so connected that even the storm drain in front of your home is waterfront in a way, because it leads directly to the watershed."

Visual and interactive storytelling has been Blue Legacy's mode of communication through expeditions around the world — she's a Cousteau, after all — and she's been invited on several occasions to testify before Congress on water-related issues.

The nomadic lifestyle persists. For the last few years Alexandra Cousteau has been traveling seven months a year, although 2011 was more home-based while she and her husband Fritz awaited the arrival of another very important crewmember. Daughter Clementine Cousteau, the great granddaughter of Jacques, was born in the summer, no doubt another future advocate for the ocean blue.