In April, Alexandra Cousteau, the grand-daughter of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, embarked on a 100 day journey around the world to spread awareness for water conservation issues. The trip, called "Expedition: Blue Planet", will travel to five continents to explore and tell the story of the various water issues people face on different parts of the globe. Like her grand-father, Alexandra Cousteau is an explorer but also runs a water conservation non-profit called Blue Legacy.The one North American stop was in New Orleans where Cousteau visited the 9th ward to see the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Cousteau also visited the Dead Zone, an 8,000 square mile area in the Gulf of Mexico that supports almost no sea life due to a lack of oxygen in the water. She held conversations with a local environmental activist to talk about Louisiana's coastal erosion problems. "Water is our most important ecosystem, and it will be the first to feel the impacts of climate change," Cousteau remarked. Other stops included the Ganges River in India, the Jordan River and Perth, Australia.
The one odd thing about Cousteau's ambitious journey is that it's primary sponsor is Dasani, the Coca-Cola owned bottled water brand. On one hand, it's great that they're helping to make Alexandra's journey happen. But on the other hand, it's seems a little ironic. Dasani is a large player in an industry that creates tons of waste to sell us a product that comes out of our taps. In the U.S. alone, bottled water production and distribution requires 17 million barrels of oil per year and we discard 29 million plastic bottles annually. Some of that ends up in our oceans. The Eastern Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific of floating garbage twice the size of Texas, is a case in point.
Cousteau's work is clearly important and the funding must come from somewhere, but Dasani's role might best be described as greenwashing. I'd be happier if Dasani helped fund a clean up of our oceans - imagine the PR they'd get from that.
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