Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2021

The Current Transcript for September 17, 2021

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: The first thing my parents pretty much said to me when they dropped me off was like, be careful, go in groups.

VOICE 2: I've heard that 30 girls in this residence were drugged. It's just terrible things were happening.

MATT GALLOWAY: 18 months into this pandemic and university students were looking forward to embarking on new adventures on campus. But the excitement of orientation week went horribly wrong at Western University in Ontario after allegations of multiple sexual assaults in 30 minutes, why students are walking out of class today in protest and what needs to be done now to address the culture on campuses across this country. Also this morning, your mail in response to the town hall we hosted this week in Nova Scotia on the state of Canada's health care system. And then, the director of a new documentary on how the message of undersea adventurer and pioneering environmentalist Jacques Cousteau rings true even today. But we begin this morning with one of the worst fire seasons on record and the people who saved their buildings, but not their land. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

Back To Top »

How Skeetchestn First Nation uses traditional knowledge to keep wildfires at bay

MG: I want to take you back to the first of July.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Good evening, everyone. We begin on this Canada Day with a catastrophic fire that has virtually obliterated the village of Lytton, B.C.

VOICE 2: This evening, 15 minutes after smelling smoke, the entire village was engulfed in 15 minutes.

VOICE 3: Fire raced through the village of Lytton, and a thousand residents have had to flee for their lives.

VOICE 4: More than 170 active wildfires burning across British Columbia. And firefighters are desperately working to contain it.

VOICE 5: Our house is to the point of almost burning [unintelligible]. Wish us luck.

VOICE 4: Everybody just watched in the city of Lincoln burned to the ground and they seen that monster coming over the hill. We didn't know what to expect.

MG: That monster was the Sparks Lake fire. It ignited around the time the town of Lytton was evacuated in the Kamloops fire district, 2021 was the worst fire season in history. By a wide margin, over 500000 hectares of land burned. And on the second of July, the Sparks Lake Fire, which would become the biggest wildfire in B.C. this year, was barrelling toward the Skeetchestn first nation.

SOUNDCLIP

But we stayed organised and we stayed, stayed to fight.

MG: The story of each person is different from the story of Lytton. Many residents were moved to safety, but others stayed because they know the land, they know fire, and they use that knowledge to protect the reserve. Skeetchestn, an Indian band, is about an hour and a half drive north and east from Lytton. Right as you turn off the highway, a sign reads, Welcome home everyone. There are grasslands and horses. Grazing hills rise on either side. Houses are scattered along the winding road and follows what's known as Dedman Valley and at the main reserve, more houses. And right at the back, surrounded again by fields is the band office.

SOUNDCLIP

[Indigenous speech]And my name is Chief Darrell Draney. I'm from the sketch Indian band here, which is one community of seventeen in the territory that we're here to protect. And I welcome you.

MG: I catch him in between meetings, the operations of the band pretty much froze up while everyone turned their attention to the monster.

MG: [/sc]

Were we scared? Every bone in my body was telling me to run and our warrior stood there and they marched towards the fire when everybody else was running. And believe me, I wanted to as well. But they marched forward to the fire and held it back.

MG: Seventy five people stayed behind to fight the fire and protect the land. Darrell Peters was one of them.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: A little bit of rain is nice.

VOICE 2: Oh, lovely. It's nice to have the water after the drought.

MG: past, for the love for we even met. He was described as the person who knows everything about the land. He's the guy who knows which rocks the bugs live under. He's wearing a white cowboy hat, crisp grey shirt buttoned to the neck and on the back it reads Territorial Patrol. Darrell Peters has worked for the band for twenty years, looking after the land and the fires.

SOUNDCLIP

DARREL PETERS: I didn't know I was going to be such an important person growing up into it, what I do today. My grandmother used to look after the fires. My great grandmother used to, too, and that goes back to the 1980s from my great grandmother. So I'm kind of like the fourth generation, fifth generation that's carrying this on.

MG: Darrell is a fire keeper. There are some ceremonial duties that come with that, but it's also practical. In the off season, Darrell sets fires on the reserve controlled burns to keep the dry underbrush fuel for wildfires under control. And during the summers, he's getting used to fighting monsters.

SOUNDCLIP

DARREL PETERS: When the fire first started out in Sparks Lake, I was pretty much second or third, third person there from where it started. It was pretty close to the community and I knew it'd be devastating once it got into the valley. But that was my main mission. I didn't want to get to the reserve and come down and take out the valley.

MG: Darrell and the team that stayed behind had water trucks and equipment to build firebreaks. But it's his knowledge of the valley, his lifetime growing up on the land that he considers the most valuable.

SOUNDCLIP

DARREL PETERS: I gained the knowledge out of my hunting and gathering. So that's why I know my winds in my directions. Pretty good of where to be and when to be at the right time. And we have radio communication. That's number one key. Before I make a move, I make a call on it first and then let everybody know what was going to be in store for what we had to do. But I couldn't make that call first until the fire made its move and then I had to make my move. It's like reading a person. You got to read how they work, what they do, what they can accomplish in such an amount of time. That's what I had to watch for.

MG: How close did the fire get to winning, do you think?

DARREL PETERS: Hmm, I wouldn't say the fire came. I wouldn't say pretty close to winning, but it came pretty close to the valley, bottom to the floor. But I wouldn't let it.

MG: Daryl was working with the crew from Tucson and at the height of the fire, about 100 people from B.C. Wild Fire Service. It's a relationship that hasn't always been easy.

DARREL PETERS: Yes, I wish they would open up to be more cooperative for the people that are in the area, because it's basically the ranchers, the people from the reserves and the loggers that know the land that have always been there. So I think they should have open arms to our our knowledge and of the areas of how to deal with the fires. And it makes will make things a lot more easier because with the Sparks fire here, they started to communicate with me a little bit better. They took my knowledge into consideration. And then we started capitalising on making the right calls, getting a handle on things.

MG: For Chief Darryl Draney, the change isn't enough. He wants financing for emergency response teams made up of locals properly equipped and ready to go as soon as fire starts. While it's still small.

SOUNDCLIP

CHEIF DARRYL DRANEY: If we were resourced properly, there wouldn't be 300 big fires in B.C. there'd be 20, maybe 30, but not 300, because our people will be able to have those resources to be able to take care of it right away. And the knowledge of the specific spot, how much fuel it has, when to attack it and when not to attack it. If we are resourced properly, we could have this taken care of way faster than B.C. mobilises a team to get here. It takes them about four days by then. It's not 50, 60, 70 hectares, it's seven or eight thousand hectares. So I think that government to government talks right away.

MG: It's not just keeping the fire out. Chief trainee also wants more permission to burn indigenous people here. Darryl Peters and his ancestors set controlled fires to renew the landscape and control the fuel load in the forest that was outlawed in the early 1900s. Prescribed burns have been allowed again in the last decade, but only on a small scale.

SOUNDCLIP

MG: There's stuff that we're going to gain from fire. We understand fire. If you don't use fire to protect the land, the fuel stacks up and then you end up with huge fires that do more damage than good. You have to understand in those ceremonies we asked fire to go away, but we also asked to come back. We need fire. We want it back.

MG: The chief thinks those controlled fires could prevent the damage that was done this time. Sure, the reserve is still standing, but so much land has been damaged .

[Indistinct chatter]

MG: Terry Donald is just getting his family, including all of their animals, settled back into his house. His daughters bring the dogs out into the yard and they Yeah, there's a chicken that's wandering around in the lawn, a couple of goats and a pen out back. They were all out of their home because of a bit of a zoo for 53 days. Says it was nice at first the hotel pool for the kids, but it quickly got old. He was anxious to get back to his home and to his land.

SOUNDCLIP

Skeetchestn along was spared. And I'm grateful for that. I truly am. My home is still standing, you see, and all our homes here are still standing. Not give that to the professional firefighters that came in and looked after our community and the people, my own people that stayed behind to battle and they've done an outstanding job, they fought it day and night to keep that monster out of our community. And they have and I'm grateful for that. But they are. On the other flip side, four corners of my territory is gone. Our tweeters ran away from us. Our moose are Teneo. We have very little.

MG: Terri is 66 years old and elder, and he loves talking about the land. He jokes that he sometimes feels like throwing the car keys of his visitors into the creek that burbles away next to his house. This world is moving too fast, he said. People need to slow down and appreciate what's around them.

Speaker 6: [sc]

And that's what we teach our children to respect what's out there on the land. And when you go to land and you see nothing but but black and ashes and what is there to teach, I could only say to my kids, [Unintelligible] was a little angry, the old one. He was angry at us. All of us, not just a [intelligible], but everybody. There's a lesson to be learnt. We're. Far too long disrespecting Mother Earth, Turtle Island, and she's she's angry. This is going to turn around and is going to teach you how to look after her.

MG: He grew up in a cabin without modern luxuries and now he's building his own somewhere to take his kids and grandkids to spend the summers learning about the land. He wants better land management, better forestry practises. He'd like to see the province use indigenous knowledge to make sure the forests, the medicines, the hunting grounds and the ceremonial spots will still be there for the next generation.

SOUNDCLIP

If you could only hear the loss and the rebuilding of my way of life out there in the land. It's going to take time. The thing about Indian people, we have patience. And that's what we're going to need the most of right now, things are going to come back and they're very slow time, just like the residential school. I'm a product of that. I'm a nine and a half year veteran. I hear what happened. I tell my people, have patience, there's good things that are going to come out of it which has got to be patient.

MG: patient and resilient, everyone that we spoke with understands that the climate is getting warmer. They know that the fires are getting bigger, hotter, more difficult to control. But for people in Skeetchestn, this is their land. This is their home. And leaving is not an option.

SOUNDCLIP

I've had a lot of conversations with people in Kamloops who are considering leaving, are looking for something that they can live with, and that's just the smoke.

Joanne Hammond is an archaeologist and director of Heritage for the Sketches and Natural Resources Corporation. It's her job to deal with land and forest management for the reserve, a job that's become almost entirely focussed on fires this year.

SOUNDCLIP

JOANNE: I have heard from people who had planned retirement in the interior that are now looking for other options, but the people here don't have another home. They are not leaving. They have been here for 10000 years and they're not going to walk away from it, there's an obligation to stewardship here that just doesn't have a parallel in the settler or second peoples population of places like Kamloops. So people will stay and do what they can to try to restore it.

MG: That's not to say that staying will be easy. The impact of a few bad fire seasons will last long past this summer.

SOUNDCLIP

DARREL PETERS: You have to be a person who goes out there to try to put food on the table and comes back empty handed to understand what's happened here. There's so much loss that urban communities don't understand and can't fathom. Even seeing it on a map isn't enough.

MG: Joanne does have a map. Orange lines outline huge swaths of sketches and territory burned in the last four years. About 65 percent of the forested area is destroyed. It's one thing to see it on a map. It's completely different to see it up close. This looks like a moonscape. You can still really smell the fire to. Chris Creek is just a short drive from the village, and the devastation there is almost impossible to believe.

SOUNDCLIP

This whole valley and all the way to the dead man. The beginning of the road that we came up was was burned in less than a day.

MG: As far as you can see, the landscape is completely burned. Blackened trees poke out like spikes joint.

SOUNDCLIP

MG: When you look at this, I mean, what is going through your mind?

JOANNE: This is lost for a generation. That's how long it's going to take for this to come back to to life and you can see what's coming. We could see this the erosion and the landslides and the damages to the creek and the fish. Just in the very first days of the fire, we knew what was going to happen. I came out here the day after it burned and. I was unable to sleep for two nights. Every time I close my eyes, I just saw that. Just black sticks. There is not enough resources in the world to just fix a landscape like this. Even if you have the plans and you have the people to do it, it's just too vast. It's really hard to look at. And it goes on for miles and miles.

MG: It's just it's I've never seen anything like this before.

MG: Joanne says the community is already cleaning up landslides related directly to the fire, and she's worried about the floods. Still to come, but it's more than just the impact on the land. It's affecting the economic health of the community to the corporation that she works for, has had to put projects aside this summer just to deal with the wildfires. Drastic action is needed, she says, to save the livelihoods and the land here.

SOUNDCLIP

JOANNE: It specifically looks like not letting industry run the show anymore. It specifically looks like reforming industrial forestry from the bottom up. Everything has to change about it. It looks like putting land management back in the hands of First Nations, and it looks like that within 10 years, not a long term plan. We don't have time for that anymore. All of those things need to happen at once in order for us to actually have a fighting chance here. We have contributed in every way to environmental breakdown. Because of money, because we've let industry make the decisions, because our government is single mindedly focussed on economic growth, that is not sustainable in any way, and that's where the change has to come from. It has to come from people over industry and profits. There's no way we can tackle climate change without also tackling the sort of sickness of capitalism that we've created and that a lot of us have come to rely on. And that is a almost impossible feat at this point, I feel, to even get politicians to acknowledge the sort of depth and scale of change that is going to be required to deal with this problem.

MG: Where do you find hope or optimism in the face of that? It's really emotional and it's really we're right here. The fire was right there.

JOANNE: I have had hope and optimism in the past as recently as June of this year. But the last two months have changed me quite a bit. And I don't I don't see hope until I see action and the fact that we are in an election campaign following on the heels of this disaster. And that's not the top thing on the list. That does not give me hope. If I had to look for hope anywhere, I would look at it for it. In communities like this, in the self-reliance and the teamwork and the commitment to the land and to family that got these 75 people who stayed here to fight this fire and protect this community working day and night for two months to do that. I haven't seen that in any other context other than in indigenous communities, the way that people can marshal all of the resources and all of the energy to help each other with no expectation of payments, also no expectation of outside help.

MG: Chief Daryl Draney says his community wants and needs the province and the federal government as partners moving forward next fire season. They might get off easier or it could be worse. But situation is used to challenges.

CHEIF DARRYL DRANEY: All First Nations have gone through a lot, you know, different ways. There's different stories, but there's so many challenges that we've come through Indian residential school. We are resilient people. There's one thing that I've always said is that. We're going to be here forever. We will be here. We passed everybody else on.

MG: That was our documentary on the aftermath of the Sparks Lake Fire on the sketches and First Nation The Current documentary editor is Liz Hoath. In a statement, B.C. Wildfire told us, as the Sparks leak incident evolved, the B.C. Wildfire Service entered into a contract for a liaison position with the Skeetchestn land. B.C. Wildfire received valuable local traditional information from Skeetchestn fire watcher Darryl Peters. This knowledge was used to funnel the Sparks Lake fire into historic prescribed burn areas. Your CBC News is next. And then, allegations of sexual assaults on the campus of London Ontario's Western University have shaken students. I'll speak with people fighting for changes on campus. And the president of Western University. That's in six minutes. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

Back To Top »

Amid Western University allegations, more education needed to combat culture of sexual violence: advocate

Guests: Carina Gabriele, Alan Shepard, Farrah Khan

MG: Good morning, I'm Matt Galloway, and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

MG: Still to come, there are a few people from the past 100 years who could honestly claim the title of Explorer as an occupation. Jacques Cousteau was one of them Frenchman Mariner Deep Sea afficionado. His series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, was much must see television in the 1970s. The director, Liz Garbus, explores his life and his legacy in a new documentary. Our conversation in 30 minutes. But first, the aftermath of orientation week at Western University. Western University's orientation week was supposed to be fun after 18 months of mostly online learning, students are back on campus and excited to be there. But this weekend, allegations surfaced on social media that more than 30 female students may have been drugged and sexually assaulted. London police have opened an investigation and it's all left some students feeling uncomfortable and unsafe.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Just as a girl, I am kind of more on edge. I have my guard up. Look, I'm more alert and keeping my eyes open like my surroundings and stuff. I do have like a later class tonight, like from seven to eight, which is obviously when it gets dark. So I have a friend, but I think we're going to call the foot patrol just to be like walked home because I mean, with everything that's happened, who's to say it can't happen to me? Right. So it does make me a little more worried.

VOICE 2: I feel the same like the first week we would all kind of like go up to each other, introduce ourselves. And now I think everybody's kind of keeping that distance between them.

VOICE 3: I feel like it's definitely scary, like we weren't personally there because, like, we're not from that residence, but like we know like things have happened. So it's not really it doesn't feel that safe right now.

MG: Western's president, Alan Shepard, addressed students concerns and the allegations, bringing in new safety measures. And we'll speak with him in just a moment. But first, Carina Gabriele is a former student executive at Western University. She spent years pushing the school to do more to address sexual assault on campus. Korina, good morning.

CARINA GABRIELE: Good morning, Matt. Thank you for having me.

MG: Thank you for being here. What's going through your mind this week as you hear this news coming out of Western?

CARINA GABRIELE: I think one of the most important things when having conversations like this is that I am not I've been asked, are you shocked? Are you surprised? And the answer is no. This issue isn't unique to Western. However, anybody who's been paying attention to the statistics, which everyone has access to, anybody who's been a front-line worker, a student advocate, knows that this is not shocking. And, you know, I'm so overwhelmed with the amount of grief and sadness, but also the students, the students at the heart of this who are doing a tremendous amount of work. They've got the walk out today and I hope each of them are supported, provided lots of care and support because it's clear that this needs to happen because the university hasn't been listening.

MG: I want to talk about that, about not listening. Just briefly, the chief of police in London, where Western is located, said that the allegations are being taken seriously. But he warned these allegations surfaced on social media where, in his words, misinformation swirls. What does that tell you?

CARINA GABRIELE: Well, the first thing I'd like to talk about when it comes to that is that disclosures and reporting are two very different things and people's comfort level for either depends on the circumstance. Some people have a mistrust of the police, which is entirely warranted. The disclosure and reporting processes, while the reporting processes are often very obscure, they're not transparent enough. So folks might feel really comfortable disclosing in a space such as social media where they know and they feel safe. They understand what it means to be putting that out there. However, they might not feel comfortable reporting creating an official report, but it doesn't mean that it's not true. I've also seen language of rumours or fact or fiction, and this just contributes to a culture of not believing survivors.

MG: You were a resident advisor at Western. How often did the students come to you and share experiences of sexual violence?

CARINA GABRIELE: It wasn't rare, Matt. It happened far more than it should have. And prior to being a resident advisor, I was also a sophomore orientation leader. These instances are not rare, which is what I mean by not being surprised or shocked. One of the issues within residence is the process is not necessarily survivor centric. If a student disclosed to us, we had to tell our direct supervisor and I've been talking to some survivors on campus in the last week or so, and they've said those processes haven't changed, which is extremely concerning. There's a difference between disclosures and reporting. If a student just wanted to disclose something to me as a resident advisor had to tell somebody which wasn't OK, so it did happen. And the process that it took for students to be able to support those students wasn't OK. Wasn't Survivor centric

MG: in your experience? Is it your sense that the university has taken reports of sexual assault seriously?

CARINA GABRIELE: I think that's hard to say because the complaints process is so challenging to navigate. And this isn't, like I said, unique to Western. This is a cross Canada issue where there is typically a very a system that lacks transparency, that is very difficult to navigate. Like one of the most important things I want to say about this, regardless of complaints processes and reporting, is that. Gender-based violence is preventable. Every single sexual assault, every single case of gender-based violence that occurs is a policy failure. It's a result of people with power not prioritizing this issue and the lives of survivors.

MG: So what has to change then to ensure that that policy changes, that the lives of survivors, to your point, are centred in this?

CARINA GABRIELE: Well, one thing I want to say is that Western is actually very fortunate in having an incredible student union. I recognise I'm biased, but it is one of the largest in the country. I trust the students at the helm of that. Students have to be listened to. They must be listened to in this process. They must not be tokenised something that provides me with a lot of hope. Having done this work, I'm currently part of a project called Courage to Act, and this is a federally funded national project where we've created tools with experts, front line workers, students, faculty, staff from across the country from pieces and tools are actually launching at the end of this month. And these are tools that will provide all of the support to the things we're talking about. I'm talking about tools. There's a student advocacy roadmap, an anthology of student advocacy there. How do you engage men on campus with prevention work? There is graduate students, a workshop for graduate students and the security of their employment. There's tools about the adjudication, reporting and investigation processes. Yes, provides me with help. As a former student leader, I wish these tools existed so I could have taken them to my institution and said we need to adopt. These Currituck tools are coming out at the end of this month.

MG: Just before I let you go, Western's president announced yesterday new measures boosting security, bringing in mandatory sexual violence training, starting a task force to help deal with this. Does that give you confidence that the university is going to to to move meaningfully on this?

CARINA GABRIELE: So I've been talking with some survivors on campus, as I mentioned, and I would like to be very clear that there is no trust with students, students reading that did not have trust that the university would be doing this or going through with what they said. Weston has a long way to go to build trust. I did this work three years ago. I know that this work has happened since then. And I know that decades and decades of student activists, faculty staff have been doing it before me. So it took a PR disaster. You know, the students organising today, they're doing so because they haven't been listened to. So I hope those students are surrounded by support and care. And just one more point to the task force. The task force was mandated by the province last year. So I'm wondering, is this Western redoing the task force? Are they bringing it up again? Is this a new task force? Whatever it is, Matt, I truly hope that Western builds that trust with students and takes an intersectional lens to this issue. We can't be talking about gender based violence without talking about racism, without talking about ableism , without talking about homophobia. These things don't exist in silos. I really hope that whatever comes out of this, the task force talks about precarious workers to graduate students, faculty, staff, athletics at Western, which no one likes to talk about, but has an issue. I really hope that all those things are talked about.

MG: Carina, great to speak with you. Appreciate your time this morning. Thank you.

CARINA GABRIELE: Thank you so much, Matt. Have a wonderful day.

MG: And you, Carina Gabriele, former student union executive at Western University. Alan Shepard is the president and vice chancellor of Western University. Alan Shepard, good morning to you.

ALAN SHEPARD: Good morning, Matt.

MG: You said these are your words. We clearly have a cultural problem that we need to address. What is the cultural problem at your school?

ALAN SHEPARD: I think we have a couple of issues I would start really with the notion of what does it mean to come to university? So you want universities to be fun. But it's also a moment here where people are meant to be transforming their lives, learning, getting the skills they need to be prosperous citizens and making contributions to Canadian life. So we really want to adjust the balance of fun and work a bit. And if that isn't in the larger context of dealing with some of the inherited notions that we all have about what does it mean to be a man or a woman, what does it mean to come to university? So we need to rebalance the the learning and the research piece Western as the long history of the work hard play hard ethic. And that was existing long before I arrived here in twenty nineteen. I think that's a fine ethic, but we want to make sure it's in balance and we want to break away from some of the really harmful narratives about, about what it was mean to be a man and how you interact with women. We want more respect for women and finally we want to address gender-based sexual violence. It's a scourge on our society. It's in every university. Is that Western? It is preventable. I want you to work on that.

MG: A fourth year Western student and a three time orientation leader posted a long thread on Twitter. She's been involved in orientation this week. She says, I'm sorry for the culture perpetrated here that made people feel entitled to your body. Is that the culture that exists at Western University?

ALAN SHEPARD: I think that exists everywhere.

MG: Is it, does it exist at Western University?

ALAN SHEPARD: Yes, I think it does.

MG: How long have you known that that culture at your school is problematic?

ALAN SHEPARD: I think that it's a larger cultural issue, and I think it's something that all universities are known for.

MG: But I guess that last question is important because as Carina was saying, it's taken a national spotlight, she calls it a PR disaster for Western to bring in something like mandatory sexual violence training. Why has it taken until now for this to happen?

ALAN SHEPARD: I got to say, I would disagree with that a bit. So in 2019 and 2020, the university revised its sexual violence policies, permitted a number of significant changes, including not requiring people to disclose. So you can disclose, you can ask for support or you can make a formal report either to us or to the police. So we tried to make it very, very centric on the person giving the report, making making the complaint. So we've done a number of steps already to improve the reporting structure, the support, the counselling sessions for students and other kinds of support to make it very survivor centric.

MG: And yet survivors don't feel comfortable coming forward. What does that tell you?

ALAN SHEPARD: But we do have people coming forward every year under the policy. And we're in a world now where people feel more comfortable reporting on social media than talking to the professionals that we have on duty in some cases. But what I would say is that, you know, we're taking all of the survivors seriously. We're encouraging people to come forward so we can help them and so we can break whatever cycles are out there.

MG: Carina just said that in some ways she's been speaking with survivors on campus, that there is no trust from students when it comes to the actions that you have announced. What does that tell you about the gap between what you are laying out and what students feel and what they're looking for?

ALAN SHEPARD: The action plan was just announced yesterday afternoon, so it might be a bit premature to come to a conclusion.

MG: But this is a larger issue about trust in the leadership of your school, right?

ALAN SHEPARD: I get that. But as I said, these announced these plans were just announced yesterday afternoon. It's a difficult time for students. We are listening to what they have to say. And I've spent pretty much the entire week walking around campus, talking to students, hanging out with them, hearing what they have to say. It's been a difficult start to the school year in general. My sense is that there is good trust with the administration and we are for sure listening to them.

MG: So you believe that there's trust, but somebody who's been involved in this work as a former student union executive, but also in speaking with survivors and now helping to try and change culture on campus across the country, says that there isn't trust. I mean, just explain the gap between that.

ALAN SHEPARD: I can't speak for your previous guest, I don't know when she graduated. But I've been here two years. I think we work really hard to build a strong relationship with student leaders and with the student body as a whole.

MG: What will show you that the culture at your school that you have said there's a problem with what will show you that that culture has changed?

ALAN SHEPARD: Well, one of the things that happens when you focus on gender based sexual violence, when you when you make it a safe space for people to disclose and to get support or when you start talking about consent and trying to make sure that you can prevent as much of this as possible, often you find a number of disclosures will go up and not down. So measuring how many disclosures you have doesn't necessarily mean doesn't necessarily tell you a lot about how the environment is changing. I think the cultural change that we're after is although it's slow and will be slow, you have to take immediate steps, which is what we've done this week. So, for example, the most important one to me is we had historically voluntary training for sexual violence prevention on campus. We've made that now mandatory for everybody living in our residences. That would be more than 5,000 students across campus. And we'll gradually roll that out to all students and probably all staff and faculty, too. So mandatory training where people have to learn about bystander intervention, consent training, personal safety training, this is really critical so that you don't it's not an online module. It's a face to face experience where people really have a chance to unpack some of their own ideas about what is safe, what's culturally acceptable, what's legal, and how can they interact with people of the opposite sex with the same sex as it may be. We've also done a couple of other things. We've added some safety ambassadors to our residence halls and we've increased the number of our special front-line constables.

MG: Alan Shepard. This has been a difficult time for students on your campus and staff and faculty as well. I appreciate you taking time to speak with us this morning. Thank you.

ALAN SHEPARD: Thank you so much, Matt.

MG: Alan Shepard is the president and vice chancellor of Western University. This problem by no means exclusive to Western incidents of sexual assault happen at post-secondary schools across this country. Farrah Khan is manager of consent comes first in the Office of Sexual Violence, Support and Education at Ryerson University. She's also co-director of the gender based violence prevention project Courage to Act. Farrah, good morning to you.

FARRAH KHAN: Good morning, Matt.

MG: We're speaking with Alan Shepard at Western about the idea of a. Culture on campus, what does that culture look like broadly, do you think?

FARRAH KHAN: Well, we know the culture on campus includes that 71 per cent of post-secondary students have either witnessed or experienced sexual violence, so that culture is rape culture. And so that is across Canada. When we talk about this, we have to talk about the culture of misogyny, white supremacy, oppression that creates the roots of which all this forms of violence is built upon. And if we don't address that, if we don't if we just look at, say, a sexual violence policy, I know the president was talking about the sexual violence policy and the changes in it, but I want also for us to talk about how we're going to address gender inequality on campus, how we're going to still gender justice. What are the overarching commitments? What is to look at orientation and go, OK, what are the risks of mass gatherings? How are we going to address this? How are we going to embed this in it orientation? So it's not just a one off workshop or a training or what I did at Western, which was a 20 minute conversation at their student union concert called One Love. It's more than that.

MG: So much of this goes back to the issue of trust and the trust that students and survivors have in the institutions to take this issue seriously. The survivors are saying, many of them, that they don't trust institutions to change the culture. I want to take a moment to listen to this. This is from a former student at UBC.

SOUNDCLIP

STEPHANIE: My name is Stephanie Sparks and I have a current human rights tribunal ongoing against UBC for an incident that happened there back in 2013 and the second semester of first year, I was assaulted sexually and physically inside a dorm on campus, the Okanagan campus. After the incident, I took about a week to process and then I reported it to various departments on campus and the RCMP. I got minimal advice from those that I reported it to, I was referred to health and wellness, although but ended up being quite a quick dead end, I was never referred to security. And when it came to interactions with my attacker in classes, I was suggested to bring it up with professors themselves. It was like living in a really bad nightmare every day and not being able to sleep to get out of it was very confusing and very lonely. In 2016, after I was finally referred to security that March, I learnt more about the non-academic misconduct process, which was the only avenue for redress that included a potential expulsion for the student in question. And so I was like, that's the option I want. And I don't want to have to deal with the student in class anymore. So we started that process, but it was going to involve my peers no matter what. And that was something that I was not willing to do on principle. The goal for me has always been to make sure that I can watch my daughters not have to go through anything like this. So it's it's a very systemic big picture change that I'm not even sure where the boundaries are. I know that it involves policy change, but also making sure that policy is enforced and followed. I see the university's role in responding to sexual assault. I think that it should be revamped like in many other areas of society, including the RCMP and in churches and communities, just because I think there needs to be more of a community response in general. Rape affects an entire person's life. It's not narrow to just one aspect that can be covered by, you know, this one section is going to come over and it's going to solve all the other sections. It's a bit unrealistic to think about it, like all of the all the components need to be involved for it to be a holistic healing.

MG: We did reach out to UBC for comment. We haven't heard back Farra Khan. How common are experiences like Stefanie's where even after reporting, she didn't feel as though there was proper action taken?

FARRAH KHAN: When we did our check report, we interviewed over 300 people from across the country, survivors, activists, researchers, frontline workers and many people are talking about not having specific training around trauma-informed work, around not having the tools that they need or the resources that they need. Only some provinces have mandated standalone sexual violence policies. So what Stephanie was speaking to about not even having a sexual science policy at that time, that impacts how people access services, how people are treated, how they're given academic considerations and support when they have to navigate the system. And only right now, Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec and Manitoba have the mandate that they have to have standalone policies. And that's one way we need to see to address this. We need to see that the settlement policies actually walk people through a trauma informed approach to these conversations and investigations from an antidepressive lens as well. We also need to see mandatory training or conversation about who does these investigations and what education equivalencies that they have. What kind of training did they have to have and qualifications. There also needs to be a lot of training for decision makers in trauma and practise antidepression and gender based violence. These things would actually help us move forward, also creating real resources and spaces for people who are doing the work on campuses. Oftentimes, it's one person that's mandated to do the support and education for whole campus community, and that, one, leads to a lot of burnout for that person, but also means that they can't give the support and resources that students need when they are themselves so stretched. So I think there's so much that can be done in this moment. I want to say thank you to Stephanie for doing what she's doing.

MG: Just in the last minute and a half or so that we have. If you take a look at the work that you've been doing with courage to act on campuses itself, I mean, what is it going to take for real change to happen? Is this a moment in this conversation where that could happen and what needs to be in place?

FARRAH KHAN: There's a lot of things that need to be in place. I think we need to talk about mandatory education, which I know the president had spoken to. I think we need to talk about mandatory education across the board for first-year students, but we also need mandatory education from K to 12 to provide competent consent-based sex education. We do not have that across this country. It is piecemeal. Sometimes it becomes a very lightning rod issue during elections and provincial elections. And it's a huge issue because we set up students to fail — we don't prepare them to when they come to university with education around relationships. I think we have to increase resources not only to campus sexual assault support centres, but to sexual assault centres across the country because they oftentimes and have for decades been doing the heavy lifting. I think we also need to talk about minimum standards and or a charter of how we're going to address education, support and adjudication of these cases and investigation. And lastly, we have to take really seriously gender justice conversations. We have to look at gender equality across campuses, look at how students are dealing with sexual violence, how they're impacted by it, and lastly, listen to students and act on their recommendations. It angers me so much that students are speaking out about this for decades. You know, I was talking to my friend Pamela Cross, a long time activist. She did a sit in back in the day in Queens when there banners about yes means no, no means yes and yes means anal. And that angers me that there's been decades of organisations where people have been asking for this. So we need more. We need to work together and we need the provinces to act because this is a provincial matter, too. This is not just up to institutions. This is the province and this is the federal government.

MG: Farra Khan, it's great to speak with you about this, as ever. Thank you very much.

FARRAH KHAN: Thank you.

MG: Farra Khan, sexual violence educator at Ryerson University and the co-director of the Courage to Act project. Coming up after your regional update, we will speak with the director of a new film about the life and legacy of Jacques Cousteau. More relevant now as we talk about climate change than perhaps ever before. My name is Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

Back To Top »

New film charts Jacques Cousteau's life from arrogant adventurer to conservationist

Guest: Liz Garbus

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway, you're listening to The Current, I had the great pleasure this week of hosting a special edition of The Current from Musquodoboit Harbour in Nova Scotia. I was there and we were very mindful of covid precautions, I should say, with a group of people from that beautiful community to talk about health care. And we heard some extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult stories about what it's like to cope with life threatening gaps in that health care system. You had stories to some of you wrote in to tell them to us. And our senior producer, Karin Marley is here to read some of your mail. Karin, good morning.

KARIN MARLEY: Good morning and welcome back.

MG: Thank you very much.

KARIN MARLEY: Let's start in Halifax. Imelda O'Toole said, I volunteer at the local library helping people improve their English. I spent time with an Ethiopian man who came here as a refugee. He was a nurse back home and of course, would need to reach a level of English that would satisfy the authorities. He was finding it almost impossible to get into any programme that would help him upgrade. It is frustrating to see this man working as a cleaner when he has so much to offer us here.

MG: No surprise, the stories from Nova Scotia also struck a chord elsewhere in this country. Carol Baker in Kamloops says problems in Nova Scotia are rampant in B.C. A man recently died in Parkville, British Columbia, due to the fact that the ambulance did not arrive for a very long time. The problem with health providers is universal.

KARIN MARLEY: Holly Southwell echoed what we heard about the shortage of family doctors. She writes from the Muskoka region in Ontario. I waited two years on a waiting list for a family doctor in Huntsville last spring. I finally got one. I was told at the time that the waiting list is now up to four years long. The doctor I was assigned is in his 70s. I pray that when he retires, I will be able to get another doctor.

MG: Michelle Sparling had a similar concern telling us on Twitter: Our youngest lives 45 minutes outside of Halifax. They are two years on the wait list for a doctor. No walk in clinics, or limited hours means getting care, even preventative care is a challenge. In Cape Breton, local ERs are closed for weeks at a time, which means an hour's long wait at the regional hospital.

KARIN MARLEY: Donna Lockhart from Ennismore, Ontario, had her own challenges, especially as a senior. She tells us doctors get paid by the number of people they see, not whether they really help you. It is stressful for older adults like my husband and me to be without someone who knows our history would support us and who we know is there for us. I loved the idea of community based health care. Resources should be directly related to the health profile of the community.

MG: Cheryl Stagg was listening in rural Newfoundland and writes about the long waits she's facing to see specialists for her health issues. She says something doesn't make sense, not the least of which is the outrage which always seems to be expressed in response to suggestions to build a public private system. I, for one, can afford to pay for a CT scan and visit a specialist. Would it not then make sense and benefit the public health system? If people like me were taken out of the public system and off the waitlists and to be directed to private fee for service clinics, would that not make more room in the public system to provide a more efficient response to those who desperately need care but are unable to pay?

KARIN MARLEY: I'm sure listeners will have thoughts on that as well.

MG: That came up during the town hall as well.

KARIN MARLEY: Finally, from Jody Asbell Clarke from Nova Scotia, she had this message for the government. I sure hope our new premier, Tim Houston, listen to the show on The Current Nova Scotia health care situation. Please, Premier, please act on this now.

MG: Thank you, Karin.

KARIN MARLEY: You're welcome.

And thank you, everybody. In Mosquodoboit who welcomed us and everybody across the country who saw this as an issue in their own community. Karin Marley is The Current senior producer. And we always want to hear from you. You can email us thecurrent@cbc.ca or send us a note on the Twitter @TheCurrentCBC. This is The Current on CBC Radio One. My name is Matt Galloway.

[Music]

SOUNDCLIP

Infant men, ancient Medusa. All living things, plant and animal, are largely molecular arrangements of water. The pulsing life force of the exotically evolved Bellagio shares with the rhythm and contractions of the human heart, a common ancestry brewed and that unique cosmic plasma, the sea, mother of all life.

MG: That's the opening of one of dozens of our long specials that Jacques Cousteau made for television show Cousteau was a sailor, a diver, an inventor, an explorer, and to a generation of children, he was inspiration.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Captain, this is Jennifer. Jennifer,

VOICE 2: And what's it like down there?

VOICE 3: OK. It's fantastic. Imagine. Having no way to imagine that this would be under water, you would just help your legs and you would float around, you would move like this swimming in space above all your little friends. It's beautiful.

MG: That is some of the remarkable archival footage featured in a new film called Becoming Cousteau. The film was made by the director, Liz Garbus, who joins me now. Liz, good morning. Good morning. Were you like one of those little kids who was hanging on every word of John Cousteau?

LIZ GARBUS: Yes, I was. All of those children in that audience hanging on to every word and dreaming of being aboard the Calypso with his seemingly merry band of journeymen.

MG: I want to talk about the merry band of Juryman in a moment. But I mean,

VOICE 1: I grew up watching that show as well and watching the specials, and it was like being transported into another world. What do you remember about his TV programme?

LIZ GARBUS: I just remember it was like opening a curtain to a new world. That was really I mean, as he says, a dream world. It all came about for me because I was reading a book to my young son and Cousteau was part of this book. And I it occurred to me that he was growing up kind of steeped in these images that were made possible by the work of Cousteau and, you know, so much of his of a young child's television diet that consists of undersea world and its beautiful excitement. And looking back, that that was really the first time these kind of fish and coral reefs were brought into our living rooms. It was just a magical spectacle. And I wanted to hearken back to that wonder as well as revisit his legacy and its meaning today in 2021.

MG: How much did you know about his life before you started making the film?

LIZ GARBUS: I knew nothing about his life. Before I started making the film. I knew what the television viewer like you or like those children in the audience, knew that he was an explorer who had shown us what had been hidden behind the surface of the ocean for hundreds of years. But, you know, in order to make a film what I need more than than that, I needed to know if there was a great story there, a human story. And as I began to dive into the material, read his journals, read the extensive interviews, bios, I began to understand that he he went on a wonderful journey that I thought was extremely relevant today. And it was a it was a journey from kind of hubris and arrogance and a sense of kind of conquest moulded into the Explorer mould of 20th century and 19th century explorers to a journey towards consciousness and conservation and global citizenship. And to me, that felt like a metaphor for the journey that we need to go on as a society, which is, you know, we've been abusing this planet and it's now calling us to to transform our attitudes as well.

MG: What was it that initially drew him to the ocean? Because there's this incredible archival footage of some of, you know, early, early, even dives. But when he's snorkelling and he's spear fishing, what was it that was so intriguing to him about that?

LIZ GARBUS: So he was I think he was always an adventurer. I mean, one of the stories he told that did not make it into the film was that he was always a bit of a rascal and his family once came to America and he was sent to a summer camp in Vermont. And he was a bit of a rascal, always getting in trouble. So he had a counsellor. He told the interviewer it was a German counsellor who made him dive to the bottom of the lake, swim to the bottom of lake to quote unquote, clean up the weeds. And as a young child, you know, this thing that was supposed to be a punishment actually delighted him. And so there must have been a taste for what lay beneath the surface since a very young age. However, he wanted to be a pilot and started training for that. But then, as we you know, we talk about the film had had an accident and shifted. He went to the south of France to recuperate from the accident and started diving there. But I think in him there was always this thirst to defy the boundaries and go deeper, further and longer. And as you say, he started as a goggle diver. But, you know, there are the limitations of that. You have to come up to breathe. And he wanted to to change that.

MG: As you say, he was always trying to defy the boundaries. And so eventually coming up for air was not satisfying enough. You forget that that scuba diving wasn't really a thing when he started out. Take a listen to this clip from the film.

SOUNDCLIP

It's always the same, necessity. This is the order to go deeper in order to stay longer. I became an inventor by necessity.

MG: What sort of underwater technology did he invent?

LIZ GARBUS: So through the relationships of his wife's family, he was able to meet a man named Emile Gangneung, who is developing a compressed air system and together they developed a new device called The Aqualung, which enabled you to pressurise air and put in the can and throw it on your back. This is ultimately the beginning of scuba. And I don't think people really realise I mean, I didn't realise that we owe scuba diving to Cousteau and his partner, Emil Gangneung.

MG: And again, anybody who has gone scuba diving or knows of it, you might take it for granted at that point. How revolutionary was this technology that, as you say, you could have these tanks on your back, you have a regulator and you can stay under the surface of the water?

LIZ GARBUS: I think it would be like today saying, OK, here is something you can put out. Here's a jetpack, Matt, go ahead and see what you see above the clouds. I mean, I think that's you know, that's what it was. It enabled a human being to be independent and responsible for their own motion as opposed to in some big suit connected to a ship and explorer. It was absolutely transformative.

MG: The next piece or another piece that allows him to transform his expeditions is the Calypso. You mentioned this earlier. This is his boat. What was so special about the Calypso?

LIZ GARBUS: You know, there was nothing that special about the Calypso. I mean, it sounds sacrilege to say it was an old minesweeper that was an American ship that was retired. What was special about the Calypso was its crew and the people who lovingly transformed it into the vessel that brought the undersea world to millions of people across the globe. And it really was the muse for Cousteau and also his wife, Simon, elsewhere, or about Cousteau, who ended up really being the steward and the soul of that boat for so many of the sailors and the Calypso crew.

MG: Who were his crew?

LIZ GARBUS: Bis crew, his crew. I mean, he called them the misfits, the dropouts. You know, they were certainly people who you know, we have lots of shots of them guzzling down bottles of whisky. There were certainly people who were rejecting the conventional lives being offered to them in large cities, and they had sailors hearts and explorers hearts. And so from America to Falko to you know, there are a bunch of folks who were on that boat for decades, along with Cousteau and and his wife, Simon.

MG: And it's like they signed up for something. I mean, there there is footage of them, you know, painting the boat when he acquires the boat and getting it into shape so that it can get out on the water. It's not like they were just there helping him explore the ocean. They were there as part of something larger.

LIZ GARBUS: Yes, it was a bit of a family, almost like a cult. It was a people. It was a group of people living together and having this great adventure even there. One of the early crew members and cameramen said, you know, when you were accepted to work on the Calypso, it was like you entering the holy House of Saints. It was an extraordinary life changing experience for those men.

MG: And it looked like a lot of fun, too. I mean, there's a real romance. The you mentioned the whisky. There's a lot of wine that's consumed. There are accordions that are on the boat. Everybody seems to be having a great time.

LIZ GARBUS: Yes. And, you know, most of all, I would say Seaman Cousteau, who the only woman on board with all the bikini clad Frenchmen who says very clearly she would absolutely not accept another woman on board and of course, fear for their young sons who were aboard, you know, maybe four months, a year when they were out of boarding school. It was yes, it was incredibly romantic.

MG: The Calypso sails around the world. And one of the things that you learn in this film, that I did not know before I watched it, is that Jacques Cousteau, at the very least, claims that he is responsible for the oil wealth in Abu Dhabi. Can you explain this to me?

LIZ GARBUS: Yeah, well, before he was a TV star, he had to fund these expeditions and first there were donations, but ultimately that was not enough to keep them going. Their reputation in the press had had gotten out and there was an understanding that there will be divers who could go down to the bottom of the ocean and stay there. And we're the best in the world. So this drew attention of oil prospectors. And ultimately they yes, they did comb the ocean floor looking for black gold, oil and finding locations for drilling undersea drilling stations. There was not an understanding at that point that this was doing damage to the sea. But this is how they funded their early expeditions.

MG: They filmed everything as well. And he starts thinking of how to use that and is led to become an undersea filmmaker. What was it that that got him thinking that the rest of the world should see what he was up to?

LIZ GARBUS: Well, I actually think Cousteau was a filmmaker way before he was a aqualung diver when he was a kid and Bolex and first cameras were available, he was making films before he was diving. So it was always something burning inside of him. And I think those of us who are in this particular business have similar memories and stories of filmmaking as children. So I think it was something he always was doing. And then when you start seeing what he was seeing undersea, well, it doesn't take much to imagine how he would then come up with the desire to turn these extraordinary experiences into films to share with the world.

MG: The first feature film, The Silent World, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Why was that such a sensation, do you think?

LIZ GARBUS: And also the Oscar here in America, it was, you know, because it it was showing unbelievable- it was unbelievable undersea photography. There was a camera intern who most cineaste will have heard of called Louis. It was it was an extraordinary collection of imagery. Plus, it had an incredible sense of timing, adventure and cinema. I mean, Cousteau said, and something that will make a lot of us in this business shift in our seats, he says, I am not a documentarian. I am an adventure filmmaker. And they really structured the film through their adventures. There are many now. They seem somewhat cliched pieces of drama that they have to overcome in the course of the film. But it really isn't a documentary in its strict sense.

MG: Let's say where's the daylight between the two?

LIZ GARBUS: Well, the daylight between the two is that he constructs. He'll say say, you know, I've seen the idea. I'll say, you know, you walk outside now and say, look at the dolphin. And later when the dolphin comes, we will shoot the dolphin. So it's constructed in that sense.

MG: Was television kind of the natural successor to to him doing feature films, do you think?

LIZ GARBUS: Yes, I think so. He did these feature films. But, you know, there seemed to be such a hunger for this technology he had invented and he wanted to continue living on the Calypso and feature films were not going to pay for that. So he is a terrific entrepreneur and businessman, and he understood that a way to finance these voyages, as well as further his aesthetic desires, was to to television.

MG: What's it like to go back and watch those TV programmes? I mean, in some ways they very much are a moment of their time, not just, you know, the tiny little swimsuits and the unadulterated ocean, but there's something something that's of the of the time that's in the for you going back and watching them. What was that like?

LIZ GARBUS: Well, I think the early shows and when he starts on ABC, it is very much about adventure. And there is this kind of arrogance to the journey, you know, and it is about the conquest going as far as possible, seeing absolutely everything. And what was interesting to me was then, because I had remembered so much of his later work as a conservationist, that going back to the early films which do not have that ideology, was really quite stunning. And it actually really, for me, crystallise the narrative arc that I was exploring in this documentary.

MG: When did he start to realise that the oceans that he was documenting and as you say, I mean, in those early films and the early programmes trying to conquer in some ways, when did he realised that those oceans were really being threatened?

LIZ GARBUS: You know, I think there were there were certainly early conversations with Taeyang, his diving partner, about the fragile-ness of the of the underwater ecosystem. But I don't think it was until Cousteau had been diving for about 20 years and returning to some of the same spots and comparing his photographs and film of the same locations that he understood that we were in a period of extraordinary change. And I think especially in the Antarctic, is where he felt it so dramatically. And that became a passion of his to sound the alarm for the Antarctic and the melting glaciers and the sea life that was at risk there. So it was really through him seeing for himself that he became this the siren for conservation of the undersea world.

MG: What was his responsibility, his role in that destruction? One of the crew members of the Calypso says the whole world was being discovered. We had no idea we were destroying it.

LIZ GARBUS: That's right. I mean, he certainly looks back. I mean, I'm not imposing this idea upon him. He looks back and he sees some of the footage, some of the things that he did. You know, there's in the silent world, there's this famous, very controversial scene of them slaughtering a shark. And Cousteau looks back on them and says it was terrible and we would never do that. Today, they also put bombs, dynamite underwater to see what would come up. You know, they rode on the back of sea turtles for fun, all of that stuff, I think not just as crew members, but also, Cousteau realised was was inappropriate. And he admitted that that it was something he would never do again.

MG: Did he feel guilty for hammering spikes into the sea floor to try and figure out whether there was oil beneath the surface?

LIZ GARBUS: You know, he never it's interesting. You know, we pore through everything. He never talked about oil with regret in that way. He talked about his interference with sea life and reefs, et cetera. But I never heard him express any remorse about oil. We certainly were looking on the lookout for that.

MG: What do you make of that?

LIZ GARBUS: You know, I think that there wasn't an understanding until. Really towards the end of his life about the damage of it and perhaps it's just like the limits of how much a human can can kind of stomach their own failures, or perhaps he wasn't asked enough because it wasn't such a well-known fact.

MG: He was a great guest on talk shows and on those talk shows started to shift what he was talking about, becoming a much louder advocate for the environment and pushing for environmental regulations as well. Take a listen to this. This is from one of his talk show appearances.

SOUNDCLIP

When I was already involved in what to say, scanning the possibilities of extracting energy from the sea. This was a choice that they made many years ago. But what I was shocked by is the speed and shamelessness with which the industrial interests have thought of the waste basket, all the environmental measures that had been very laboriously take.

MG: At this point, Jacques Cousteau is an international celebrity. What sort of impact did him saying that on television have?

LIZ GARBUS: You know, it had a great impact and it was the birth of the environmental movement since nineteen seventy one. And then through 1992, these were his main talking points about protection. You know, in the early decades of his life as a conservationist, he thought his best role was to make people love the sea and therefore feel attached to it and want to protect it. But as he got older, he felt in fact, he had to go further than that and really sound the alarm. Of course, his television shows, as he was doing so, became less adventurous and less entertaining and had strict sense. And he lost an audience, his shows that cancelled. They ended up going on lesser seen networks. And so he paid a price for a commercial price for sounding the alarm. But I don't think he regretted that at all.

MG: What does that tell you? I mean, as a filmmaker yourself, what does that tell you about the line that he had to walk in terms of crafting a message that would resonate with people but also would have an audience?

LIZ GARBUS: Well, I think he became first and foremost an advocate and he realised he would lose some audience that way. And I and he was very comfortable with that idea. In fact, he would become quite testy with interviewers later in life who would push him on this subject about becoming too dark and, you know, harkening back to that earlier spirit because he felt he really had one and only one mission at this point in his life.

MG: He says in the film, in some ways when he's talking about the state of the oceans, that it's too late. Do you think did he believe that it was too late to save the oceans that he loved?

LIZ GARBUS: I think after the loss of his son, Philip, he did take a pretty dark view. Philip was also an environmentalist together. Perhaps they felt invigorated by carrying the message of conservation. I think after the loss of Philip and Cousteau doing it by himself, it was definitely a darker time. But he said he always had hope. And Rio in 1992, which he attended five years before his death, was a real turning point for me. It could have been a turning point for the environmental movement. It felt to those involved like a major milestone. However, we now know 30 years later it was not that. But I do think he felt somewhat hopeful after Rio. But he also knew and he said himself many times, we are throwing blank checks on future generations and they are going to pay. And here we are paying.

MG: Why do you think you talked earlier about the journey that we are on and in some ways mirroring the journey that he was on? Why do we need to hear his story now?

LIZ GARBUS: Well, this summer, 2021, the IPCC report came out about the effects of human activities on our planet. And as many of us have known for a long time, there is damage and change that is irreversible. But some of the most deleterious effects, we still have a moment to change course. And that course change is what Cousteau's journey was. So we were very much in this moment in which we are running out of time. And it's it's the most urgent issue for for all of humanity, quite frankly. And I don't think that's an overstatement.

MG: He died in 1997. What would you have asked him?

LIZ GARBUS: Who's next? Because there's nobody who can carry this mantle. There's nobody today who has the celebrity and the authority to speak for the environment to a global audience. And that's a real loss for us. I know he felt that Felipe was going to be next to son, but that didn't happen. And, you know, I suppose I would have would have talked to him about that.

MG: It's a beautiful film and it's just nice in some ways to remember the power that he had and the influence that he had. Liz Garbus, thank you very much.

LIZ GARBUS: Thank you so much.

MG: Liz Garbus is the director of Becoming Cousteau screening as part of the Toronto International Film Festival, which runs through Sunday. That is The Current for this Friday. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One. Q is next. Cynthia Erivo has won a Tony, a Grammy, an Emmy, also nominated for an Oscar, and she has just released her own album. The debut is called Chapter One, Verse One. She'll talk to Tom Power coming up next on CBC Radio. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. Have a great weekend. We'll see you on Monday.

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Friday September 17, 2021 Full Transcript

More Stories Like This