Renowned explorer, environmentalist and filmmaker Celine Cousteau to speak at NYU Abu Dhabi

Whether diving in the freezing waters of Antarctica or swimming with anacondas in the Amazon, Celine Cousteau’s mission is to reconnect people with their place in the natural world – just like her grandfather, the famed French explorer and filmmaker, Jacques Cousteau.

French-American Cousteau, who is in Abu Dhabi this week, will present a talk today as part of NYU Abu Dhabi’s Social Impact Leaders series. She will also visit local schools through the Jane Goodall Foundation’s Roots and Shoots movement.

Cousteau is the director of CauseCentric Productions, a non-profit organisation that produces and distributes multimedia projects focused on grass-roots organisations working on environmental issues. She has produced and presented television documentaries for PBS, CBS and the Discovery Channel, which involve regular stints out at sea, such as when she spent five months diving off the coast of Antarctica and Easter Island for a 12-part series.

“It was tough and my tolerance for the cold was a lot less than the men’s,” she says of diving in waters with a temperature of minus 2°C. “Before getting into the water you have all this fear, but you have to perform on camera and that creates performance anxiety. Your face goes numb straight away. As long as you’re holding your regulator in your mouth that doesn’t matter, but if you lose mobility in your hands, you really can’t do much. My equipment failed pretty much every single dive, so I conditioned myself for that scenario. I’d dive for about half an hour before my hands and feet went completely numb.”

But Cousteau found it a fascinating experience and compares diving to “swimming through a science fiction movie”. “I could even hear the music score of the film as I dived around this beautiful iceberg,” she says. “We saw penguins swimming underwater, sea stars and nudibranch sea slugs.

Original article by Jessica Hill

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Renowned explorer, environmentalist and filmmaker Celine Cousteau to speak at NYU Abu Dhabi