Cousteau: Thank you.
It certainly is wonderful to see a sea of faces out there -- mammals everywhere sitting.
Dr. Benjamin said, when you look out there, just think of everyone as your family, and
now it looks like I have a whole lot more shopping to do for the holidays.
I'll make a big turkey.
But I'd like to take you on a little bit of a journey, and part of it is -- how did I
get here.
My family, as you know, for generations has been exploring the oceans.
I, in a way, am now crossing over and exploring the land as well.
I always want to tell the human story: How are humans connected to the environment; how
are we connected to the forests; how are we connected to the oceans.
Here's a little bit of a family portrait: In the middle of all those men is my mother
and my grandmother.
And little known to a larger public audience, my grandmother actually was on board Calypso
from the day she would leave port, and would not get off until Calypso came home.
The men would fly in and out as their schedule permitted.
My mother was an expedition photographer for 13 years, and would come home with stories,
but she was always behind the camera.
So it's really a great honor for me to be a third-generation in this family; but more
importantly, a third generation of women out there exploring and bringing this back to
you.
In getting ready for this conference, I was in Florida, and I met with Dr. Laura Fleming
of the Ocean and Human Health Center, University of Miami.
I said, what am I doing speaking to -- well, now it's about 10,561 people in the health
industry?
So I began to tell my story.
I said, I can't become a health specialist in less than six months.
I can certainly try.
As I was telling my story of how I got here, she looked at me, she said, that is what you
tell them.
Why am I here?
I went to the Amazon in 1982.
I was just about 9 years old.
I went with my grandfather aboard Calypso, spend a couple of weeks with him there; of
course, my grandmother was there.
She was nurse, she was hairdresser, she was confidante, she was a mother, and our extended
family kept growing.
I went back in 2006 and 2007 as an adult.
It was there really that everything came together for me, that as a child I grew up with this
family; and now as an adult, this is really what my direction was meant to be.
I studied psychology, so health of a different kind, and then I went on to study intercultural
relations.
Now, everywhere I go, I see the intersection of humans and the environment.
The photo you see here is the slim area of Belen, a part of Iquitos in Peru.
The people that live in these homes don't have adequate resources of water, and they
throw their trash out the windows.
So when the Amazon River rises, it carries the trash away.
This is also where they swim, in the same water as you just saw in the previous photo.
In the forests of this area, there is also some of the cleanest water you will ever find.
The resources that we need to live, nature has for us.
As we were hiking through the forest, we ran out of water -- we were luckily with locals,
which we always work with -- and he found us this vine and cut the vine, so that we
could drink.
Nature provides everything we need.
It was also on this journey to the Amazon that I really came to an understanding of
the importance of health.
I went to an indigenous conference in the middle of the Vale do Javari -- it's about
8,500 million hectors, 21 million acres.
There are only about 3,500 or so people living there, six different contacted tribes and
about six uncontacted tribes.
At this conference during the days we were able to attend, in the middle of nowhere -- this
is a 33 hour boat ride, the subject was health.
In the three days we were there, sitting in this very hot schoolroom, translating from
Portuguese to six different native languages, I found out that 80% of this population has
hepatitis, so I wrote it down.
Of the 3,500 or so contacted people in 2006, there were over 2,700 cases of malaria.
Now, for a 21 million acre area, there are only nine health practitioners, and they only
go occasionally to bring health to these people.
During that conference, they were announcing they were cutting that down to four -- four
people for 21 million acres.
There was no way these people were going to have enough access; nor could they very easily
go to places where they could access health on their own -- canoes, small outboard motors,
several days.
So when I left this conference, I decided I was going to do something about it.
As a filmmaker, I learned that I can do something more.
I had been in the Peruvian Amazon and negotiating going into another indigenous village for
this film, Return to the Amazon.
The Chief said to me: We will let you in our village, but what will you do for us?
I naively said: Well, I'm making this big international film.
Didn't seem to be enough.
I said: The international community will see what's happening here -- the oil companies
are drilling in your backyard, contaminating your forest, contaminating the water sources
in which you swim, drink, fish, wash your children, and they will see what's happening.
He smiled and he said: That's nice.
Do you really think that person watching your film is going to do anything to help us?
Do you really think they're going to go to bed, and then wake up the next morning and
actually do something?
He says: Medical professionals come here and they want to study our medicinal plants.
They ask us to come to the villages, and we let them, and we teach them everything we
know about the medicinal plants.
We take them into the forest, we show them how we prepare them.
And they make promises to help us, and they go home, and they make their little white
pills, and nothing comes back to my village.
Anthropologists do the same.
They want to come into our villages and learn about our culture and our history, and we
welcome them with open arms, and we tell them our stories and they write their notes, and
we pass down our history and they write their notes, and they make promises to help us,
and they go home and we see nothing.
As well intentioned as you are making this film, it's not enough.
That was the best adult lesson of my life.
It is not enough.
I have a great intention, I make these great films; but what is coming back to those communities
who need more?
So in the moment I attended that conference, I saw my opportunity to give back -- not on
behalf of any other organization, but on behalf of myself, as somebody who has access to this
place, who had information and, therefore, who had a door open to bring something back
and to help in a way that they needed, in a way that they asked for.
I spent a year trying to bring a team of doctors down into this area.
Now, being completely outside the medical profession, this was a huge learning curve.
I went down to the University of New Mexico -- I was living in Santé Fe at the time -- talked
to the department there.
I said, okay, I have this crazy idea, would you be interested?
Eventually, we had a staff person willing to sponsor a program where they would send
medical students down into this area.
I had a non-profit organization ready to donate medical supplies.
Now granted, this is what I would do somewhere between 11:00 and 12:00 PM, somewhere between
trying to make films, doing conferences, running around.
It was really tough.
At the end of the year, I met so many obstacles in making this happen that I decided I had
to let it go, which is one of the most difficult lessons of my adult life.
How do I let these people down, how can I do that?
What they needed was somebody on the ground, what they needed was a non-profit organization
and a group of people on location to work on this.
What they also needed is less barriers on the part of the governmental organizations
that didn't allow foreign doctors to come into the area.
They thought their four health officials were sufficient.
A couple of weeks after this, I got an email.
It was very random that it was sent to me, but it was a non-profit organization looking
for volunteers to go with a medical team into the Peruvian Amazon.