Cousteau sails in for Dillon Lecture Series

Brendan Ulmer
staff writer

Lets face it – most people who travel the world do not have the city of Hutchinson, Kansas circled on their map.

However some, like Celiné Cousteau, who find themselves between our borders can’t help but find the beauty that all too often gets taken for granted.

“You’re not so separate from things,” said Cousteau, who was the speaker for the 2022 Dillon Lecture Series, which was at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at the Sports Arena. “On my phone, I took pictures on the way from my airport to here just thinking, ‘You guys get this sunset every night?’ I don’t remember the name of the man who drove me, but I think I probably talked his ear off about the colors of the sunset.”

Cousteau is a woman who, as a kid, had the privilege of joining her famous grandfather, Jacques Cousteau, on scuba expeditions. She’s a woman who has spoken in front of both the United Nations, as well as remote tribes in the Amazon in South America alike. She holds her message of environmental and tribal preservation as of utmost importance, no matter what her audience.

“The stories that I tell are not easy stories to tell,” she said. “‘Tribes on the Edge’, (indigeonous people) asked me to tell their story because they don’t wanna die. When I go down there that’s the story I’m telling.”

She warns against feelings of apathy when it comes to world issues, and encourages everyone to do what they can to make the world a better place.

“The more people are present and witness, the less people actually act because they think someone else is gonna do something about it,” she said, “Thats a huge issue cause we are all witnesses all the time, whether it’s cyberbullying or whether we’re watching television and realizing that there’s a disaster somewhere, or walking down the street and a mother is mistreating her child, what do we do about that? I think it takes a lot of courage to actually stand up and do something.”

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