Alexandra Cousteau, filmmaker and granddaughter of Jacques-Ives Cousteau, will deliver the campus earth week keynote address at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, April 16, at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Sonja Haynes Stone Center.
The lecture is free and open to the public and is brought to campus by the UNC Institute for the Environment in partnership with “Water in our World” and the Center for Galapagos Studies, Sustainability Office, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, and the Gillings School of Global Public Health.
The campus earth week keynote address, “This Blue Planet: Preserving and Sustaining and Healthy Earth,” will complement Carolina’s “Water in our World” campuswide water theme by addressing worldwide water issues and their broad impacts.
Cousteau is a National Geographic (NGO) “Emerging Explorer” and a globally recognized advocate on water issues. Her global initiatives, including her NGO “Blue Legacy,” focus on telling the story of water issues to inspire citizens to protect water resources. Blue Legacy, led by Cousteau, spearheads educational expeditions to produce short films, blogs, photographs and interactive elements to allow media outlets to more effectively engage audiences. It pursues water’s intersection with energy, food, communities and diplomacy as themes for its expeditions.
Cousteau was honored as an “Earth Trustee” by the United Nations and a “Principle Voice” by CNN International. The reach of her work extends to projects in Botswana, Cambodia, Canada, India and the Middle East. She and her husband Fritz Neumeyer recently welcomed their first daughter Clémentine (and the first member of the fourth generation of Cousteau) into their Washington, DC home.
A reception for students to meet Cousteau will be held at 5:15 p.m. in the Hitchcock Room of the Stone Center.
By Katie Hall, UNC Institute for the Environment.
Published February 25, 2014. Updated April 10, 2014.