Washington Window

Tilting At Windmills

Marketing the Ghost of Jacques Cousteau to his next highest bidder
Alliance perverts icon's philosophy

Despite his best efforts and several millions of other peoples' dollars, departing Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound president and former CEO Charles Vinick has been unsuccessful in camouflaging his patrons' opposition to Cape Wind with green paint.

It's a win for Cape Wind unless Senator Ted Kennedy persuades President George W. Bush to designate Horseshoe Shoal as a federally protected "national monument," Charles is jumping ship, bailing out just when the Minerals Management Service of the US Dept. of Interior has released its "Record of Decision," setting forth how the agency will go about considering and approving offshore alternative energy projects and alternative uses for existing offshore platforms. MMS has done a seemingly thorough and fair job of it, so far.

The decision MMS has taken, essentially continuing to develop a formal set of rules while moving forward with its consideration of the Nantucket Sound proposal and others, is a "win" for Cape Wind, articulating as it does MMS's process and criteria which, from all indications, Jim Gordon's project will easily meet. Jim's efforts and persistence are charting the course for future offshore wind and alternative energy projects, and we all owe him mightily.

This allows Cape Wind to go forward without much by way of obstructionist rhetoric and back alley politicking, which thus far have characterized the way opposition forces have played. A few nitpicking lawsuits by die-hards and big egos, then: "Voila!" A tidbit of recovery from America's fossil-fuel addiction!

Charles Vinick is off to follow the money, again, with the wind at his back, compass characteristically in full spin, to market the Ghost of Jacques Cousteau to his next highest bidder.Unless Senator Ted Kennedy persuades President George W. Bush to designate Horseshoe Shoal as a federally protected "national monument," thereby taking the Cape Wind site off the table, the Cape and Islands will live up to its pioneer seafaring traditions, while drawing electricity from winds that once filled the sails of whalers and fishermen and drew America's settlers to its rocky shores.

Characteristic bluster and bravado

But shouldering his characteristic bluster and bravado, Charles Vinick is off to follow the money, again, with the wind at his back, compass characteristically in full spin, to market the Ghost of Jacques Cousteau to his next highest bidder.

We read now that he's consulting with a major player in the budding wind generation industry, helping that company "avoid conflicts." This gives new meaning to the word, "Greenmail." It is reminiscent of how the Reverential Racial Shake-Down Kings, Jesse Jackson, Sr., and Al Sharpton bully a Burger King or Toyota or other firms, raising issues of prejudice and then "helping" their targets create programs addressing a perceived discriminatory practice, all for a fee or a grant or "philanthropic" contribution to their own nonprofits.

In Vinick's present case, what is he going to do for Clipper Wind? Help them to identify and confront hypocritical NIMBYs, bird lovers and fear-mongers -- some fronting for coal and other fossil fuel industrialists, who fear windpower as "creaming" off their peak demand while giving Americans a hope of energy alternatives -- who lay all manner of disproportional, disingenuous unlikely risks in front of Charles Vinick's new company's wind projects? What then?

Will Vinick drag out his can of "Cousteau Green" paint to help grease Clipper Wind's projects through an environmental and regulatory gauntlet that Vinick helped to create via his "leadership" of the senseless opposition to Cape Wind?

If so, in this Vinick will be maintaining a tradition of betrayal of the values the late Jacques Cousteau's fans and followers of a generation past understood "the Commandant" to hold. Cape Wind he would have loved! Jim Gordon he would have celebrated. To the Cape and Islands he'd have said, "Congratulations!"

Who knows, he might even have asked me to help draft that speech, the way I did for his keynote remarks 25 years ago for the start of cooperative efforts to study and repair Chesapeake Bay, or his testimony I drafted and reworked with him to stop New York City Mayor Ed Koch from the continued dumping of Big Apple trash too close to the New Jersey shore. No way Cousteau would oppose Cape Wind! Two decades ago the man built his own innovative wind-assisted hybrid research vessel, Alcyone!

Captain Cousteau believed, perhaps to unrealistic extremes driven by the great passions which fuel explorers and pioneers, that the World Ocean (because to him there was just one "global sea") held much promise for human progress and could help to set us free from ignorant and wasteful ways we historically have exploited the ocean, if we but sustainably managed its bounty while harnessing the energy of its powerful forces. It's who Cousteau was! It's what Cousteau did!

The late ocean explorer, film maker and educator, when criticized for not being an "ocean scientist" in any formal academic sense, would counter with, "I am not a scientist; I am an impresario of scientists!" He saw his and our roles in The Cousteau Society as bringing new findings and new ideas to wider audiences, particularly political and industrial leaders the world over. This what Captain Cousteau did, better than any other before or since, and our awareness and concern about the ocean are his legacy. It is not Charles Vinick's or anyone else's product or "brand" to hijack and auction.

Jacques Cousteau is not for sale!

It is not, as Vinick's successor as CEO of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, Glenn Wattley, put it (in another news outlet's article about Vinick's departure), saying that Charles Vinick's involvement in the Alliance brought " the  Jacques Cousteau side -- the strong environmental," as if it's a two-step with Wattley's self-proclaimed "energy side." Wattley's comment makes what Vinick was hired to bring to the Cape Wind opposition gambit transparently and abundantly clear. Vinick was an environmental show dog, nothing more.

And for Vinick to market his Cousteau history, in effect prostituting his work for and with Captain Cousteau in exchange for "inferentially" lending Cousteau's name to efforts like those of the Alliance in opposing something the Captain would have loved and promoted, is a betrayal and an abandonment of the lowest order. The monumental hypocrisy of such activity is without shame.

 The news reports of Vinick's salary last year, obscene by nonprofit standards for a supposedly regional environmental advocacy group, could well have read: "For Sale! Jacques Cousteau! Only 30 Pieces of Silver! Inquire within!" That it was paid by tax-exempt funds from selfish high-rollers would have for the most part disgusted Cousteau, although it would not have surprised him.

Once in March, 1983, when Captain Cousteau and I were working one-on-one on upcoming testimony before a congressional committee, late at night in The Cousteau Society offices in a Manhattan highrise -- pulling an "almost all-nighter" to make our plane to DC for a 9:00 a.m. hearing on The Hill -- Captain Cousteau spoke about credibility and our shared responsibility to protect it.

"You know, Dick, when one of our films has circulated worldwide, as many as two billion people may have seen it," Cousteau said. "If we make a mistake in our facts or in our philosophy, our enemies will use that to undermine what we are trying to do." Cousteau was very conscious of his celebrity and of what he insisted was the responsible way we'd use public and media interest to direct such attention to issues and to policies he believed was our duty to advance.

In his later years, surrounded by sycophants and servile staffs looking out for primarily themselves and their once and future careers, Captain Cousteau split with his eldest and surviving son (and heir apparent), Jean-Michel -- for whom I had primarily worked before and after Charles Vinick joined The Cousteau Society -- their split coming primarily from family issues plus differences in philosophy and priorities father and son could never comfortably reconcile.

 Jean-Michel, to his credit, has never tried to be his father but he has instead sought to advance the romantic Cousteau Philosophy about the sea and its mysteries toward practical solutions for pressing planetary problems. In doing so, consistently in the 31 years that I have known (and admired) him, he has been willing to work with anyone who could employ science and technology to make progress, while trying to make a living as well as a name in his own right. For this he has been criticized by many, but never by me, for I agree with him.

And if Charles Vinick were fronting for Jean-Michel Cousteau rather than carrying around the philosophical corpse of a deceased environmental icon, this column would be about Ecosphere Technology, where Joe Allbaugh, a  long-time croney of George W. Bush, is fronting for some retired military brass who are  "mining" homeland security budgets, developing products for that market. Joe Allbaugh was Bush's first administrator of FEMA, coincidentally or not. Ecosphere brought Jean-Michel Cousteau onto their board a while back, only to be replaced by Vinick when the younger Cousteau departed its board.

It's all on their website; it's interesting, it's no doubt about the "green paint," but it isn't about Jacques-Yves Cousteau, whose credibility Vinick has not earned the right to sell, no matter the political spin or "PR" or reticence of Cousteau kin to counter or criticize. Vinick was recruited by lobbyists to block Cape Wind, purely and not-so-simply as it's turned out, and now is on to the next "client."

Vinick left the Cousteau Society not long after Jean-Michel split with his dad as he pursued his own approach to living with his famous name, while making a living trying to live up to that name. Generally, Jean-Michel Cousteau has been successful at this, and for a time Vinick was among those who helped him be so. But it is beyond borderline dishonest to suggest, as Wattley did so blatantly and cluelessly, that Vinick brought anything the late Jacques Cousteau would have in any way valued to the Alliance's selfish, self-serving opposition to Cape Wind, and if Vinick gave that impression then it is he who must live with that.

Wattley, if he were wise, would never have invoked Cousteau's name in the same sentence as Charles Vinick's, as if Wattley were joining the Cousteau team, as the Captain always called us. As for Charles? He's off the team now!