I think Captain Cousteau might be the father of the environmental movement.

Turner is crediting Jacques-Yves Cousteau with a foundational role in modern environmental consciousness. By calling him the movement’s “father,” he points to Cousteau’s unusual combination of exploration, mass-media storytelling, and advocacy: Cousteau brought the underwater world into living rooms through film and television and increasingly framed ocean degradation as a public, moral, and political issue. The phrasing “might be” signals a conversational, non-scholarly claim rather than a strict historical attribution, but it underscores how influential popular communicators can be in turning scientific knowledge into a broad social movement.