Environment: The Dying Oceans

Jacques Yves Cousteau, the renowned underwater explorer, has covered 155,000 miles of sea on film-making and oceanographic expeditions during the past 3½-years. Last week in Monte Carlo, he summed up what he had seen in glum, blunt terms: "The oceans are in danger of dying. The pollution is general."

It was not only the ubiquity of pelagic oil particles that appalled Cousteau and his crew aboard the Calypso. "People do not realize that all pollution ends up in the seas. The earth is less polluted. It is washed by the rain which carries everything into the oceans, where life has diminished by...