In 1959 Jacoues Cousteau sounded the alarm: the Mediterranean was dying. Diving off France’s southern coast, Cousteau found a marine desert that a few years earlier had teemed with fish and plants. He blamed poisons from the large urban and industrial complexes built near the sea. Cousteau crystallized growing public concern over pollution of the world’s seas and oceans. By the 1960s, oil spills, chemicals and sewage were turning areas of the Baltic into toxic cesspools, heavy metals and DDT had accumulated in fish and shellfish from the Atlantic to the China Sea, causing carnage among birds that ate them and poisoning people.