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Jacques Cousteau was a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, and filmmaker who co-invented the Aqua-Lung and spent decades introducing the underwater world to audiences around the globe through his television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. He was the person most responsible for the idea that the ocean was not just a resource to be exploited but a world to be known — a civilization of its own, ancient and intricate and worth protecting. He spoke of the sea the way other people speak of a person they love: with specific detail, with reverence, with the knowledge that it could always surprise him.

World Oceans Day is observed on June 8 each year, and June 8 is also National Best Friends Day. World Oceans Day is a call to protect something that most people have only seen from the surface. Cousteau's words explain why that protection matters beyond ecology or economics: the ocean does something to the human soul that nothing else does. You don't have to have dived in it to feel it — the sight of the horizon from a beach, the smell of salt, the sound of waves — it pulls at something ancient in us. The net of wonder he describes is real, and it is the reason people fight to preserve what they have never seen. Best friends, like oceans, hold us in exactly this way — their depth always exceeds what's visible on the surface.