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two organizations devoted to giving the public, by means of mass 
media mainly, accurate information about the aquatic and marine 
environments of our planet. I am also director of the Oceanograph- - 
ic Institute of Monaco, and it is within this institute that I succeed- 
ed in bringing the International Atomic Energy Agency, the agen- 
cy’s laboratory called now the International Marine Radioactivity 
Laboratory, which is monitoring the dispersal, the bioconcentra- 
tion, flocculation, and absorption of every single radioactive ele- 
ment in the marine environment. We have been doing this for 20 
years, and I am one of the four members who decide the programs 
every year. 
I am also secretary general of the International Commission for 
the Scientific Exploration of the Mediterranean and have been for 
12 years. We are concerned about all the problems and we are fol- 
lowing very closely the problems concerning pollution and dumping 
in the Mediterranean. My organization has helped UNEP in their 
beautiful efforts which ended last year with the signature of the 
Mediterranean action plan to preserve the health of the Mediterra- 
nean waters. 
This commission, ICSEM, has launched a 10-year program to 
study pollution in the open Mediterranean Sea from atmospheric 
fallout. We had been studying very carefully coastal pollution and 
various dumping operations in the Mediterranean. But something 
that has never really been studied is to what extent the damage 
done to the ocean is due to atmospheric fallout, and how the ele- 
ments that fall in the ocean disperse in the water. 
After 46 years of active life at sea, I am still conducting the CA- 
LYPSO operations. As you know, we are going to study the ecology 
of Amazonia in Brazil. But our major effort with CALYPSO to 
study the environment was in the Mediterranean in 1977, when we 
explored and measured pollution in the coastal waters of nine na- 
tions and also around the coast of Venezuela 2 years ago. We are 
Ben prepaning! after the Amazon, to work in the Caribbean very 
closely. 
The result of these many years of studies have proven to me that 
the pollution originating in rivers, in water spraying along the con- 
tinents and into the sea, loaded with all the pollutants that you 
can imagine—I do not want to enumerate them—had some local 
effect of very serious consequences. But the damage or degradation 
that we were measuring in such seas as the Mediterranean or the 
Caribbean may be attributable, at least for an equal part, to me- 
chanical degradation, such as abuses in fishing methods or landfills 
or dredging for gravel or sand on the Continental Shelf. All these 
mechanical actions have, we found, a combined effect with pollu- 
tion and increase the effects of pollution by making the environ- 
ment more vulnerable. 
The science of the pollution of the environment is a new science, 
and some scientists have found a new name for it. If you do not 
know it, I will tell you: It is molismology. This barbaric name is 
soon going to be used as much as biology or geology. 
I do not pretend, and I underline this, to be a specialist of dump- 
ing and of pollution in this area. As I told you, I worked mainly in 
the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean. But I think that the 
problems are the same everywhere. We are convinced that on this 
