A flock of sea goals
30 years later, Paul Watson is still giving poachers shit
BY Dayna Boyer
Photography courtesy Sea Shepherd
After three decades of patrolling the high seas for bad guys, environmental pioneer Paul Watson is still going strong. The founder of the radical marine conservation group Sea Shepherd is adamant that the years haven’t changed him, or his life’s work. Watson is as opinionated and outspoken as ever, calling for radical solutions (such as solving the Earth’s ecological crises by drastically reducing its human population) and exposing hypocrisy where he sees it.
“Last year I saw Greenpeacers sitting down for a baked fish meal onboard the Greenpeace ship Esperanza while engaged in a campaign to oppose overfishing,” Watson wrote in an Earth Day editorial this year. “When we pointed out that our Sea Shepherd ships serve only vegan meals, the Greenpeace cook replied, ‘That’s just silly.’”
A lifelong activist (at the age of nine he was known to search out and destroy animal leghold traps), Watson has been both condemned as a terrorist and lauded as a hero. A legendary figure within the environmental movement, he has earned a reputation for being hardline and uncompromising, but in person he is approachable, intelligent and quick to chuckle at all the names he’s been called.
The eighth founding member of Greenpeace, Watson left the group in 1977, saying he was dissatisfied with its direction, emerging bureaucratic structure and move away from grassroots activism (others claim he was booted). Ask the 57-year-old today, and he’ll still tell you that environmental movements are too big and bureaucratic. “I call them the largest feel-good organizations,” he says. “It’s sad that we’re the most radical organization, because we’re pretty conservative.”
Sea Shepherd’s primary campaign of the past year was aimed at stopping Japanese whalers in the Antarctic, and the organization is still growing. A new ship was just added—the Robert Hunter, named for the late first president of Greenpeace—bringing the total fleet to three. In May, the Farley Mowat (nee: Ocean Warrior) was dispatched to Iceland for an anti-whaling campaign, while the Sirenian continues to patrol the Galapagos Islands to enforce a commercial fishing ban.
It was Watson and Hunter who, back in 1975, pioneered the tactic of intervening between a whaler and his prey to physically stop a hunt. Watson says the move was fed by a “Gandhi-like” belief that the whalers wouldn’t risk a human life to hit their target. But that’s not quite how it went. “Gandhi wasn’t working for us that day,” Watson says, recalling a hunter making a neck-slashing gesture before launching his harpoon, missing the activists’ heads by inches.
After leaving Greenpeace, Watson founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society to continue using interventionist tactics to enforce marine conservation laws and treaties. Campaigns to stop illegal hunters have included tactics such as ramming ships, shooting cannons full of lemon pie filling and sabotaging boat propellers. This may sound extreme, but there is a case to be made that the vigilante actions are legal under the UN World Charter for Nature—which can be interpreted as allowing individuals to enforce international conservation laws.
It’s not all about pie filling, however. In May, Sea Shepherd successfully persuaded Ecuador to join the International Whaling Commission, an organization responsible for international whaling regulations and supported by more than 70 countries.
Sea Shepherd’s tactics may not have changed much since the 1970s, but the playing field has—at least a bit. The group’s website offers a podcast and a blog, and it relies heavily on sponsorship to fund campaigns. In April 2007, Watson signed a deal with Australia’s Bluetongue Brewery, which will donate $1 from every case of beer it sells to the group.
