October 13, 2023

COMMENTARY BY CAPTAIN PAUL WATSON

I have never been much of an administrator. My forte has always been the action, the confrontations, the long voyages and the challenging of the unlawful operations threatening life and diversity in the sea.

My entire life has been guided by my experiences with defending and protecting the citizens of the natural world.

I began my career at the age of eleven when I began to walk the traplines in Eastern Canada, freeing beavers, foxes, skunks, and coyotes from leghold traps and destroying the traps so they could not be used again.

I was a juvenile saboteur, a teenage vigilante disrupting hunters and championing the lives of animals and the protection of eco-systems, especially marine eco-systems.

Someone recently called me out for being angry, accusing me of allowing my anger to alienate the pilot whale killers of the Faroe Islands or the whalers of Iceland. I have repeatedly been told that anger is never the answer. Change comes through compromise and cooperation they tell me.

I disagree. My anger sustains me and keeps me focused.

In my memories are experiences that have left indelible scars that cannot be easily forgotten. The things I have witnessed, seen, felt and experienced are the things that drive me onward from campaign to campaign, through conflicts, betrayals, and sacrifices.

How do I remove the sight of seal pups being kicked in the face and skinned alive? How do I toss aside the life changing experience of looking into the eye of a dying Sperm whales that spared my life? How do I forget the agonizing scream of an elephant mortally wounded and dying before my eyes? How do I remove the sight of the sinking bodies of living sharks, fins cut off as they slowly descend into the darkness to die alone and frightened in the depths of the abyss?

The answer is I can’t and because of this there is no retirement, there is no rest. The killing goes on and so must I.

I never get depressed or pessimistic because that would mean surrendering my power over the future, and that power exists with each new day in the present because it is what we do in the present that will define what the future will be.

It is my anger that forced my removal from Greenpeace, an organization that I co-founded in 1972. It is my anger that inspired me to resign as a national director for the Sierra Club because they refused to end their endorsement of hunting. It is my anger that was described by Sea Shepherd as the “Watson Problem” that forced my removal from Sea Shepherd Global, the movement that I founded in 1977.

In every case they wanted to neutralize my anger, wanted me to compromise and cooperate, to be more understanding of those whose actions are literally destroying life on this planet.

To lose this anger is to surrender to the forces that wage war upon the natural world. 

Anger can be a very positive emotion when it is properly focused and channeled. It is an emotion that overcomes fear and provides the strength to go where others fear to go, to do the things that others refuse to do and to say and write the things that many people do not wish to hear.

I am a defender of life, of nature, of wilderness and of the Ocean. 

If the Ocean dies, we all die and that is the knowledge that sustains me, that drives me and centers me.

When I was young, I was described by many critics as an angry young man. Today I am an angry old man.

Farley Mowat once said that my problem is that I never grew up and added, “and thank God for that.”

I am still the same young boy who freed beavers from leg-hold traps. I am still the young man who hunted down, rammed, and ended the notorious career of the pirate whalers Sierra in 1979.

Today, Japan has an Interpol Red Notice on me for disrupting the illegal whaling operations of the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.

The anger and the passion that created the Sea Shepherd movement also created the people who ousted me from that same movement. I mentored them, I encouraged them, I gave them the opportunity to be powerful activists.

What I did not anticipate and what I was blind to was that the positions I gave to them and the success that we achieved in activism gave them security, comfort and reputation and my anger made me a threat to what they became.

Because I could not accept partnerships with Fishery companies and corrupt governments and insurance companies and because I refused to transform to a mainstream less controversial, less confrontational position, I became someone they had to remove, someone they needed to cancel and whose legacy they needed to erase in order to transition to what they wished to become – respectable, secure and non-controversial.

I have always been, and I will always continue to be the outlier, and the unpredictable outsider. I will never compromise with the defense of my clients and I never will.

My position on the killing of whales and dolphins is that there can be no justification for their killing by any person, anywhere for any reason. There is no justification for the sealing industry or for shark finning, for super trawlers and industrialized fishing operations.

Our Ocean is dying and dying in our time, and I will never sit back and watch it die. I have never been, and I will never be an observer. Edward Abbey once said that the point is not to study nature, the point is to defend it.

I have co-founded and founded three big movements. Greenpeace in 1972, Sea Shepherd in 1977 and the Captain Paul Watson Foundation and Neptune’s Pirates in 2022.

Names change, logos change but what never changes are passion, courage, imagination and determination. 

In 2022, everything that I built over 45 years was taken away from me EXCEPT my passion, courage, imagination and determination. 

And building on these virtues I have the loyalty and support of veteran crew and veteran supporters and because of that we have rebuilt and continue to rebuild our fleet.

Our efforts against whaling and the killing of dolphins, against over-fishing, turtle poaching and shark finning suffered a short setback, but we are now revived and coming back stronger than ever before.

Back in 1979, I had barely enough money and fuel to cross the Atlantic in my quest to hunt down and destroy the pirate whaler Sierra. I did not know where or how to find that ship, but I set forth from Boston to search for it and on July 16th, I found the Sierra 200 miles off the coast of Portugal. I chased that ship into a Portuguese harbor and rammed it twice, disabling it and forcing a million dollars in repairs. Six months later after repairs, we sank it dockside. I lost my first ship, but rallied support to replace it with a 2nd ship and voyaged halfway around the world from Scotland via Panama to the Bering Sea to land in Soviet Siberia and a confrontation with the Soviet Navy that we managed to survive after documenting evidence of illegal Soviet whaling operations.

After a decade of confrontation, we drove the Japanese whaling fleet out of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. An embarrassed Japanese government responded by issuing an Interpol Red Notice for the charge of conspiracy to trespass on a whaling ship. 

Being targeted by the government of Japan was not unexpected. The surprise was being ostracized by four Sea Shepherd Global directors because of the Red Notice because it caused them issues with their partnerships with governments and corporations. Our success in ending illegal whaling in the Southern Ocean became an embarrassment to four of the Sea Shepherd Global Directors and because of thi,s they unlawfully ousted Sea Shepherd France president Lamya Essemlali and myself without a meeting, a discussion, a vote or an explanation, and have refused to communicate ever since. To dismiss a Board member in this way, not having the courage to do it to our faces but with an e-mail was very cowardly but it was what they decided to do to seize control of the ships, the list of supporters and even our history which they have been removing in order to cancel the history of my establishment of the Sea Shepherd movement and my history of over four decades.

It is that history of defiance and focused anger that has now placed my sights on two target – illegal Icelandic endangered Fin whale whaling and the horrific slaughter of pilot whales and dolphins in the Danish Faroe Islands. 

We must end both. I am confident that we can end Icelandic whaling in 2024. Ending the entrenched annual massacre of pilot whales and dolphins is more of a challenge but not impossible.

I have always said that the answer to an impossible problem is to find the impossible solution and impossible solutions can be found through passionate courage, determination, and imagination.

Finally, after a year of struggle with legal suits and threats, after betrayals and disappointments, we are back, we are strong and we intend to prevail in our crusade to abolish whaling and to defend diversity and interdependence in the sea.

Going forward we have a coalition of Sea Shepherd France, Sea Shepherd Brazil, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Spain, South Africa, Uruguay, Australia, New Zealand, Demark, Canada, Switzerland, and the USA.

In other words, we are back!