Conversation - Sea Shepherd’s Paul Watson

Paul Watson doesn’t care what you think. The captain of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been putting himself between whales and harpoon ships for more than 30 years, preventing the killing of countless cetaceans. He’s been called a terrorist, a greater threat than Al-Qaeda, a liar. None of it bothers him.

“I am here to say things people do not want to hear and do things people do not want to see. I am here to piss people off – that is my job,” the 59-year-old Watson says in Ron Colby’s 2008 documentary Pirate for the Sea.

A Canadian, Watson was a co-founder of Greenpeace and instrumental in the campaign to ban the clubbing of Arctic fur seals. He has gained wider notoriety as a central character on the Animal Planet show Whale Wars, which chronicles Sea Shepherd’s skirmishes with Japanese whalers. He was also spoofed last year in a South Park episode called “Whale Whores.”

“Being lampooned on South Park is hardly something to complain about,” he says. “They brought the issue of the dolphin and whale slaughter by the Japanese to a very large audience. I could not really care less how I was portrayed.”

So where are you coming back from?

We got back from Antarctica about the seventh of March. We’re heading to the Mediterranean now to go against bluefin poachers. We took three ships down to Antarctica and lost one. For the first time we managed to save more whales than were killed, so that was a successful campaign. They have a quota of 935 minke whales, and they have 50 humpbacks on their permits. So 520 whales were saved, and 507 killed.

Let’s go back to your early days of eco-activism.

I was raised in an eastern Canadian fishing village right on the Maine border, called St. Andrews. I used to swim with these beavers in a beaver pond when I was 10. I went back when I was 11 and found there were no more beavers. I found that trappers had taken them all so I became quite angry and that winter I began to walk the trap lines and free animals from the traps and destroy the traps. So that was really my first venture into activism.

You’ve talked about a whale you made eye contact with as it bled to death after being harpooned. Tell me about the connection you felt with that whale...
Continue reading
Michael Shapiro @'Earth Island Journal'