Eco-Pirates

From his voice, you’d never guess he’s a pirate. He speaks in a mild tone and chooses his words with care. But Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and a radical environmentalist, freely admits to sinking at least 10 whaling boats in port, and attacking dozens more on the high seas in his lifelong quest to save whales, seals, and other precious creatures of the sea.

In 1997, he spent 60 days in a Dutch jail under accusation of ramming a Norwegian whaling vessel. In 2002, he was forced to flee Costa Rica after ramming an illegal shark fishing boat. And last month, a Japanese Coast Guard marksman allegedly shot him as he attacked an illegal whaling ship in the South Pacific Whale Sanctuary—the bullet lodged in his Kevlar vest.

An active self-promoter with a tendency to exaggerate, Watson embraces his image as a violent pirate. “We find it funny … that’s why we raise the Jolly Roger on our vessels,” he told me yesterday, while comparing himself with former pirates Henry Morgan, Sir Walter Raleigh and John Paul Jones.

Watson was one of the three co-founders of Greenpeace, but in 1977 the group expelled him after he forcibly stopped a Canadian seal hunter clubbing seals on the ice floes of Newfoundland. He now ridicules the organization for deserting its principles and lavishing money on fruitless ad campaigns; “It’s become the world’s biggest feel-good organization.”

His new band of pirates takes a more radical approach. Over the last few months Watson pursued Japanese whalers across the South Pacific in the Steve Irwin, a boat named after the Australian crocodile hunter, who had planned to join a Sea Shepherd voyage before his death. At the height of the chase, Sea Shepherd activists boarded a Japanese whaling vessel, sparking an international crisis that only ended when Australian diplomats negotiated the activists’ release. In the aftermath Australia’s generally anti-whaling government sternly warned Sea Shepherd to not repeat the stunt, and moderate conservation groups distanced themselves from Sea Shepherd.

To Watson, the campaign was a success. He dismisses the Australian government’s complaint—“We expect criticisms from government, that’s all they ever do.” And he similarly discounts other groups’ concerns, “We’re the ladies of the night conservation organization—people agree with us, they just don’t want to seen with us.” More important to him is the claim that his protest cost the Japanese whaling program $70 million, and caused it to kill half as many whales as it would have otherwise.

I began researching this piece wanting to condemn Watson’s acts and their philosophy. Eco-terrorism has always repelled me; using violence against humans seems an odd way to preach compassion towards animals. Moreover, many of Watson’s actions seem patently counter-productive: Icelandic support for whaling was said to peak after Watson scuttled two Icelandic whaling boats in Reykjavik’s harbor in 1986.

And yet there is something about Watson’s unrestrained passion that is so contagious, and something about his dogmatic but moral purpose that seems so noble, that it is hard to entirely condemn him. One can certainly disagree with his violence (he stressed that despite his many violent acts he has never injured or killed a person, nor been convicted of a felony), and worry about his judgment (several crew members have alleged that Watson’s bravado risked their lives).

But it is hard not to sympathize with his frustration at mainstream protest. Japan continues to slaughter hundreds of whales every year, under the pretense of a “research program” that produces few research papers but sells plenty of whale meat to the Japanese public (there has been an international moratorium on whaling in place since 1986, but scientific research is exempt). Whaling is inherently inhumane, and these mighty creatures take an average of five to 30 minutes to slowly bleed to death, while others escape wounded to die at the ocean’s bottom.

Nor is it easy to ignore Watson’s courage. In 1981 he secretly entered Siberia to document a Soviet facility converting illegally hunted whale meat into feed for animals at a fur farm, evading the KGB and the Soviet Navy in his subsequent escape. Actor Martin Sheen calls him “one of the gutsiest guys on the planet” and the Dalai Lama has gifted him a statue of Hayagriva, a wrathful Hindu deity who strikes down his evil foes.

In the coming weeks Sea Shepherd’s decrepit black trawler, the Farley Mowat, will patrol the ice-clad waters of Newfoundland, as Canada’s 2008 seal hunt begins. The Canadian government has increased this year’s permits to allow the killing of 275,000 seals, 98 percent of them babies, in what Watson calls “the world’s largest marine slaughter.” And in spite of new government regulations designed to stop the live skinning and clubbing of seals, Watson says that his crews have already documented seals bleeding to death on the ice.

Last weekend, Sea Shepherd was again in the news, the Canadian Coast Guard alleging that the Farley Mowat had “grazed” one of its icebreakers. Watson is adamant that the Coast Guard actually rammed his vessel, and says he has videotape evidence to support the claim. Either way, the incident had the desired effect of putting Sea Shepherd back in the news. In some sense, that is a victory for violence over reason. But it may also represent the best hope for Canada’s seals.

As Watson says, “pirates get things done.”


Lewis E. Bollard ’09 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House.  His column appears on alternate Thursdays.