"Surfers Have a Powerful Activist Base": An Exclusive Conversation with Captain Paul Watson

Yahoo

27-01-2025

In our first conversation with Captain Paul Watson, the anti-whaling activist talked through his recent five months in a Greenland jail, other brushes with the law in his 50 years of activism and his ongoing battles with the Japanese government. In the second installment of our chat, he discusses surfers' role in activism, his acrimonious split with Sea Shepherd in 2022, on playing the long game and what we can do to help."Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal in the United States officially labeled me a pirate in the 1980s. So when somebody calls you something like that, well, instead of denying it, I just embrace it. I said, 'If you want to call us pirates we'll be pirates.' I got myself my pirate flag logo and all that sort of thing. And also pirates are romantic characters, especially to young people, so we have to take advantage of that. There's the harsh reality of piracy, and then there's the romance of piracy, and we embraced the romance part of it."
"It's a long process, and I knew it was going to take a long time. We started opposing the killing of dolphins and pilot whales in the Faroe Islands in 1983. We've been opposing dolphin slaughter in Taiji since 2003. Look, slavery didn't end overnight. Women didn't get the right to vote overnight. You have to have patience to make a difference. But let's look at what has been accomplished since 1974 when I started this. Australia stopped whaling in 1977. Peru, Chile, South Korea and Spain followed soon after. As of 2019, all pelagic whaling was ended. So whaling is now confined to the waters in Norway, Iceland, and Japan, plus the Faroe Islands. The problem is Japan is now looking at returning to the Southern Ocean, and we know that because of the ship that they built, which is definitely too big and long-range to be going to for coastal whaling. So that is their ambition. So right now we have our ship the Bandero, in Melbourne to act as a guard to the entrance of the Southern Ocean. If Japan returns, we'll be there and we'll be prepared. Our other ship, the Jean Paul de Jore, is in Bermuda, and in June it will be heading to Iceland to go against the Icelandic whalers there. That's where the frontiers are now."
"In 2022, there was a hostile takeover of Sea Shepherd when I was illegally dismissed from the board of both US and Global. They took everything. They took the ships, the assets, the database, they took everything. But most grievously, they changed the objectives to go mainstream. They accused me of being too controversial and confrontational. And the reason they did that is the guys who did it, like the Managing Director Jeff Hansen in Australia, is because they have nice comfortable jobs and a lot of job security. I was too controversial and a risk to their precious positions.
I work now with the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. I never set Sea Shepherd up to be an organization. I set it up to be a movement. And so that's what we're continuing to do with the France and Brazil Sea Shepherd plus the Captain Paul Watson Foundation continuing the movement with the original objectives and the original strategies that I developed in 1977. ""We don't compromise to sell out to governments. The falling out I had with Sea Shepherd Australia was because they went into a partnership with Austral Fisheries. Austral Fisheries is 50% owned by the Maruha Nichiro Fishing Company in Japan, who had links with the Taiyo Whaling company that we went up against in the 1970s. So I never envisioned that Sea Shepherd would be in partnership with a company that was involved with killing whales, but that's exactly what happened.
But fortunately, a lot of the people who supported me when I was with Sea Shepherd have come over. John Paul DeJoria, the owner of the Paul Mitchell shampoo line and Patron Tequila, bought a ship that we named after him as well as another called The Bandero. So within 3 or 4 months of the Foundation starting we had our first ship and a lot of veteran crew members also came over. We've had so much support."
"Kelly Slater and Dave Rastavich have been actively involved as supporters and so many surfers have joined our crews. I've always looked on surfers, scuba divers, and sailors as ambassadors for the ocean. To me, the most alarming thing that we face today is that since 1950, there's been a 40% diminishment in phytoplankton in the sea, and phytoplankton provides up to 70% of the oxygen in the air we breathe and sequestered enormous amounts of CO2. And why is this happening? I think it's because of the diminishment of whales, seals, dolphins and seabirds. Whales are farmers in the ocean. They're just spreading manure across the crops of phytoplankton, and so they perform an extremely important ecological function. And the reality is that if phytoplankton disappears from the sea, we die. We don't live on the planet with a dead ocean. So the ultimate responsibility of every human being is to do everything we can to protect life diversity and interdependence in the sea.
Surfers are in a better position to see right before their very eyes the changes that are escalating as far as climate changes and the effect of biological diminishment of diversity. Surfers and the surf industry have a powerful lobby and activist base. They need to use it."