Paul Watson has been engaging in acts of derring-do on behalf of the animal
kingdom for more than 30 years.
In the early 1970s, not long after he co-founded the Greenpeace environmental
movement, the Canadian was among a small group of activists who took to the
seas off California to try to stop a Soviet fleet from killing whales.
Watson - Greenpeace membership number: 007 - was steering a small, fast,
inflatable Zodiac speedboat. His aim was to position himself between the
whales and the Soviet harpoons. The whalers had already opened fire on a
passing pod of whales, and at one point an injured sperm whale broke away
from the group. It headed straight for Watson’s boat.
As Watson heaved on his rudder, the whale passed a few feet away, its eye
clear of the water. It seemed to be staring directly at the men who were
trying to save it. Watson has never forgotten that moment.
“In an instant my life was transformed and a purpose for my life was
reverently established,” said the man who would later fall out with
Greenpeace and found one of the world’s most aggressive environmental
groups, the US-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
Watson recently wrote a 1,600-line poem about his efforts to protect that
whale. It began: “Leviathan’s solitary eye haunts me still/ I am obsessed
and driven mad with anger.”
Watson’s obsession and anger burn as fiercely as ever.
In the heaving waters of the Southern Ocean last week, it was the black-hulled
Sea Shepherd flagship, the Steve Irwin - a former Scottish fisheries vessel
renamed after the Australian wildlife expert killed by a stingray 16 months
ago - that was embroiled in a hair-raising skirmish with a Japanese whaling
fleet less than 200 miles off the coast of Antarctica.
At 57, Watson is too old – and a little too heavy – to be hopping in and out
of Zodiac speedboats. But he was there on the bridge as two of his crew
members set off an international furore by launching a mid-ocean boarding
raid on the Yushin Maru No 2, part of a Japanese whaling fleet.
The two men, one a Briton, were seized by the Japanese and restrained on deck
with rope and cable ties – in full view of the cameras. Watson could barely
restrain his glee. His antics were being reported by almost every media
outlet in the world. The plight of the whale was back in the news.
Watson could seemingly chalk up yet another triumph for his explosive strategy
of calculated outrage, reckless confrontation and scathing insult. While the
“wusses” of Greenpeace are mincing around like “the Avon ladies of the
environment”, he says, Sea Shepherd is in the thick of the fight to save the
whale.
“The Japanese haven’t killed a whale in a week,” boasted Watson, who says he
has not seen one die since 1977. “We have been successful, and we’re going
to try to get them not to kill a whale for another week, and maybe another
week after that.”
Yet for much of the environmental world, Watson is more of a scoundrel than a
saviour. He has been variously denounced as a pirate, a terrorist and a
deluded crackpot who is one day going to cause a terrible tragedy. Is he
really saving the whale? Or is he actually hardening opinion in Japan,
making it less likely that the whaling fleets will return to port?
Watson is typically unequivocal about the rights and wrongs of his actions.
“We cannot sit upon our ass, doing nothing as gentle creatures die,” he said
before his ramshackle “Neptune’s Navy” set off for its annual rendezvous
with the Japanese whalers.
“When people call us pirates, I really don’t have a problem. We’re pirates of
compassion in pursuit of pirates of profit.”
He certainly sports a piratical air with his unruly white hair and his
homemade captain's uniform, bristling with gold braid. He isn’t a real
captain, but there is no doubting he is in complete control of the Sea
Shepherd organisation, which claims 40,000 supporters worldwide, with 12,000
active members, an annual budget of $2m and a full-time staff of 10.
Nor is there doubt about the passion he inspires among a startling range of
celebrity admirers, from Mick Jagger to Uma Thurman. “He’s one of the
gutsiest guys on the planet,” said the actor Martin Sheen, who gushed to The
New Yorker magazine last year that he was “grateful” to Watson for his
“commitment and his courage and his daring and his humanity”.
Yet among those who should be his allies, he is regarded as an irritant who
gets in the way of the environmental movement’s goals. Offers of cooperation
are rejected.
Last week Greenpeace, having found the Japanese whaling fleet, refused to give
Watson’s group the coordinates for its location. “It’s operational policy;
we just don’t do it,” said the group. Last year, when the situation was
reversed, Sea Shepherd had provided the coordinates for them.
Greenpeace insists that nonviolence is key to getting its message across.
Willie Mackenzie, the organisation’s oceans campaigner, said violence
“doesn’t progress the argument anywhere for us”. He added that Greenpeace
had detected a previous shift in Japanese opinion on whaling, but the
government in Tokyo had always been quick to label protests at sea as
terrorist activity, stirring up public resentment.
“That’s why we’re careful to use nonviolent protests,” Mackenzie said.
“They’re determined to group us together as terrorists, so the less
ammunition we can give them towards that, the better.”
Watson was kicked off Greenpeace’s board in 1977 after losing his temper
during a save-the-baby-seals protest in Newfoundland. He had attacked a
sealer and thrown his skins in the water. Watson was seen as too passionate
and too egotistical for his own and the organisation’s good. The feud has
continued ever since.
Watson took on the role of freelance maritime vigilante. He scuttled two
whaling ships in Reykjavik harbour in 1986 and spent 80 days in prison in
the Netherlands after trying to sink a Norwegian vessel. At one point he
dropped paint-filled light bulbs on a Soviet trawler in the northern
Pacific; he has also flung smoke-bombs, stink-bombs, rancid pie filling and
even stale chocolate cake at whaling vessels.
Last year he launched “Operation Asshole” in which his boats would eschew the
typical Greenpeace tactic of putting themselves peacefully between the
whaler and its prey. Instead the Sea Shepherd pursuit vessels would attempt
to give the Japanese ship a “steel enema” – ramming his bows up its stern.
They could not, however, get close enough.
His personal life was equally volcanic. Divorced three times, he was
previously married to a Playboy model and a Greenpeace accountant. One of
his volunteers reportedly described his management style as “anarchy run by
God”.
One of the main targets of Watson’s ire is Dr Luis Pastene, a Chilean
scientist at the Japanese Cetacean Research Institute (CRI). Pastene is
described by Watson as the “Dr Mengele of whales”. The CRI is the central
plank of what many world governments agree is Tokyo’s highly dubious
interpretation of an exception to the International Whaling Commission
moratorium, which allows sovereign nations to kill whales for research
purposes only.
As one of the world’s most prolific whaling nations, Japan has long argued
that its Antarctic hunts are necessary to monitor the movements of whale
populations, to study relations between different types of whale, and to see
how they are being affected by pollution.
All this science will apparently require the slaughter of at least 900 whales
during the current hunting season. What made this year’s hunt so
controversial was that, for the first time since the 1960s, the Japanese
harpoons planned to target humpback whales, as well as minke. But at the beginning
of last month the Japanese government bowed to international pressure and
gave the humpbacks a stay of execution.
Most of the whale meat from the annual hunt ends up on Japanese dinner tables.
Lord Rooker, the food minister, dismissed last week as “preposterous” and
“indefensible” the Japanese claims that the “research” requires such mass
killing.
Watson takes the view that Rooker, like most politicians, is an impotent
nobody who will do nothing significant to help the whale. He mocks Pastene
as a “whale vivisector” who pretends to be studying whale parts while merely
acting as a cover for commercial whaling.
Nobody doubts the gleeful savagery of Watson’s invective, or the perverse
cunning of his inflammatory strategy of causing as much trouble as possible.
If some of his wilder claims aren’t quite supported by facts, at least he is
making it impossible for governments to sweep the whaling issue aside.
All this came to a head amid last week’s Southern Ocean shenanigans. An
Australian, Benjamin Potts, 28, and the Briton, Giles Lane, 35, sat at the
back of an 18ft Zodiac as it sped towards the Yushin Maru.
The weather was bright and calm, and the two Sea Shepherd volunteers tossed
ropes over the Japanese ship’s side and scampered up “like spiders”. It was
a surprise to nobody that they were promptly seized, allowing Watson to
denounce the Japanese as “terrorists”. His men were only trying to deliver a
letter, he said.
The ensuing standoff was resolved after the arrival of an Australian vessel,
the Oceanic Viking, which was supposed to be monitoring the Japanese fleet
but which ended up ferrying Watson’s stormtroopers back to their mother
ship.
Yesterday Watson accused the Australians of diverting the Steve Irwin away
from the whaling grounds when it returned the two men. “Australian Customs
deliberately led us away from the [Japanese] fleet and Greenpeace is
guarding the coordinates like the crown jewels to prevent us relocating the
whalers,” he said.
There were signs last night that if that was the intention, it had failed. The
Japanese complained that their fleet had suffered another hounding from Sea
Shepherd activists. A spokesman denounced it as “an inhumane terrrorist
attack” and demanded that the Australian government seize the Steve Irwin.
Watson’s snort of derision was loud enough to scare a penguin. “People have
got to stop thinking about the Japanese as some sort of legitimate
operation,” he said by satellite phone from his ship last week. “These
people are no different from elephant poachers in Africa or tiger poachers
in India.”
He intends to harass the Japanese fleet for at least another week. It is
possible that his actions may save a few whales, but his main mission – of
provoking chaos and attracting attention – has already been an outstanding
success.
Additional reporting: Christopher Thompson and Paul Ham in Sydney
The cows of the sea
Though they possess social skills that humans associate with intelligence,
whales are no smarter than your average pet, according to many experts.
Tony Martin, head of the marine mammal section of the British Antarctic
Survey, describes blue whales as “the cows of the sea”. He said: “They graze
as they go along so they don’t have to outwit their prey, just like a cow
doesn’t outwit the grass.”
What’s more, although whales communicate, they do not speak: “They have
contact calls, but that’s not language,” said Martin. “We’ve never been able
to observe anything like Mum saying to Dad, ‘Have you seen Johnny recently?’
” Predatory toothed whales, which include killer whales and dolphins, are
certainly considered more intelligent than plankton-grazing species such as
the blue whale, but no more so than other animals.
“Humans are in awe of whales and they are incredible in so many ways, but in
terms of intelligence, it is hard to say they are special,” said Martin. “I
wouldn’t rate them any higher than a pet cat.”
Elizabeth Gibney
