A Good Day To Die: Sea Shepherd Founder Captain Paul Watson On The Compassion Behind Confrontation

Jason Elias:

Hi, and welcome to the Big Deep Podcast. Big Deep is a podcast about people who have a connection to the ocean. People for whom that connection is so strong, it defines some aspect of their life. Over the course of this series, we'll talk to all sorts of people, and in each episode, we'll explore the deeper meaning of that connection. In our season two premiere, we speak with Captain Paul Watson, principal founder of the Sea Shepherd environmental organization. Hello, this is your host, Jason Elias. Welcome to the Big Deep Podcast.

Jason Elias:

In this episode, my conversation with Captain Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd, the environmental organization known for interventions with whaling ships around the world. Paul has been at the forefront of the ocean environment for years and was seminal in the foundation of two renowned organizations, Greenpeace and then years later Sea Shepherd. Sea Shepherd and Captain Paul himself can evoke strong feelings, particularly as they position themselves as much more activist than other protest organizations and actually call themselves interventionists.

Jason Elias:

Paul himself has been at the helm of ships that have boarded, rammed, and sunk multiple whaling vessels around the world. Regardless of what anyone might think about his tactics on the sea, I wanted to understand more about what motivated him, why he felt such a deep connection to whales and the ocean, and what pushed him into protecting the ocean in such an active and controversial way.

Jason Elias:

Admittedly, it took months of pursuit on my part to finally get this interview. And with so many layers and handlers to deal with, I wondered who I might meet. And yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Paul turned out to be warm, funny, and engaging, a man of great intellect whose passion was less about confrontation and much more about compassion.

Capt Paul Watson:

My name is Paul Watson, and I'm a marine conservationist. I founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977.

Jason Elias:

Many people have seen and know of your work, but one of the things that we talked to a lot of people on this podcast about is what is it that drives you to feel motivated to get so involved about the ocean? At your deepest core of who you are, where is that coming from?

Capt Paul Watson:

Well, I was raised in a fishing village in Eastern Canada on the Passamaquoddy Bay. And right from a very early age, I used to sit in the end of the dock, watched the whales, watched the seagulls. So from the earliest time I can remember, the ocean has been a part of my life. When I was 10 years old, I spent the summer swimming with a family of beavers and had a great time. The next summer, I went back and look for them and couldn't find them. Made some inquiries. Found out trappers had taken them all during the wintertime, and that made me very angry. That winter, I began to walk the trap lines and free any animals and destroy the traps. So that's really where I started my life as an activist at age 11.

Capt Paul Watson:

Then at 17, I ran off to sea, joined the Norwegian Merchant Marine. And in 1969, I got together with some other people, and we founded this organization called the Don't Make a Wave Committee. The objective of that was to stop nuclear testing in the Aleutians on Amchitka Island. The Quakers had done something down at Bikini Atoll in 1956, and so we thought we'd do the same thing. The groups that came together is Sierra club and the Quakers.

Capt Paul Watson:

At one of the early meetings, somebody flashed a peace sign, and it was Bill Darnell who said, oh, make it a Greenpeace, and that was the origin of the word. But Bob Hunter said, well, that's a great name for the boat. So I was an officer on the Greenpeace 2, which was the second boat that went up, and they actually detonated a day before, so we had not yet reached the island. But the publicity that we generated from that actually shut down all further tests. So it was very successful in that respect.

Capt Paul Watson:

People had different motivations for going there. The Quakers, of course, it was a peace thing. For the Sierra Club, it was an environmental thing. My concern was that Amchitka was a wildlife preserve, and you couldn't go on there with a gun, but here we are blowing up five megaton bomb up underneath it, and it killed quite a few sea lions and sea otters. So, that was my motivation. And then, I was with Greenpeace for the next seven years until I left in 1977 and established Sea Shepherd.

Jason Elias:

So in a certain way, there is two aspects to that. There's the compassion that you have for these animals, but then there's also the fact that you actually wanted to do something about it. You were not a passive person, and you felt you had a responsibility. Would you say that's fair?

Capt Paul Watson:

Yeah. I would never describe myself as a passive person. In fact, one of the reasons I left Greenpeace was it was a protest organization, and I'm really never been into protest. Sea Shepherd is an interventionist organization. We intervene directly, but we do so nonviolently. I created this approach, which I call aggressive non-violence, which means that we're going to be as aggressive as possible. We're not going to hurt anybody. And in a 42 years of operations, we've never caused a single injury to anybody.

Jason Elias:

I think in the public's mind, Sea Shepherd sometimes can assume that there have been harm done to others, but to hear that's not true and that, that's central to what you believe, I guess in a certain way, makes sense because the idea that you have compassion extends to the human beings that are doing these things. There are a lot of people who support the ideas that you talk about but would never take that next step to get as active. What is that in you? Are you a natural-born rebel? Is there some aspect of you that you point to in your history that brought this out in you? Or did you just come into this world a hard charger?

Capt Paul Watson:

That was really hard to say. I've certainly rebelled against my father. He is quite abusive. My mother died when I just turned 13. And so my father took us away, and I ended up running away from home and going to sea. So I spent a lot of time on merchant vessels and in the coast guard. When I was 22, I joined the American Indian Movements Occupation and Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and I was a medic during that occupation. I learned a valuable lesson there. We were surrounded by about 3000 federal agents, U.S. Marshals, FBI, even members of 82nd Airborne, and they were shooting about 20,000 rounds a night. They wounded 46 people killed two.

Capt Paul Watson:

I went to Russell Means, who was a leader of the American Indian Movement, and I said, look, we can't win here. The odds are against us. So what are we doing? And he said something that stayed with me for the rest of my life. Well, we're not concerned about the odds against us, and we're not concerned about winning or losing. We're here because this is the right place to be, the right time to do it, and the right thing to do. And what you do today will define what the future will be. I guess it's all summed up in the Lakota words, Hoka hey, it's a good day to die. In other words, if you're prepared to take a stand for what you believe in, that's what matters.

Jason Elias:

When you say it's a good day to die, intellectually, that makes a lot of sense, and that looks good in movies, but that's a tough thing to do when there's a reality to it. This fear ever play into your calculus around actions.

Capt Paul Watson:

If I go back when I was eight years old, I almost died. We were playing Pirates. I was tied to the mast of a sunken ship by a bunch of the other kids, and they forgot me. The tide was coming in, and it kept getting higher and higher, and nobody was there, and I was yelling for help. At one point, when the water was up to my chest, I just resigned myself to the fact that I was going to drown. What saved me was that some teenage boys heard me and came in and cut me loose. After that, I really not felt any fear. Once you've overcome the fear of dying, then you're not afraid of anything. Not afraid of speaking, not afraid of acting. It was Miyamoto Musashi who said the acceptance of death is the way of the warrior. This is the reality everybody's going to die. It's more important how you live. That's always been something that's guided me. I would say that fear is not a factor in my life, really.

Jason Elias:

That's an amazing story to hear, considering the trajectory your life has taken. You obviously have this amazing life history that has kept you active and involved from the time you were eight years old until now. Your passions could have manifested in any number of ways. What is it about the ocean? Why the ocean? Is there some special connection you have to the ocean? And if so, can you tell me what that feeling for you is?

Capt Paul Watson:

The ocean is the life support system of the entire planet. And as I say over and over again, if the ocean dies, we all die. 70% of the oxygen that we breathe is produced by phytoplankton. Since 1950, there's been a 40% diminishment in phytoplankton population. And why are phytoplankton populations being diminished? Because their food supply, the nutrients, nitrogen, and iron, come from whales, marine mammals, and seabirds. One blue whale every day defecates three tons of manure which floats on the surface and provides the nutrient base for the phytoplankton. And they also, they go deep diving. They bring up those nutrients from the depths and deposit them on the surface. It's called the Whale Pump. So whales, in many respect, are the farmers of the ocean. And the crop is oxygen that every other species gets to breathe.

Capt Paul Watson:

I became very aware a long time ago, the interconnections between all these different species. For hundreds and hundreds of years, the shamans in Polynesia, they would declare an area, say a bay in Bora Bora. This area is kapu. There will be no fishing in this bay for 20 years, and if anybody was caught fishing, it was the death penalty because they knew that if the fish disappeared, so would they. I set Sea Shepherd up to intervene basically as an anti-poaching organization. There's 4 million fishing vessels out there, and 40% of them are illegal. So my ultimate goal is to protect the ocean, and that's going to require some really radical interventions.

Capt Paul Watson:

And in 1986, we signed half of Iceland's whaling fleet. And a former colleague from Greenpeace came to me, and he said, I just want to let you know that what you did in Iceland was reprehensible, and that's an embarrassment to this whole movement. I said, really, John, I didn't sink those ships for you. Didn't sink them for Greenpeace. Didn't sink them for any so-called movement. In fact, I didn't sink them for any human being on the planet. John, we sank those ships for the whales. Find me one whale anywhere in the world that disagreed with what we did that day, and I promise you, I won't do it again. The whales are our clients. The sharks are our clients. The fish are our clients. And that's what we do. We protect, and we preserve, and we defend.

Jason Elias:

I'd like to hear one experience on the water that really resonated with you in some way and stuck with you as something very moving or important to you.

Capt Paul Watson:

Well, I did have an experience in 1975 during the first Greenpeace campaign to protect the whales. We had come up with this idea to confront the Soviet whaling fleet, and we searched for them for two months. They finally found them about 60 miles west of Mendocino in California. We had been reading a lot of Gandhi at the time, and we thought that the best way to save the whales was to put our bodies between the harpoons and the whales and that they wouldn't kill us in order to kill the whales.

Capt Paul Watson:

So in June of 1975, Robert Hunter and I were in a small inflatable boat, and we were racing in front of a Soviet harpoon vessel. In front of us were eight magnificent sperm whales that were swimming frantically, trying to escape. Every time the harpooner began to maneuver, I would maneuver our boat to block them. This worked for about 20 minutes until the captain on the Soviet vessel came running down the catwalk, and he screamed into the harpooner's ear, looked at us, smiled, and brought his finger across his neck. And that's when I realized Gandhi wasn't going to be much use to us that day.

Capt Paul Watson:

A few minutes later, there's a horrendous explosion, and the harpoon, it's a 250-pound bomb, really, flew right over our head and slammed into the backside of one of the whales in the pod, and it was a female. She rolled on her side. There's blood everywhere. She screamed. I never even knew a whale could scream at that point. The cable to the harpoon slashed down, just narrowly missed our boat. Suddenly the largest whale in the pod rose up, slapped the surface of the water with his tail, and dove. He swam right underneath of us and threw himself at the bow of the Soviet vessel giving time for the others to escape, but they were ready for him with an unattached harpoon. The harpooner pulled the trigger, point-blank range, and there's a terrific explosion. The whale fell back, bleeding, thrashing about in agony on the surface.

Capt Paul Watson:

We approached, and I caught his eye, and suddenly he dove, and I saw a trail of bloody bubbles coming at us real fast. He came up and out of the water at an angle so that the next move would be to come down and crush us. And as his head rose up out of the water, and I saw his eye only about three feet from me. So close I could see myself in the reflection in his eye. I felt something. It was understanding. The whale understood what we were trying to do because I could see the effort that he made to pull himself back. His head began to slip back, and his eye flipped beneath the waves, and he died. He could have killed us then chose not to do so.

Capt Paul Watson:

So personally, I feel indebted to that whale, to the fact that I'm alive, but I also felt something else, and that was pity, and not for himself, but for us that we could take life so senselessly, so thoughtlessly. As I was sitting there in the midst of the Soviet whaling fleet, as the sun was going down, and I said to myself, why are they killing these whales? You can't eat sperm whale meat. They're killed for oil. Spermaceti oil is especially valuable on one of the things that it was used for by the Soviets is in the construction of intercontinental ballistic missiles. And I said to myself, here we are destroying this incredibly beautiful, self-aware, sentient creature for the purpose of making a weapon meant for the mass extermination of human beings. And that's when it struck me. We're insane. Our species is totally insane, certainly ecologically. And I said, at that moment, I'm going to do everything I can to defend them, not for us, but for them. And that's what I've dedicated my life to ever since.

Jason Elias:

Finally, we end every interview and every episode with a single open-ended question we ask everyone we talk to, what does the ocean mean to you?

Capt Paul Watson:

When people think of the ocean, they think of the sea, and the sea is just one part of the ocean. The ocean is a planet. It is water in constant circulation. Sometimes it's in the sea. Sometimes it's locked in ice. Sometimes it's underground. Sometimes it's in the clouds. Sometimes it's in the cells of every living plant and animal on the planet. The water that is constantly moving through all of these mediums. The water that is now in your body was once in the sea, once in ice, once underground. So we are the ocean. Everything that affects any one part of the ocean affects all parts of the ocean, and it's that understanding I think that really can make a difference.

Jason Elias:

Thanks for listening to the Big Deep Podcast. Next time on Big Deep.

Jill Heinerth:

People said to me, the age of exploration is over. What is there left to do? But I looked at that and went no. It's not over. And when I'm swimming through these caves, I'm literally swimming through the veins of mother earth.

Jason Elias:

We really appreciate you being on this journey into the Big Deep as we explore an ocean of stories. If you like what we're doing, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, please like and comment because those subscribes, likes, and comments really make a difference. For more interviews, deeper discussions with our guests, photos, and updates on anything you've heard, there's a lot more content at our website, bigdeep.com. Plus, if you know someone who you think we should talk to, let us know at our Big Deep website as we are always looking to hear more stories from interesting people who are deeply connected to our world's oceans. Thanks again for joining us.