The HOT GLOBE Interview with Ocean Hero Captain Paul Watson of "Whale Wars" and So Much Else
Watson Sees the Big Picture. And He's Not Very Happy with Our Species
Halfway up Vancouver Island on our field trip to investigate whether open-ocean salmon pens are killing native salmon, we paused to put in a call to Paris for the HOT GLOBE interview with Captain Paul Watson, the legendary co-founder of Greenpeace, the Sea Shepard Society, the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, and the man behind the hit TV series “Whale Wars,” which brought a whole new generation into the understanding of our oceans in peril. As we talked, Watson was on a boat in the Seine River as preparations for the Paris Olympics took place all around.
In our opinion Paul Watson has done more to save whales, stop shark finning, interdict poachers and draw attention to the deteriorating condition of the planet’s seas than almost anyone alive. In this exclusive interview he looks back at it all—and, forward to our future— Please continue. This is an important one:
TRANSCRIPT:
HOT GLOBE: Steve Chapple here with Hot Globe. I'm talking to Paul Watson. Paul is in Paris and almost needs no introduction as a co-founder of Greenpeace, the Sea Shepherd Society, and the man behind ‘Whale Wars”, of course, which was a huge hit on television worldwide, and now the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. Paul, I was struck by the arc of your understanding of what's happening with the seas. There was one great line, “Our survival is intricately linked to the health of the oceans.” Can you expand on that? And you talked about worms, about bees, about plankton. How is it all fitting together?
PAUL WATSON:: I got a call from a reporter from Fox network, Bret Hume, a few years ago, and he said, did you actually say that worms, trees, bees and fish are more important than people? And I said, yeah, I think I said that. And he said, how could you say something so outrageous? I said, what do you mean?
[Fox Channel’s Bret Hume] says, “It's so unchristian to say that whales, bees, trees and worms are more important than people.” And I said, they're more important than people for a very simple reason. They can live here without us, but we cannot live here without them.
Our problem is, is that we have this anthropocentric attitude that it all revolves around us. We're the dominant species. We're the only species that matters when the reality is a biocentric reality. And that means everything is interdependent with each other.
And I believe that there's three basic laws of ecology. The first is a law of diversity, that the strength of an ecosystem is dependent upon diversity within it. The second is the law of interdependence, that all species within that ecosystem are interdependent with each other. And the third is the law of finite resources is a limit to growth, because there's a limit to carrying capacity. When one species steals the carrying capacity of other species, that causes diminishment in both diversity and interdependence, which leads to ecological collapse.
HOT GLOBE:: Well, you know, I think that was exemplified by this recent field trip that we made with Hot Globe and also with the University of Victoria, Dr. Ben Neil. We went up to the Salmon Coast Field station, and we looked at salmon farms. You've been involved in that, way back from when you ran for mayor of Vancouver, if I recall. What do you think of salmon farms now?
PAUL WATSON:: Well, salmon farms are one of the most destructive forms of fisheries happening in our ocean. First of all, it takes about an average of 70 fish caught from the wild to feed one farm raised salmon. They're an incredible source of pollution. The farms use antibiotics and chemicals, very intensively. Now, the problem is that these chemicals get spread out to wild salmon populations. Plus, you have the transmission of viruses from the salmon pens into indigenous salmon populations, and they don't have the antibiotics to protect themselves from those particular diseases. So we've seen a decline in indigenous salmon populations. The best way to look at it is Alaska and British Columbia. Alaska has a healthy native salmon population. British Columbia does not. Alaska does not have salmon farms.
I've never understood how they can authorize these salmon farms. If you or I were to take some piranhas from the Amazon, bring them up and stick them in a lake in the US or Canada, we would be committing an offense. You're putting an exotic predator into an ecosystem. It doesn't belong.
The Atlantic salmon is an exotic predator that does not belong in the Pacific Ocean. And yet here we are bringing it in. And of course, I remember at the time, they told us they're not going to escape. Of course, they escaped. They said they're not going to reproduce. Yes they did. So everything that they've told us is basically a lie. The reason it happens is it's a $3 billion or more industry and that justifies everything that they're doing. I find that salmon farms, whether they be in British Columbia, Scotland, Norway or Chile or in Tasmania, are contributing greatly to the diminishment of diversity within our ocean.
HOT GLOBE:: You also use another phrase—”adaptation to diminishment.”
PAUL WATSON:: Well, the human species has this incredible ability to adapt to diminishment that served us really well 20,000 years ago. And we're hunter gatherers. You never knew where your next meal was coming from. You had to adapt to the changing climatic conditions or changing situations. But now what's happened is that we're adapting to the diminishment, and it's not a healthy thing to do. So as one species disappears, we just move on to another species. We forget that species was ever there. We've seen the collapse of the northern cod in the North Atlantic. We've seen the orange roughy population collapse.
Another way of looking at it is if this was 1965 and I were to say to you, in 40 years you're going to be buying water in plastic bottles and you're going to be paying more for that water than the equivalent amount of gasoline, you would look at me like, nobody's going to do that. And yet here we are. That's “adaptation to diminishment.”
And so we do it even when there's no need to. New York City has some of the cleanest water in America because it comes from the Catskills and the Allegheny Mountains through stone tunnels. It's not contaminated yet. People still buy the bottled water rather than drink the water out of the tap. In fact, the tap water is so clean they bottle it up and sell it in Los Angeles as New York City tap water.
HOT GLOBE:: Yeah, it is crazy. And now you're getting plastic pollution all the way up to microplastics in the brain. We don't know what that will mean. And that has major implications for the oceans. You said it's the things you can't see in the ocean.
PAUL WATSON:: In 1985, I remember we were talking about plastic pollution. Charles Moore actually set up an organization to address that. Nobody was taking it seriously. I was, when I was a director of the Sierra Club. They just laughed at me.
So for years and years we've been warning about it. Nanoplastics, specially, which infiltrate into fish. And if it gets into fish, it gets into people. And it comes from all sorts of sources. Instead of worrying about, like, plastic bottles, for instance, we should be worried about automobile tires that lose microplastics every time they go down the road. Stuff that comes out of detergents or fibers out of our laundry. All of this stuff is getting in there, and it's getting into the bodies of of fish, into plankton, and ultimately into our own bodies. And now we're finding that even in plastic water bottles, that there are nanoplastics. We have no idea what the cumulative effect of this is on our bodies. There's been very little research done on it. There's an experiment going on. We're in the middle of the experiment. We're the guinea pigs.
HOT GLOBE:: And that sort of leads to “disruptive nonviolence,” right? Your old and wonderful catchphrase, of course, whales, but everything else. I'm a great admirer, by the way, of all the anti-poaching efforts, you've done in Central America, the Galapagos. Nobody else is doing that.
PAUL WATSON:: Well, I recall in 1977 I set up this strategy called “aggressive nonviolence.” That's aggressive. That's aggressively intervene. But that's not to hurt anybody. I've never caused a single injury to a single person in 50 years, during that entire time, but we have shut down hundreds and hundreds of illegal activities. Aggressive nonviolence also means that it's okay to destroy equipment which is being used illegally to take life. If a poacher is about to shoot an elephant and you knock that gun out of his hand and you destroy the gun, that is, to me, an act of nonviolence, okay?
A legal trophy hunt in Zimbabwe.
You're saving life and destroying a non-sentient object. When I think of when we sank those whaling ships in Norway and in Iceland, we didn't hurt anybody. But we saved lives by doing it. And I happen to believe that a sentient life has more value than a non-sentient object. But we live in a society where we've been conditioned to understand or to believe that material objects are of more value. I mean, picture yourself going into the city of Mecca and spitting on the Black Stone. Your chances of getting out of that city alive are somewhat remote. Or walk into Jerusalem and start hacking away at the Wailing Wall. You're going to get an Israeli soldier’s bullet in the back, and nobody's going to have any sympathy for you because you've attacked something which is sacred.
But each and every day we go into the most mysterious and sacred and beautiful cathedrals of the natural world, whether it be the rainforests of Amazonia or the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, and we totally desecrate and destroy these cathedrals.
And how do we respond? Well, picket signs, letters to politicians, whatever. But nobody really stands up and defends it, or they're not as outraged as if it was some old wall in Jerusalem, a hunk of marble in Rome, stone in Mecca.
HOT GLOBE:: I agree completely. Now what about the new fin whale campaign? I'm a little confused here. I mean, Captain Watson Foundation is part of British Sea Shepherd, is that right? And they're going after fin whales and that megalomaniac, owner killing whales out of Iceland. One guy.
PAUL WATSON:: Richard Lawson. Yeah. He's fanatically obsessed with killing whales, and he's targeting endangered fin whales. Actually, it's Sea Shepherd, Uk, which is actually the Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK. They changed the name. So it’s right. It's the foundation. I find it's incredible that this is an endangered species recognized as such by NOAA or IUCN, and yet they're killing these whales with impunity. It's also a violation of the global moratorium on commercial whaling established by the International Whaling Commission in 1986. So we're intervening against something which is illegal.
There won't be any whaling this summer. I'm quite convinced of that. We made it quite clear we would directly intervene.
They did get a quota. He got a quota of 99 whales, which is much less than he wanted. But now he's saying that he hasn't got enough time to put it together. So he's not going to be killing any whales this summer. I don't trust him. We're watching them very closely. But meanwhile, we have to set our sights on a probably more egregious target. And that is the launching by Japan of a new factory ship called the Koenji Maru. And it wants to target fin whales in the North Pacific, probably the Southern Ocean or off the coast of Japan.
So I'm sending the MV John Paul DeJoria. In two weeks, we're going to head towards Japan, and we're going to go through the Northwest Passage to do it because that's 7000 miles shorter than going through the Panama Canal. And we'll be the first environmental conservation vessel to do the Northwest Passage. I think only 341 ships have gone through there since 1906. That'll put us in a position in the north of the North Pacific. Our other ship, Bandero, is in Australia, and it'll be down in the south. So if they go to the Southern Ocean, we'll be able to meet them. If they go to the North Pacific, we'll be able to meet them. And if they go to the coast of Japan or continue off the coast of Japan, we'll be able to meet them there, too. But you don't build a long range ship of that size to do coastal whaling off of Japan. They built that ship to kill whales in the Southern Ocean or in the North Pacific.
Japan has announced that they want to revive the whaling industry. We're committed to making sure that they don't.
HOT GLOBE:: Fin whales are the second largest whales, beautiful big sentient beings. Correct?
PAUL WATSON:: And endangered.
HOT GLOBE:: What other new campaigns? What are you thinking? That arc of your wonderful life and all that you've done. Are there things that we should be doing now, as average people? And what are you launching besides those campaigns?
PAUL WATSON:: Well, what we're doing right now is working closely with Sea Shepherd Brazil and Sea Shepherd France, which remained loyal to me. We have our vessel, The Walrus, down in the Iberian Peninsula doing the research on the interaction between orcas and yachts. I think we've actually discovered this week the solution to that. You know, the orcas are attacking the yachts and causing damage. But they're doing it—
HOT GLOBE:: Playfully, playfully.
PAUL WATSON:: Playfully. So what we've discovered is that, first of all, we had them come to us and they started to try and damage the boat.
So we started putting things out into the water for [the orcas] to play with, buoys. They got distracted quite easily and began to play with those toys rather than attack the boat.
So what we're going to try and do now is meet with a government in Morocco, in Spain and Gibraltar and say, look, everybody should if they're going to cross that water bring some objects that they can attach to a rope so they don't lose them just to throw them out there and have the orcas play with them. And uh, that's wild.
HOT GLOBE:: That might create a whole sort of viral, emotional connection with whales and people again, you know, because that makes it seem like they're children or adolescents or, you know, dogs.
PAUL WATSON:: We're hoping that that'll help because Morocco, the fishermen are trying to get the Moroccan government to shoot them because they're saying that it's a threat to their industry, whatever. But we're going to try and find a solution to that.
We're also working with Sea Shepherd Brazil to protect river dolphins and illegal fishing off the coast of Brazil. We have a crew down in the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean to patrol the beaches at night to protect sea turtles, because poaching is a real problem down there. We're also putting a crew in the Faroe Islands this summer to disrupt the killing of pilot whales and dolphins there. Here's the thing. There are so many issues, what we really need are a diversity of approaches. That means hundreds and hundreds of thousands of individuals and organizations addressing all of these different things. We can't do it ourselves. Nobody can. So the strength of an ecosystem is in its diversity. Therefore, the strength of any movement has to be in diversity. And whether that approach is litigation or legislation or education or direct intervention, it all works towards the same end.
So what I try to do is encourage people to ask, What are your talents? What are you good at? And put that into service of making this a better planet. If you're a teacher or a lawyer or an engineer, whatever, try and make this a better planet by using your skills. And keep in mind that what changes things, what brings about major change in the world? It's the passion, the courage and the imagination of individuals.
PAUL WATSON:: And I'm happy to see that more and more of this is happening now than happened 20, 30, 40 years ago especially amongst young people who really don't have any choice because they have an uncertain future.
People my age lived in the most materially materialistically and freest time in the history of humankind. It'll never come again because the resources are simply not there to support it. And again, the things that I was able to do in the 60s and 70s, we can't do now because governments have become more repressive and they will get more repressive, especially with climate change and environmental degradation. You're going to find more and more repressive governments and the rising of more and more right-wing governments to protect what is really important to them, which is the profits of corporations and such and such.
HOT GLOBE™ by Steve Chapple is a reader-supported publication. If you can spare a little to keep our expeditions and unique interviews going, please consider subscribing now.
And we're living in a world now where corporations not only control the governments, they also control the media. And so the message that people get is one which is tailored for them. You know, the problem is not fake news. The problem is no news, things which are simply not covered. Since 2010, about a thousand environmentalists have been murdered. But you wouldn't know it. It's not in the media unless it's somebody famous like Chico Mendes or somebody like that. You just don't know about it. So the the the media, no matter what, Left, Right or in between is extremely censored. And if you try to step out of that, well, they'll throw you in prison like Julian Assange.
HOT GLOBE:: Well, are you then hopeful or an optimistic or a little bit worried about our future?
PAUL WATSON:: I'm not optimistic. I'm not pessimistic. I learned a lesson a long time ago as a medic for the American Indian Movement during the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. We were surrounded by US government officials shooting at us. They fired 20,000 rounds a night into the village. They wounded 46, killed two. I went to Russell Means, who was a leader of the American Indian Movement, and I said, We don't have any hope here. The odds are against us. We can't possibly win. So what are we doing? And he told me something which has stayed with me for the rest of my life. He said, We're not concerned about the odds against us. We're not concerned about winning or losing. We're here because this is the right thing to do, the right place to do it, and the right time to do it. He said, Don't worry about the future. You have no power in the future. You only have power in the present. And what you do in the present will define what the future will be.
So I focus all my attention on doing what I can in the present, and I don't worry about what the outcome is. I have no control over that. But I have seen because of what we have done during the present, whether it be during the 60s or 70s, has had an effect and that species have been protected, ecosystems have been protected. David Wingate, a biologist in Bermuda, because of him, because of his intervention, the Bermuda storm petrel did not go extinct, because of Diane Fossey, we still have mountain gorillas
I could name so many examples of individuals who, because they've intervened and made a difference, and
I can't think of anything more noble or honorable than because a person intervened, a species was saved from extinction or a habitat was protected from being destroyed.
HOT GLOBE:: Wonderful. You know, we could end there, but we first met back in Rio 92, Rio de Janeiro, at the Hotel Gloria which was quite a place to hang out. River Phoenix, David Brower, everybody passed through there. If you recall. That was a very hopeful time. That was the start of the modern environmental movement, although you started it before then.
PAUL WATSON:: I remember that. Jacques Cousteau was there too. But, well, first of all, every promise that was made there, none of them actually materialized. That was where Gro Harlem Brundtland came out with this word sustainability.
HOT GLOBE:: That's right.
PAUL WATSON:: That word means business as usual. We'll just call it sustainable. So I look around now, everything is sustainable. Sustainable agriculture, sustainable fishing, sustainable mining, sustainable this, sustainable that. It's just a marketing term. That's all it is. And that—
Sorry, I'm on the river here. Uh, I'm right in the middle of Paris and they're all gearing up for the Olympics. So there's a lot of police action and everything.
HOT GLOBE:: Maybe we'll talk again. It's been an honor. Thank you for all you've done for the oceans and the planet.
PAUL WATSON:: Thank you. Well, have you talked to Doctor Alexander Morton? [Ed. Note: Morton first raised the alarm that salmon farms were throwing off sea lice which were killing young wild salmon. Aboard the tk the Hot Globe expedition will reach Morton’s original Salmon Field Research Station in about three days.]
HOT GLOBE:: I’m told she’s sequestered away doing her own work after doing a lot on sea lice, for whales.
PAUL WATSON:: I provided her with a boat for a couple of summers in order for her to do that research. And have you seen William Shatner's latest video?
HOT GLOBE:: That's insane. Yes. It's one of the funniest things ever.
PAUL WATSON:: I've known him for a long, long time. He's sort of a quiet in the background environmentalist. Always has been.
HOT GLOBE:: Really? No, but that's one of the more outrageous videos. We'll put that up on Hot Globe next week.
PAUL WATSON:: Well, certainly got their attention because, you know, as I always say, there's there's the laws of media.
Only four things that the media understands: sex, scandal, violence and celebrity.
And if you want a story, you need one of those things. If you have all four stories, you've got a super story. That's why we have so many celebrity spokespeople because they're guaranteed to get coverage. I learned that when I brought Brigitte Bardot to the ice floes off in Newfoundland in 1977/ Just posing her cheek-to-cheek with a baby seal guaranteed us the cover of Paris Match and most major magazines in the world.
HOT GLOBE:: Exactly. I remember that as a child. Yeah. Well, we got to sign off here for Hot Globe. Captain Paul Watson, one of the great saviors of our planet. Let's hope it all works out. So all of our grandkids can live well. #
HOT GLOBE™ by Steve Chapple is a reader-supported publication. If you can spare a little to keep our expeditions and unique interviews going, please consider subscribing now so that others may read for free.
Love this interview! So important!! Thanks Steve, Sura Gail Tala, we were with you at Mannys Birthday in Cuba!
What a great interview with the legendary Captain Watson! He has a knack for simplifying complex subjects, getting to the heart of the matter with language that is memorable and helps with communication. For example, (paraphrasing) three fundamental principles of life - diversity equals resilience; interdependence - all planetary life forms are knitted together and are dependent upon/thrive in relationship to each other; our planet has finite resources and when one species takes a disproportionate share, it damages the entire system.