Captain Paul Watson

An iconic Canadian environmental and anti-species activist, Paul Watson is the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

"This is the living planet of water and if we see it that way then we will see that it is all interconnected and interdependent." Captain Paul Watson

We have the great pleasure to welcome one of our seas' most revered captains and climate activists, Captain Paul Watson. Captain Paul is the founder of Sea Shepherd - an international non-profit marine conservation organization engaged in direct action campaigns to defend wildlife and protect the world's oceans from illegal exploitation and environmental destruction. .

- What are your daily rituals?

Right now I'm helping coordinate our fleet - we have 11 ships on the water and 250-300 permanent volunteers from around 25 different countries. Two weeks ago we seized 6 fishing boats in Sierra Leone waters and our vessel the Sam Simon has just returned from a dolphin protection campaign opposing a fleet of French trawlers in the Gulf of Gascony. We have 2 ships Le Conrad and Le Sea Eagle which carry out anti-poaching patrols in the Mediterranean, 3 ships in the Sea of Cortéz in Mexico protecting the endangered vaquita marina porpoise and another ship which is under way to lend a hand to the Colombian authorities to protect a national park. We also have a research vessel off the coast of Mexico, which in November discovered a new species of whale. Next, our ship The Ocean Warrior is in Peru to oppose the illegal activities of Chinese fishing fleets in the eastern tropical Pacific. I think that covers pretty much all of them.

- There have been several attempts to sue you for your activities with Sea Shepherd, do you represent a threat to the fishing industry?

“Of course, this industry feels strongly threatened by our actions because we tell the world that there are no sustainable fisheries. Commercial fishing destroys our oceans, our diversity and our interdependence. The fishing industry would like you to think that when you get fish and chips or buy fish from a store, it comes from a small boat in the ocean, which delivers fresh produce straight to your table. . The reality is that super trawlers are corporate and industrialized looters of our oceans. It is completely unbearable. Since there is no definition of the term “sustainable fishing”, how can local fishermen maintain their livelihood? “Artisanal fishing communities around the world are not the problem. The problem is the corporate, industrialized and highly mechanized fishing industry. Take a Patagonian toothfish out of the water in the Southern Ocean (the trawl we confiscated was 70 meters long, weighed 70 tons and took us 110 hours to grab!) And transport it to the fish markets of London, Paris or Colorado is the real problem. For hundreds of years, Polynesian shamans observed "Kapus" (codes of conduct), which declared an area, such as Bora Bora, banned from fishing for 20 years. If anyone was caught fishing, it was the death penalty. From their perspective, it wasn't extreme - they understood that if the fish disappeared, so did they.

Today these areas do not exist and there is nowhere for fish to hide. What we are seeing today is the collapse of one industry after another, when one fishing model collapses they switch to another fishery until that one s 'collapse - cod fishing in the North Atlantic, for example. The fish that were considered unsaleable in the 1960s and 1970s are those that are being sent to the market now, such as pollock or turbot. Pollock is tasteless fish and no one had much use for it, and then they found out that if they applied a chemical scent on it and covered it with a red stripe, they could sell it as fake crab meat. Chilean seabass is actually Patagonian toothfish - it's not a very marketable term, so they just renamed it: it's not from Chile and it's not even a sea bass!

- How would you replace the millions of jobs lost in the commercial fishing industry? Could they perhaps patrol the sea in search of poachers and help maintain ecosystems with their existing knowledge?

“To be frank, they should find another job because what they're doing right now means there won't be a fishing industry in 30-40 years. No one is talking about the millions of artisanal and indigenous fishermen who are made unemployed by the operations of highly industrialized societies. The Norwegian trawl fleet alone has put more than 1 million fishermen out of work in India. Asian and European fleets are plundering the waters of West and East Africa - the reason you have pirates in Somalia is that these fleets plundered their waters, took everything and drove these people into poverty. . There is a lot of room for artisanal fishing on this planet, there is no room for industrialized fishing operations.

- What should governments and policy makers do to conserve marine life? Does a nation show the way?

“The first thing they can do is eliminate subsidies from the fishing industry, which total about $ 76 billion a year. You could solve world hunger with that kind of money. This is the economy of extinction - to build a $ 100 million fishing trawler you have to get a loan from the bank, which means you are heavily in debt, you have to catch more fish to pay it off and keep the price of fish high. For example, Mitsubishi has a 10-year supply of bluefin tuna in its warehouses. They could supply their market and not catch another fish for the next 10 years. But they won't because if they did, the price of their commodity would drop. Scarcity translates into higher profits. Fishing is extremely expensive today, but it wasn't before. It works well for corporations - they make a lot of money because they can ask for anything for the commodity and put that money in something else. It is a short term investment for short term gain. There are no more so-called fishermen, they are just companies that use the small fishing community as a selling point for their product and destroy the community at the same time.

- Do you think the mainstream media react and portray what you are doing? Referring to the documentary "Seaspiracy", how can we capture the "spirit of the times", the outlines of current thinking and stimulate forward movement?

“Modern media are complicated. Donald Trump spoke of "fake news", but it is not, it is not news. It's what they don't cover that is the problem. Over 1,500 environmentalists have been murdered in the past 15 years, but you never hear about it. Just last week, Rory Young was murdered in Africa and there is very little in the media about it.

In our modern world, the medium in which you convey your message is more important than the message itself, so you must control that medium. Netflix is a great medium for this - if we didn't have Netflix, no one would be watching Seaspiracy. He's enjoying great success and making his way to the top 10 in most countries - and he's even number 1 in places like the UK and Hong Kong.

For us, the camera is the most powerful tool ever invented. The great thing is that you are reaching people who would never have been reached otherwise. Take Blackfish, which could not have seen the light of day without CNN's interest in it. You have to dramatize your message and find a way to get it across. Many years ago I decided that if you want to get your point across, you have to understand media culture. There are some things the media cannot ignore, the four elements - sex, scandal, violence, and fame. - Every story has one of these elements and if you don't have one of these elements, you don't have a story.

They make the rules, we play the game. ”Seaspiracy exposes corruption and conflicts of interest in marine conservation groups and hollow political efforts.

- What are the key NGOs like Sea Shepherd that we should be watching out for that are working to protect marine life?

“There is no one doing what we do as an interventionist and marine anti-poaching organization. But, there are a lot of environmental marine conservation organizations doing good. The strength of an ecosystem lies in diversity, so the strength of any movement must be in diversity. Whether this approach is through education, litigation, legislation or direct intervention, it all works in the same direction. Earth Island Institute is a good organization - the one that talked about tuna without dolphins, which I think was wrong, but they do a lot of good work.

As Ali Tabrizi says in the documentary, follow the money. This is always the key to knowing what is going on. We expected the seafood industry to send us scientists - I call them bio-stitutes because they pretty much provide the data to back up what the industry wants them to say. The same with climate change - you will find scientists who support deniers and those who will go with the facts. Usually, the scientists who support deniers, or in this case the fishing industry, are employed by various companies that have a vested interest. They accused Seaspiracy of being inaccurate even before seeing the movie.

I keep hearing that people think this is full of lies, but my answer to that is what exactly are we lying about? It's Ali and Lucy's story and people relate to the stories - Sharkwater is Robert Stuart's story, Mission Blue is Sylvia Earle's story. The only criticism I hear about Seaspiracy again is that they debunk that prediction as to when the fishing industry is going to collapse and there is controversy over specific percentages - but the point does is not the exact date or figure is that the industry will collapse!

- Why is it important to adopt a plant-based diet to restore the health of the ecosystems of our oceans? And how does this correlate with countries in the South where poverty and subsistence often leave no choice in food?

“Again, this is not about small communities in Africa or Asia, it is about industrialized operations supplying this endless market to the Western world. The meat industry kills 65 billion animals each year and is the biggest contributor to groundwater pollution, ocean dead zones and greenhouse gas emissions.

We are killing more fish. We are talking in trillions. About 40% of all fish caught are actually fed to chickens, domestic salmon and pigs. Today we find ourselves in a situation where the chickens on battery farms eat more fish than the puffins and albatrosses. Domestic cats eat more fish than seals in the North Atlantic - 2.8 million tonnes each year just for cat food!

It's an unbalanced world, and it needs to be restored. There is simply no room for 8 billion hominid primates that eat meat and fish. We can adopt a plant-based diet, especially in industrialized countries where people can afford it. On board our ships we have been vegetarians from 1979 to 1999 and vegans since 1999. You don't have to be vegan to join our crew, but you certainly have no choice once you are on board .

- We took a close look at Cowspiracy and Seaspiracy, both life-improving from our perspective - what's the next industry you think could get heavy media exposure in order to change our 'unsustainable' habits ?

“We need to eliminate plastic.

It's a design failure from the start and there must be alternatives. We cannot continue to use a single-use product that ends up polluting the environment, breaking down into microplastics and infiltrating every living system on the planet to the point where plankton now eats it and our bodies are now polluted. It's difficult ; even trying to eliminate single-use shopping bags is under a lot of pressure from the industry. We must put an end to this collective form of mass psychosis, which has polluted our minds for hundreds of years, called anthropocentrism. This idea that we are better than anything. We have to learn to live in harmony with all the other species and understand that we are here by the fact that they are here, and we cannot live without them. We need to replace it with a biocentric attitude - the idea that we are part of the whole. It means looking at what this planet is - we call it Earth; I call it the ocean. It is water in continuous circulation, sometimes in the sea, in ice, sometimes underground, in clouds and sometimes in the cells of every plant and animal on this planet, constantly moving through all these different mediums. . The water in your body was once in all of these places. It is the living planet of water and if we see this we will see that everything is interconnected and interdependent. There is limited growth and limited carrying capacity and when we steal the carrying capacity of other species it leads to a decrease in diversity and interdependence.

- I am intrigued by the methods Sea Shepherd uses at sea. Can you tell us how you apply your aggressive non-violence policy?

“In 1977, when I created Sea Shepherd, we implemented an aggressive nonviolence strategy. This means that we are going to intervene physically and that we are not going to hurt or kill anyone.

- What does non-violence mean?

In my opinion, this does not include the destruction of property. If a material object is used to kill, the destruction of that object is non-violent. For example, if someone is about to shoot an elephant and you destroy the rifle, it is an act of non-violence - you are saving a sensitive life by destroying something that was used for it. to kill. We are proud of the fact that after 42 years no one has ever been injured or killed. Over the past 5 years, together with our partners and various governments around the world, we provide the resources, materials and volunteers and they provide the authority. We don't carry weapons, but the authorities do.

We transport soldiers from Sierra Leone or Liberia on board ships. They are responsible for enforcing the law, on our side we offer our help.

- And how do you deal with problems at sea?

“If we are attacked, our crew wear bulletproof vests and helmets. We have nets to keep things from being thrown on the bridge and we have water cannons to deter them. Our most dangerous campaign is in the vaquita refuge in the Sea of Cortéz. We are attacked with Molotov cocktails and they shoot down our drones, so we have to protect ourselves. Today, it is the US Naval War College that teaches us our tactics and our approach. There is pressure to get the US Marines to do something about poaching and we are used as a role model.

- You must have had difficult situations, what was one of your greatest stories at sea?

“Driving the Japanese whaling fleet from the Southern Ocean was a great victory. It took us years, but every year we were able to reduce their quotas - finally, in 2013, they only took 10%. We literally drove them into bankruptcy and cost them over $ 100 million in lawsuits. What they were doing was illegal. People have tried to say that we are anti-Japanese, but poachers are poachers, no matter where they come from.

I am accused of being racist by all those who oppose us, including the Norwegians.

- To conclude, is there anything you would like to add?

“I would like to say that what Ali and Lucy Tabrizi did with Seaspiracy was awesome. They spent 5 years working on the project and they told the story in the best possible way in 90 minutes. They did an even better job of deciding Netflix to be the channel that would broadcast the documentary. "

Interview conducted by Rosanna Pycraft, freelance journalist specializing in the cultural field. Rosanna is particularly fond of sustainable food, alternative music scenes and the arts. Currently living in Lisbon, she is passionate about the environment, ecotourism and travel in order to discover local histories and different cultures.