Captain Paul Watson knows what people are calling him.
“Eco terrorist.”
The Toronto-born activist casually throws out the term, referring to the name his critics have called him and members of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the organization Watson founded that is devoted to conserving marine wildlife.
“People call us a lot of things,” he says.
But it obviously hasn’t deterred Watson, who spends half of each year at the helm of the Steve Irwin — one of the Sea Shepherd’s fleet of three ships — chasing down whalers on the international seas.
“We are an anti-poaching group,” Watson says. “We’ve never injured anyone and we’ve never been convicted of felonies.
“But we’ve shut down a lot of illegal operations,” he adds.
A new documentary directed by Canadian filmmaker Trish Dolman, Eco Pirate: The Story of Paul Watson, premieres at Toronto’s documentary film festival Hot Docs this month. The film looks at Watson’s controversial life in and out of the environmental movement he helped create, including the founding of Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd.
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Watson says, sounding surprisingly subdued for a man who is used to attracting media attention. “I don’t really like documentaries about myself.” (Eco Pirate is the second documentary about Watson’s life to date. The first, Pirate for the Sea, was released in 2008).
The films are a testament both to the high-profile nature of Sea Shepherd (both Sean Penn and Martin Sheen sit on its advisory board) and to Watson’s effectiveness. But it becomes obvious Watson would rather the attention be placed on his campaigns to save the oceans — on the whales, the blue fin tuna and the sharks he has said he would give his life to save — rather than on himself.
He is quick to divert discussion away from the documentary to his most recent success on the international seas.
Sea Shepherd recently drove a Japanese whaling fleet off the coast of Antarctica after a seven-year struggle. Watson says the victory is one of his finest accomplishments to date. “The knowledge that whales are swimming free that would otherwise be dead gives me a lot of satisfaction,” he says.
Most of the “battle” was captured for the upcoming fourth season of reality TV show Whale Wars, set to air this June on Animal Planet. The popular series follows Watson and his volunteer crew as they chase and harass Japanese whalers.
Watson’s reputation as an “eco warrior” stems from a belief that direct action is the only approach to environmentalism.
“Sea Shepherd was set up to intervene,” says Watson. “What we do is called aggressive non-violence.”
Watson says this is in contrast to the Greenpeace Foundation — the organization he helped found at the tender age of 18 but from which he is now disassociated.
His involvement with Greenpeace began in 1969 when he helped organize a mission to the United States–Canada border to protest nuclear testing at Amchitka Island.
Watson says he felt motivated to take part in the voyage out of concern for the marine wildlife at the planned testing site.
During Watson’s time at Greenpeace, he led anti-whaling campaigns, and their first voyage to protect seals from hunters on Canada’s east coast.
While he takes a measure of pride in his involvement with the world’s most recognizable environmental group, he now calls Greenpeace, with its focus on protests, “the world’s biggest feel-good organization.”
Watson broke ties with the group in 1977, the same year he founded Sea Shepherd. “Protesting doesn’t really accomplish much in the long run,” says Watson. “Sea Shepherd’s approach is economic. We bankrupt them by preventing them from getting their quotas and interfering with their operations.
“I don’t think you can appeal to people ethically or morally, but you can appeal to their bank accounts,” he adds.
It’s no surprise the seemingly fearless Watson found his calling when he was just nine years old.
While living in New Brunswick with his parents and six siblings, Watson felt kinship with a beaver he swam with in a pond near his home. When Watson found his furry friend had been killed by a trapper, so began his first campaign to save the beavers. He eventually joined a local environmental group called the Kindness Club.
After returning to Toronto with his family at 13, Watson continued to foster his interest in wildlife.
“My grandfather used to take me to the Riverdale Zoo all the time,” says Watson. The first article Watson ever wrote was an interview with the curator at the zoo when he was a Grade 7 student.
In his late teens Watson went off to sea with the Canadian Coast Guard, a move he says provided him with the skills to carry out campaigns in treacherous weather as a first officer on voyages with Greenpeace and now at the helm of his Sea Shepherd ships. With his shock of white, wavy hair and serious goatee, Watson looks like a man on a mission and indeed he is. In the past year he has spent only two weeks at home in Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands, Washington.
When not at sea, he’s on the university circuit, lecturing about the laws of ecology and “getting people to understand how important it is to protect our oceans.” Watson, 60, has been married three times and says relationships for him have been difficult. “I’m never around,” he says. “But I can’t imagine doing anything else.” Aside from an adult daughter in Seattle with whom he is close, Watson quite obviously feels his greatest affinity for animals.
“My passion has always been animals,” says Watson.
Sparked by the success of Whale Wars, the unrelenting Watson is set on expanding his participation in reality TV. In May he’s Mediterranean bound to begin shooting Tuna Wars, with a Seal Wars and Shark Wars in the works.
While films and TV shows help to bring some of Watson’s work to a broader audience, Watson is unequivocal in summing up the sense of urgency he feels as he carries out his mission.
“Forget about cancer and heart disease,” he says. “If we destroy diversity on the planet, we destroy ourselves.”