For 20 years, Paul Watson, quixotic founder/leader of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has led a fight for the seas, pitting his decommissioned 90-foot Coast Guard cutter against industries that use exploding harpoons and indiscriminate, 35-mile-long drift nets. Although it evolves slowly, David Morris’s portrait of Watson is a fascinating one of a confrontational, committed and courageous man who takes credit for saving thousands of whales, hundreds of thousands of dolphins and millions of seals.
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Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
Fulcrum Publishing (1995), 224 pgs.
Part of that portrait involves Morris’s personal account of a sea hunt with Watson, a high-seas drama of a search-and-ram operation in which Watson chases away befuddled Japanese trawlers. Seeing drift-netting as strip-mining the oceans, Watson abides no mewling bystanders. He rams drift-netter ships and puts their captains on the defensive. (Charges against him are usually dismissed to avoid public awareness of the business.)
Although a founder of Greenpeace, Watson split from that organization over what Morris calls his use of”forceful nonviolence,” as Watson does not believe the destruction of inanimate objects to be violence. If any words typify Paul Watson, they’re his own, when he tells a critic: “We don’t give a damn what you or anybody else on this planet thinks. We didn’t sink those ships for you. We did it for the whales.” – Publishers Weekly