Virginia Brown
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) founder Captain Paul Watson recently visited Australia, following the organisation's 2005-06 campaign against Japanese whaling in Antarctica. During his visit he spoke to Green Left Weekly about the Sea Shepherds' work.
Watson has been an environmental activist for nearly 50 years and was a co-founders of Greenpeace. In 1977 he left Greenpeace over disagreements about campaign tactics and founded the SSCS.
The SSCS's mandate includes upholding international laws to protect marine wildlife, and it has initiated and supported many campaigns to defend ocean ecosystems. Its best-known campaigns include those against the whaling and sealing industries, and long-line fishing activities, and to protect the Galapagos Archipelago's unique biodioversity.
On the controversy surrounding the SSCS's use of direct-action tactics, Watson said that these tactics are legal and help to prevent the illegal slaughter of marine life. He also noted that the SSCS has never injured anyone, unlike the seal and whaling companies they have opposed. (In 1986, a Sea Shepherd vessel opposing whaling was attacked with tear gas and rifle fire, to which the activists responded with cannons loaded with chocolate and other edibles).
Watson told GLW: "The accusation you hear in the media is that anybody who does anything to protect the environment is an eco-terrorist, but it's just name-calling and public relations on the side of the corporations. No person has ever been injured, let alone killed, by an environmental activist anywhere in the world. Corporations like Shell and Exxon are the real eco-terrorists."
Watson is very critical of businesses that use "green" marketing to disguise the environmental destructiveness of their products. He recently criticised former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore's company, Green Spirit, saying it "was set up to justify pretty much anyone who wishes to make a buck off destroying habitat and species".
Moore now advocates nuclear power as a sustainable energy source. Watson responded: "Nuclear power will not prevent coal, oil and gas from being utilised. It will just make it cheaper. Moore is not pushing nuclear power as an alternative; he is promoting it as an additional source of power. Until the nuclear industry can find a safe way to deal with radioactive waste, it can never be a safe alternative power source. Patrick presents us with a choice of being executed by hanging or firing squad."
Watson criticised the global economic system as "pretty much all based on unlimited growth, exploitation of resources and competition". He believes that environmental consciousness has increased significantly over the last three decades, but that most problems have not been addressed and are worsening.
He cited the United Nations' Global Biodiversity Outlook 2 report, issued on March 20: "The report estimates that the current rate of extinction is 1000 times faster than historical rates. [This is] the sixth major extinction event in the history of earth, and the greatest since the dinosaurs disappeared."
One of the SSCS's most prominent campaigns is against Canada's commercial seal hunt, which it calls "the largest mass slaughter of marine mammals in the world". Last year, more than 320,000 seals were killed in the government-sponsored hunt, which produces mainly luxury items.
Watson commented on the devastating effect on the ecosystem: "When you remove an animal from an ecosystem you change that ecosystem permanently; it becomes something else. The entire north-west Atlantic ecosystem has been irreparably damaged, with new species moving in, and the codfish population has collapsed.
"They say that if you get rid of the seals you'll have more fish, but the biggest predators of fish, outside of people, are now other fish. The seals and other predators keep the other fish populations in check, so if you lower seal or seabird or dolphin populations you increase the predatory fish population, causing even further declines in fish populations like the cod ... The Northern Cod, for all intents and purposes, is extinct.
"The science is there, but the scientists who work for the government pretty much tell the government what it wants to hear."
To find out more about the SSCS, visit <http://www.seashepherd.org/australia>. To learn more about the Convention on Biological Diversity, visit <http://www.biodiv.org/default.shtml>.
From Green Left Weekly, March 29, 2006.
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