A cetacean vigilante for some, a radical pirate for others, Paul Watson, whose continued detention will be examined by a Greenlandic judge on Thursday, has dedicated his life to protecting the oceans and defending whales.
At the helm of his associative fleet, the 73-year-old American-Canadian environmental activist has harassed, rammed, sabotaged and sunk dozens of commercial fishing vessels. Controversial methods, which have earned him several legal proceedings and a reputation as a pariah among followers of non-violence.
Under an international arrest warrant from Japan, the founder of the NGO Sea Shepherd, already detained in the Netherlands in 1997 and exiled on the high seas from 2012 to 2014, repeats that he has never injured anyone. Tokyo, however, accuses him of being responsible for damage and injuries on board a Japanese whaling ship in 2010, in the Antarctic.
The life of this fishermen’s bête noire changed in June 1975, during an expedition with Greenpeace against a Soviet whaling ship. “The day I looked into the eye of this dying sperm whale in the North Pacific Ocean,” he wrote in 2023.
“I made a promise to this great Water Spirit that I would eradicate whaling in my lifetime.”
A fight continued outside of Greenpeace, the NGO he co-founded in 1971.
“Watson tended to advocate the end of non-violence,” says Rex Weyler in his book, who immortalized his comrade kneeling on the back of the cetacean that had turned his life upside down.
“Ecoterrorism”?
Or “Greenpeace could not afford to lose the moral stature of satyagraha, absolute non-violence,” according to the Sanskrit term notably used by Gandhi, believes the photographer. The NGO’s board of directors excluded Watson by 11 votes to 1.
The sailor changed course and founded Sea Shepherd in 1977, to fight body and soul against fish poaching. He was dismissed in 2022, following internal quarrels, leaving him with a feeling of betrayal. Several branches of the association, including the French one, still support him.
With Sea Shepherd, Watson has undertaken spectacular operations on the high seas. Siberia, Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands and Japan… He has saved thousands of cetaceans and drawn attention to the illegal activities of whalers with shocking images.
In 45 years of action, the captain is said to have sunk more than ten ships, and to have stormed at least as many.
“Pirate” or even “eco-terrorist” tactics according to critics.
“Absurd,” he defended himself in the Telegraph in 2009. “To me, an ecoterrorist is someone who sows terror in the natural environment, like a fleet of whale hunters equipped with explosive-tipped harpoons entering a whale sanctuary to kill a thousand whales.”
A graduate in communications from Simon Fraser University in Canada, the man who invited Brigitte Bardot on an expedition in 1977 to publicize the massacre of baby seals knows how to shine the spotlight on the causes he defends.
Fierce communicator
“We accomplished more with his visit than we did in three years of activism,” Watson said in a 2016 interview. “That’s when I realized we had to use celebrities, because they’re media.”
Pamela Anderson and Pierce Brosnan, among others, have contributed to the association’s message, as has the television series “Whale Wars”, first broadcast in the United States in 2008, where Watson, in his own role, appears as an uncompromising and combative leader.
His strength of character was built from childhood.
Born in Toronto (Canada) in 1950, the eldest of seven children, he lost his mother at the age of 13.
Since then, “something has dried up inside him,” his sister confided.
After a fight with his father, he left home at age 15. He joined the Coast Guard, then boarded a Norwegian cargo ship.
In 1969, he participated in the genesis of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, fighting against nuclear tests near the coast of Alaska, a group at the origin of the founding of Greenpeace. A long career as an activist can begin, offshore.