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Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
The story of one of Watson's many voyages bent on disrupting business as usual on the high seas.
224 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 1995
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September 29, 2009
This book is written from the first person perspective of the author and that ends up being its downfall. If he spent half the time writing about the seals that he spent complaining about his own problems, it might have been readable.
If you want to learn more about Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society from an outsider perspective, I'd recommend The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals, though I really think Captain Watson tells the story much better himself in his books Sea Shepherd and Seal Wars: Twenty-five Years on the Front Lines with the Harp Seals.
If you want to learn more about Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society from an outsider perspective, I'd recommend The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet's Largest Mammals, though I really think Captain Watson tells the story much better himself in his books Sea Shepherd and Seal Wars: Twenty-five Years on the Front Lines with the Harp Seals.
May 10, 2024
THE FRANK ACCOUNT OF A REPORTER/PASSENGER IN A SEA SHEPHERD CAMPAIGN
Author David Morris wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, “What follows is the account of my voyage with [Paul] Watson on an antidriftnet campaign in the North Pacific during the summer of 1992. The account weaves together in a single narrative three main strands: the voyage, its ecological context and a gradually emerging sketch of Paul Watson. Watson matters… because he puts us so clearly on notice that the time for inaction or halfway measures is over. His way of life and thinking challenge us to question our ingrained attitudes and actions… he offers a compelling example of what a hew human relationship to the earth could be. This is a personal book, and I think it has to be personal. My own unheroic role as narrator---a middle-aged writer, scholar and ex-professor so clearly out of his element---is something I cannot help… [I seek] to preserve something of the individual education that went on during the voyage and its aftermath.” (Pg. x-xi)
He explains, “There’s a grain of truth in the story that Paul Watson keeps his whereabouts hidden. Many Americans haven’t heard of him… but outside America he is widely known as an important environmental activist. He is one of the founders of Greenpeace. He invented the tactic of tree-spiking to save old-growth forests from lumber companies. He has disrupted government-sanctioned wolf hunts and seal hunts… he has rammed Japanese driftnet ships a thousand miles from land. He has confronted Russian whalers on the high seas… Paul Watson has repeatedly put his life on the line to stop the destruction of marine wildlife and ocean habitat. His methods get his routinely denounced as a terrorist, but future generations may regard him as a hero… he is someone whose impassioned defense of whales, seals, seabirds, dolphins and almost every form of endangered marine species marks him as a distinctive and---in a solitary way---representative figure of our time.” (Pg. 2-3)
He notes, “Even allies in the environmental movement sometimes denounce him… Many of the denunciations boil down to little more than attacks on his character. He is called headstrong, polemical, combative… arrogant… Other attacks conceal a more indirect antagonism. Although some environmental groups reward their executives with lavish income and fat expense accounts, the tiny Sea Shepherd staff works mostly without a paycheck. Watson draws no salary. He supports himself solely by occasional lectures, writing and teaching. What he lacks in resources, however, he makes up for in boldness and dedication.” (Pg. 13-14)
He reports, “What kind of cuisine is served on the Sea Shepherd II? Pasta. Pasta, salad, beans, and rice. No meat… The pasta is first-rate… Overall, the crew … is a UN of unique and unusual people: British, Danish, Mexican, Australian, Peruvian, American… Canadian.” (Pg. 27) He adds, “I notice that the average age of the crew must be about twenty. The ship has the air of a children’s crusade… I don’t mean to known education---or youth. Still, a tad more age and experience among my crewmates isn’t such a terrible wish, is it?” (Pg. 29) Later, he notes, “It surprised me to find myself assigned to share a cabin with a woman… I come to like the idea that [she] and I have been thrown together in this windowless box.” (Pg. 34)
He recounts a conversation with Watson: “I mention to Paul that the environmental movement needs people of differing talents and dispositions… his disagreement astonishes me. The environmental movement, he says, is an illusion… There’s no environmental movement… because nothing is happening. People just give money to giant fund-raising organizations like Greenpeace in order to feel good… He thinks it will take nothing short of a catastrophe… to change our relation to the planet. I get the feeling that he thinks the disaster is not too far away. It’s not surprising that people who make money by exploiting the environment have come to regard Paul as the enemy… Paul’s form of forceful nonviolence, he knows, has nothing to do with the civil disobedience associated with Thoreau., Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.” (Pg. 45-46)
He acknowledges, “the Greenpeace regulars do not hold Paul Watson in high regard… Paul split with Greenpeace in an emotional dispute … in 1977. Accounts of the split differ. Paul clearly struck the new Greenpeace leadership as a liability in their quest for growth and power. It is fair to say that Greenpeace threw him out… Today… he is one of Greenpeace’s most vocal critics. Sour grapes? Perhaps. But consider that Greenpeace has now grown into a huge, multinational corporation… [that] employs one thousand people… These numbers prove … the extent of worldwide concern about the environment. Indirectly they may lend support to Paul Watson’s view that, in helping to found Greenpeace, he… created a monster.” (Pg. 53-55)
He continues, “Paul believes that playing it safe---adopting a moderate style of compromise, cooperation and modest, incremental change---boils down to just another way of selling out the environment. Real protection of the environment… demands going out each day to do battle. Hard struggle, not moderation, is what will save the whales and the redwoods and the rain forest. Greenpeace, he believes, in its quest for funds and respectability, has lost the will to do battle. Paul’s line of attack bothers me, although I probably count as a moderate… Greenpeace at least offers a prime example of what the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society refuses to become… [It] employs no lawyers, no professional fund-raisers and no bureaucrats… Paul sees it as an information training ground for volunteers, who will leave to found other organizations, like Alex Pacheco, [co-]founder of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).” (Pg. 56-57)
Perhaps surprisingly, he points out that of the Sea Shepherd’s two ships, “While the Edward Abbey has stocked its galley with hamburger, chicken and … cheese, the Sean Shepherd II is strictly vegetarian… Almost the entire crew are vegans… Paul, who likes hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches equally, interprets veganism as a form of philosophical lunacy… Paul clearly chafes at living under implicit daily rebuke by the tattered collection of twenty-something idealists who … run the Sean Shepherd II. Most vegans, he complains, are afflicted by a kind of political correctness and groupthink that extends even to their fondness for old clothes and dirt… ‘All those clean t-shirts …. I bought for them in Santa Cruz, and they still go around looking like the homeless.’” (Pg. 59)
He notes, “driftnets are in one sense merely a symbol. Huge corporations are looking for a ways to vacuum the life out of the sea until, one day, there is little left worth fishing for. The most striking change during the three decades he has been sailing out there, Paul says, is the absence of seabirds. No birds means no fish. What will it be like twenty years from now? It’s getting easier to understand why Paul thinks it will take a catastrophe to make people change their relation to the earth… The so-called Earth Summit, in Paul’s view, amounted to nothing more than public relations---‘a fiasco.’” (Pg. 97)
He states, “[Watson] knows that infiltrators sometimes join his crews, but he says he doesn’t care, so long as they perform their shipboard duties. He keeps a careful watch for saboteurs… After all, he isn’t in a good position to complain is his opponents succeed in sinking a Sea Shepherd vessel… As he demonstrated in Iceland, Paul at times not only doesn’t avoid capture but insists on getting arrested. He may show up and demand that the authorities press charges… Paul’s monkeywrench tactics … [are] a calculated method employed for the specific ethical purpose of defending and preserving the earth… If you are Paul Watson, you do what it takes and don’t worry about your critics.” (Pg. 109-110)
He reports the controversy over whether the Sea Shepherd ships should carry weapons. “Paul replied, ‘we’ve been carrying weapons for ten years now and never used them.’ As captain he has sole responsibility for the lives of his crew. Fifteen hundreds miles from land, he says, you never know who might try to board your ship… ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asks in exasperation. ‘Call 911?’” (Pg. 131-132) He also reports that “Somebody once asked him accusingly if the Sea Shepherd II, which burns tons of diesel fuel, doesn’t cause air pollution. ‘Yeah,’ Paul replied, ‘but I can’t ram driftnet ships with a sailboat.” (Pg. 139)
Of their encounter with the Japanese, he recounts, “The Sea Shepherd II crew has scored a direct hit with vials of butyric acid… that makes the Japanese ship reek like a thousand pounds of rancid butter… Paul has been pushing the Sea Shepherd II to top speed and now the water pump is broken down… ‘We’re dead in the water,’ Paul comments dryly over the radio. But it’s not over. Paul orders … to continue the chase in the Edward Abbey… As [they pull] us close to the racing driftnet shop, Peter runs below and returns holding an AK-47 automatic rifle. Ah yes! So much for denial… Shots from the armor-piercing rifle blast through the engine noise… The Civil War cannon on our stern has just fired off a round… This is not just more than I bargained for. It’s like waking up on a battlefield… We radio the Japanese captain to stop, but he clearly has no intention of doing so. I wouldn’t stop… after someone in a menacing black ship with a black pirate flag has tried to ram my ship in the middle of nowhere… Why are we chasing them? They won’t stop, we can’t capture them and we’re not big enough to ram them... Heading below deck, I pass Meg… ‘This is too radical for me,’ Meg says. I’m inclined to agree… I’m just trying to bluff my way through, trying not to fall apart, hoping that Paul has gotten enough hits and Peter enough pictures. But I doubt it. This is why they’ve come.” (Pg. 165-166)
He notes, “Paul [says] without a hint of defensiveness, ‘If I were to live a completely pure lifestyle, then I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things that I wanted to do, because, for one thing, I wouldn’t fly an airplane. I wouldn’t drive a car. If you don’t use these forms of transportation, then you might as well just shut up and crawl into a hole, because nobody’s ever going to hear anything you have to say… You have to use whatever is in your environment… If you live in the city, then you use the tools in the city.’” (Pg. 177)
He concludes, “I expect that Paul will continue to struggle for the earth with all his heart. The battles ahead on the ocean and in the courts seem unending… The ultimate question, in any case, will not be what Paul Watson has accomplished… but what we can learn to make of his difficult life’s work.” (Pg. 209)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, as well as other forms of radical environmentalism.
Author David Morris wrote in the Preface to this 1995 book, “What follows is the account of my voyage with [Paul] Watson on an antidriftnet campaign in the North Pacific during the summer of 1992. The account weaves together in a single narrative three main strands: the voyage, its ecological context and a gradually emerging sketch of Paul Watson. Watson matters… because he puts us so clearly on notice that the time for inaction or halfway measures is over. His way of life and thinking challenge us to question our ingrained attitudes and actions… he offers a compelling example of what a hew human relationship to the earth could be. This is a personal book, and I think it has to be personal. My own unheroic role as narrator---a middle-aged writer, scholar and ex-professor so clearly out of his element---is something I cannot help… [I seek] to preserve something of the individual education that went on during the voyage and its aftermath.” (Pg. x-xi)
He explains, “There’s a grain of truth in the story that Paul Watson keeps his whereabouts hidden. Many Americans haven’t heard of him… but outside America he is widely known as an important environmental activist. He is one of the founders of Greenpeace. He invented the tactic of tree-spiking to save old-growth forests from lumber companies. He has disrupted government-sanctioned wolf hunts and seal hunts… he has rammed Japanese driftnet ships a thousand miles from land. He has confronted Russian whalers on the high seas… Paul Watson has repeatedly put his life on the line to stop the destruction of marine wildlife and ocean habitat. His methods get his routinely denounced as a terrorist, but future generations may regard him as a hero… he is someone whose impassioned defense of whales, seals, seabirds, dolphins and almost every form of endangered marine species marks him as a distinctive and---in a solitary way---representative figure of our time.” (Pg. 2-3)
He notes, “Even allies in the environmental movement sometimes denounce him… Many of the denunciations boil down to little more than attacks on his character. He is called headstrong, polemical, combative… arrogant… Other attacks conceal a more indirect antagonism. Although some environmental groups reward their executives with lavish income and fat expense accounts, the tiny Sea Shepherd staff works mostly without a paycheck. Watson draws no salary. He supports himself solely by occasional lectures, writing and teaching. What he lacks in resources, however, he makes up for in boldness and dedication.” (Pg. 13-14)
He reports, “What kind of cuisine is served on the Sea Shepherd II? Pasta. Pasta, salad, beans, and rice. No meat… The pasta is first-rate… Overall, the crew … is a UN of unique and unusual people: British, Danish, Mexican, Australian, Peruvian, American… Canadian.” (Pg. 27) He adds, “I notice that the average age of the crew must be about twenty. The ship has the air of a children’s crusade… I don’t mean to known education---or youth. Still, a tad more age and experience among my crewmates isn’t such a terrible wish, is it?” (Pg. 29) Later, he notes, “It surprised me to find myself assigned to share a cabin with a woman… I come to like the idea that [she] and I have been thrown together in this windowless box.” (Pg. 34)
He recounts a conversation with Watson: “I mention to Paul that the environmental movement needs people of differing talents and dispositions… his disagreement astonishes me. The environmental movement, he says, is an illusion… There’s no environmental movement… because nothing is happening. People just give money to giant fund-raising organizations like Greenpeace in order to feel good… He thinks it will take nothing short of a catastrophe… to change our relation to the planet. I get the feeling that he thinks the disaster is not too far away. It’s not surprising that people who make money by exploiting the environment have come to regard Paul as the enemy… Paul’s form of forceful nonviolence, he knows, has nothing to do with the civil disobedience associated with Thoreau., Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.” (Pg. 45-46)
He acknowledges, “the Greenpeace regulars do not hold Paul Watson in high regard… Paul split with Greenpeace in an emotional dispute … in 1977. Accounts of the split differ. Paul clearly struck the new Greenpeace leadership as a liability in their quest for growth and power. It is fair to say that Greenpeace threw him out… Today… he is one of Greenpeace’s most vocal critics. Sour grapes? Perhaps. But consider that Greenpeace has now grown into a huge, multinational corporation… [that] employs one thousand people… These numbers prove … the extent of worldwide concern about the environment. Indirectly they may lend support to Paul Watson’s view that, in helping to found Greenpeace, he… created a monster.” (Pg. 53-55)
He continues, “Paul believes that playing it safe---adopting a moderate style of compromise, cooperation and modest, incremental change---boils down to just another way of selling out the environment. Real protection of the environment… demands going out each day to do battle. Hard struggle, not moderation, is what will save the whales and the redwoods and the rain forest. Greenpeace, he believes, in its quest for funds and respectability, has lost the will to do battle. Paul’s line of attack bothers me, although I probably count as a moderate… Greenpeace at least offers a prime example of what the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society refuses to become… [It] employs no lawyers, no professional fund-raisers and no bureaucrats… Paul sees it as an information training ground for volunteers, who will leave to found other organizations, like Alex Pacheco, [co-]founder of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).” (Pg. 56-57)
Perhaps surprisingly, he points out that of the Sea Shepherd’s two ships, “While the Edward Abbey has stocked its galley with hamburger, chicken and … cheese, the Sean Shepherd II is strictly vegetarian… Almost the entire crew are vegans… Paul, who likes hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches equally, interprets veganism as a form of philosophical lunacy… Paul clearly chafes at living under implicit daily rebuke by the tattered collection of twenty-something idealists who … run the Sean Shepherd II. Most vegans, he complains, are afflicted by a kind of political correctness and groupthink that extends even to their fondness for old clothes and dirt… ‘All those clean t-shirts …. I bought for them in Santa Cruz, and they still go around looking like the homeless.’” (Pg. 59)
He notes, “driftnets are in one sense merely a symbol. Huge corporations are looking for a ways to vacuum the life out of the sea until, one day, there is little left worth fishing for. The most striking change during the three decades he has been sailing out there, Paul says, is the absence of seabirds. No birds means no fish. What will it be like twenty years from now? It’s getting easier to understand why Paul thinks it will take a catastrophe to make people change their relation to the earth… The so-called Earth Summit, in Paul’s view, amounted to nothing more than public relations---‘a fiasco.’” (Pg. 97)
He states, “[Watson] knows that infiltrators sometimes join his crews, but he says he doesn’t care, so long as they perform their shipboard duties. He keeps a careful watch for saboteurs… After all, he isn’t in a good position to complain is his opponents succeed in sinking a Sea Shepherd vessel… As he demonstrated in Iceland, Paul at times not only doesn’t avoid capture but insists on getting arrested. He may show up and demand that the authorities press charges… Paul’s monkeywrench tactics … [are] a calculated method employed for the specific ethical purpose of defending and preserving the earth… If you are Paul Watson, you do what it takes and don’t worry about your critics.” (Pg. 109-110)
He reports the controversy over whether the Sea Shepherd ships should carry weapons. “Paul replied, ‘we’ve been carrying weapons for ten years now and never used them.’ As captain he has sole responsibility for the lives of his crew. Fifteen hundreds miles from land, he says, you never know who might try to board your ship… ‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asks in exasperation. ‘Call 911?’” (Pg. 131-132) He also reports that “Somebody once asked him accusingly if the Sea Shepherd II, which burns tons of diesel fuel, doesn’t cause air pollution. ‘Yeah,’ Paul replied, ‘but I can’t ram driftnet ships with a sailboat.” (Pg. 139)
Of their encounter with the Japanese, he recounts, “The Sea Shepherd II crew has scored a direct hit with vials of butyric acid… that makes the Japanese ship reek like a thousand pounds of rancid butter… Paul has been pushing the Sea Shepherd II to top speed and now the water pump is broken down… ‘We’re dead in the water,’ Paul comments dryly over the radio. But it’s not over. Paul orders … to continue the chase in the Edward Abbey… As [they pull] us close to the racing driftnet shop, Peter runs below and returns holding an AK-47 automatic rifle. Ah yes! So much for denial… Shots from the armor-piercing rifle blast through the engine noise… The Civil War cannon on our stern has just fired off a round… This is not just more than I bargained for. It’s like waking up on a battlefield… We radio the Japanese captain to stop, but he clearly has no intention of doing so. I wouldn’t stop… after someone in a menacing black ship with a black pirate flag has tried to ram my ship in the middle of nowhere… Why are we chasing them? They won’t stop, we can’t capture them and we’re not big enough to ram them... Heading below deck, I pass Meg… ‘This is too radical for me,’ Meg says. I’m inclined to agree… I’m just trying to bluff my way through, trying not to fall apart, hoping that Paul has gotten enough hits and Peter enough pictures. But I doubt it. This is why they’ve come.” (Pg. 165-166)
He notes, “Paul [says] without a hint of defensiveness, ‘If I were to live a completely pure lifestyle, then I wouldn’t be able to do any of the things that I wanted to do, because, for one thing, I wouldn’t fly an airplane. I wouldn’t drive a car. If you don’t use these forms of transportation, then you might as well just shut up and crawl into a hole, because nobody’s ever going to hear anything you have to say… You have to use whatever is in your environment… If you live in the city, then you use the tools in the city.’” (Pg. 177)
He concludes, “I expect that Paul will continue to struggle for the earth with all his heart. The battles ahead on the ocean and in the courts seem unending… The ultimate question, in any case, will not be what Paul Watson has accomplished… but what we can learn to make of his difficult life’s work.” (Pg. 209)
This book will be of great interest to anyone studying Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, as well as other forms of radical environmentalism.
June 29, 2011
fantastic book. I actually read it with a highliter because there were so many quotes, points, and statistics that I felt would be important to note and refer back to. there are a lot of books about SSCS and Paul Watson. this is another one, and if you're absorbing as much about them, why they do what they do, and experiences on the ships, this is a great quick read that is another great source of info
September 30, 2013
It is a quite old report, but the book is really odd. The author seems to be quite a fun good willed guy, but do spend a lot of time to whine about everything. It is more a report about how difficult it is for him to live on a ship than anything else. I am still wondering if the part about shooting at ships is of any truth, and I honestly doubt it. The campaign he has been involved wiht is clearly not the most exciting ever. So if you want to read about SSCS, maybe find another book.
August 27, 2015
Un muy buen libro, que te explica los problemas que tenemos actualmente en el planeta, y de como voluntarios de sea shepherd trabaja por defender los océanos, de las terribles matanza de ballenas.
Gracias a este libro quise hacer un cambio en mi vida, le tengo mucho cariño
recomendadisimo
Gracias a este libro quise hacer un cambio en mi vida, le tengo mucho cariño
recomendadisimo
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews