- Speaker #0
The context in which businesses operate is undergoing a radical transformation. New social, energy and environmental demands, in particular, require all economic players to rethink their approach. This means reinventing their purpose, minimizing their negative impact on resources and the living world, balancing the imperative of long-term goals with short-term constraints, doing things differently and inventing new solutions. But what exactly? and how can it be done in practice? I am Julien De Vorex. Reboot Business is a podcast by Impact Labs about an economic world in transition. Just over a year ago, on September 7th, 23 to be precise, I had the privilege of interviewing Paul Watson, the legendary captain and founder of Sea Shepherd. He is one of the most renowned activists of our time, dedicating his life to protecting marine life. Today, Paul Watson is in prison. despite not having been sentenced. He has been detained since July 21st in Greenland, awaiting a decision from the Danish Ministry of Justice on a potential extradition to Japan for a minor matter related to his fight to defend Wales. It is worth recalling that Japan has been condemned for illegal whaling by the International Court of Justice in 2014 and by the Federal Court of Australia in 2015. Hundreds of thousands of people have mobilized to demand Paul Watson's release, and he has sought political asylum in France. Yet, we sadly know the fate often reserved to whistleblowers. This re-arraying of our conversation is a way to ensure his plight is not forgotten. This is a discussion about activism, the defense of a noble and vital cause, because, as he says, if the ocean dies, we all die. And the ocean is dying. We delve into his worldview, biocentrism as opposed to anthropocentrism, the meaning of commitment, and strategies for activism and struggle in general. This is not an episode about business, but a reminder that the economic world only exists if the living world thrives. I really hope you will enjoy this conversation, and thanks for listening.
- Speaker #1
do you think is really important to better understand regarding what is going on with the world right now?
- Speaker #2
Well, my approach is one called biocentrism, and it's a philosophical view that, you know, we're part of everything. We're not lord and dominant over everything else. For 10,000 years, human societies have been anthropocentric, except for indigenous cultures. What that means is that they believe that everything is about... humanity. It's all created for us, and we're the only really important species. The biocentric point of view is that we're part of everything, and everything is interdependent. And therefore, if we're going to survive, we have to live within the laws of ecology. That is the law of diversity, that the strength of an ecosystem is dependent upon diversity within it. The law of interdependence, that all species within an ecosystem are interdependent with each other. And the law of finite resources, that there's a limit to growth because there's a limit to carrying capacity. And when one species steals the carrying capacity from other species, that causes diminishment in both diversity and interdependence, which leads towards ecological collapse. And I believe that's what's happening right now is that we're living in the Anthropocene, which is also called the sixth major extinction. And that's because of the massive number of species of plants and animals that are going extinct.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so very clear and very systemic view, I guess. We're part of this world and something's going on with the world and trying to understand, you know, whether I call it the playing field. You know, we'll follow the game in there and destroying our own playing field. What are you, how would you describe that? What are you fighting for and why?
- Speaker #2
Really fighting for the survival of the oceans and therefore the survival of life. Since 1950, there's been a 40% diminishment of phytoplankton in the seas. And phytoplankton provides up to 70% of the oxygen in the air we breathe and sequesters enormous amounts of CO2. So if phytoplankton were to disappear from the ocean, then we die. We don't live on this planet without phytoplankton. Life is dependent upon these aquatic plants that provide the oxygen, sequester, CO2. And it's really the foundation of everything in the ocean. The phytoplankton is eaten by the zooplankton, which is eaten by the fish, which is eaten by the whales. And one of the reasons for this diminishment is a diminishment of other species. For instance, whales are like the farmers of the ocean. They provide the nutrient base for phytoplankton, magnesium, nitrogen, iron. And that comes from the feces of the whales. One blue whale, for example. dumps about three tons of fecal material every day, heavily rich in those three nutrients. And when you reduce the whale population, you reduce the nutrient base for the phytoplankton. So nature's worked really well for thousands and thousands of years, recycling oxygen, recycling nutrients. And we've interfered with that by overfishing, by pollution, and by the killing off of whales and seals and other marine mammals. And that's really the root cause of the problem.
- Speaker #1
So basically, you're fighting for survival of the living.
- Speaker #2
Well, as I say, if the oceans die, we die. We don't live on this planet with a dead ocean. And the ocean is the life support system of the planet. I guess the best way to illustrate that is if you look at the Earth as a spaceship, which is what it is, or on this incredible voyage around the Milky Way galaxy. And every spaceship has a life support system. That provides the food we eat and the air we breathe and regulates climate and temperature. And that life support system is run by and maintained by a crew of engineers, all those species that make things work. And we humans, we're not the engineers. We're passengers having a great time amusing ourselves. But what we are doing is we're killing off the engineers. And the more engineers we kill, that is everything from the bees, the trees, the worms, to the fishes, to the whales, the more that we kill, the more the life support system begins to break down. And if it collapses, then what we have is an ecological collapse and we won't be able to survive that.
- Speaker #1
And who are you fighting against? I guess it's usually a tough question because there are different levels of answer. And we tend to usually focus on the symptoms. And in your case, you know, there would be, for example, a boat, you know, and the crew that comes with it that is chasing well to be very practical. What is the root cause? Who are the adversaries?
- Speaker #2
Well, what we're fighting really is anthropocentrism, this dominant human worldview that we control everything. We can do anything we want with anything. But, you know, any movement is like an ecosystem where the strength of an ecosystem is dependent upon diversity. A movement is dependent upon a diversity of approaches. And that could be education, litigation, legislation, direct intervention, direct action, actually. And we all do our... part. What I've been focusing on is the protection of marine mammals and marine life, stopping whaling, stopping sealing, stopping overfishing. But there are so many other things that need to be addressed and are being addressed by passionate and courageous individuals around the world. And so that's really the strength of a movement is that kind of diversity. People who are attacking and tackling climate change or diminishment of species or pollution, you know, whatever people choose to be involved in. And really, I just encourage people to use their skills and ability to the best of their ability to try and make this a better world. And individuals can really make a difference. I mean, because of Diane Fossey, we still have mountain gorillas in Rwanda. Because of David Wingate, we still have storm petrels in Bermuda. And so individuals all over the world are actually making an incredible difference. And I can't think of anything more honorable than because you've lived and dedicated your life to protecting an ecosystem or an endangered species and they survived. That's a lasting legacy.
- Speaker #1
I think we'll get back to that question of who's the adversary, because it's a tough one and that can be related to the strategies. But I want to talk about the choices you made a while ago regarding these tactics and these strategies. So Sea Shepherd, which you found it, is associated to the parrot flag. I don't know what's the mobile name. There is a name, but I can't remember it. It's basically about direct actions, kind of without asking permission, hence the pirate. Why and how did you get there?
- Speaker #2
Well, the flag actually comes from the French, the Jolly Rouge, the Jolly Roger. And, you know, every pirate had their own flag. And in the 90s, when people began calling us pirates for what we were doing, I said, OK, if you want to call us pirates, we'll be pirates, you know, because pirates got things done. They just cut through the bureaucracy and the red tape and they got things done. And if you look throughout history at pirates who got things done, let's take a look at John Paul Jones, the founder of the United States Navy, who was also the founder of the Russian Navy, by the way. And he was a pirate, as were Sir Francis Drake or Roger Sircouf or Sir Walter Raleigh or Jean Lafitte. They were all pirates and they actually got things done. And so, but when, you know, if you go back to the golden age. piracy, they were way, way ahead of their time. This was a time when pirates elected, democratically elected their captains, where they accepted anybody on their crew, regardless of race or gender. So way, way ahead of their time. And in a time when, you know, a 10-year-old boy could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread in London, it wasn't a big stretch to become a pirate and go after, you know, treasures on the high seas. And when people say, oh, they're thieves, yeah, well, who did they steal the gold from? The Spaniards. And who did the Spaniards get the gold from? They stole it from the Indians, so they weren't all that bad. But anyway, the great thing about the pirate plaga, the Jolly Roger, is that children love it. Young people love it. It's a romantic sort of a symbol. And I found that people really embrace it. And because of that, we've used it over the years.
- Speaker #1
And I want to talk about, so go back to the why. You're talking about the fact that you don't go by the rules, basically. And who is the pirate in the room? And I read somewhere that you describe yourself as a conservative. And when people tend to describe you as radical. And I know that words and language. in general is something powerful and that is today actually more and more distorted. Can you explain this to me and why do you think this matters?
- Speaker #2
Well, I get called a lot of names. People call me an eco-terrorist, but I've never worked for Monsanto or Exxon, so I'm not an eco-terrorist. But, you know, when people say, are you a radical? My response to that is, no, I'm a conservative. You don't get more conservative than being a conservationist. We're here to conserve. That's the root of the word conservative is to conserve. It's been changed around to support right-wing agendas or whatever, but still, the root of the word is to conserve and to protect. And so I look upon what we do as being a very conservative approach. But also, we don't break any laws. We operate within the boundaries of practicality and within the boundaries of international law. But law is very confusing. What is legal in one country isn't legal in another. But when you're on the high seas, there's international law, and I think that supersedes all kinds of national laws. But. Really, you have to, you know, a few years ago, I gave a lecture to the FBI in the United States. They actually paid me to come and give a talk to them. And one of the questions was, well, Sea Shepherd's walking a very fine line when it comes to the law. And my answer was, does it matter how fine the line is as long as you don't actually cross the line? And we don't cross that line. We've never injured anybody. I set up the strategy of aggressive nonviolence in 1977. And what that means is to aggressively intervene without causing. injury to anybody. Now, people say, well, you sink whale inches. Well, that's a piece of material. You cannot commit an act of violence against a non-sentient object. And if you destroy a piece of equipment that is used illegally being used to take a life, then that is an act of non-violence. If somebody is about to shoot an elephant and I knock the rifle out of their hand and destroy the rifle to save the elephant, that's an act of non-violence. So it really is how it's interpreted. But, you know, when we live in a world where property has more value than life, then of course it's going to be looked at as being unacceptable.
- Speaker #1
So if I hear kind of violence is being defined as not abiding by the law in some places, it could be, actually it's a little bit on this, you know, violence versus nonviolence, because it's a big topic. And it's been debated and still is, you know, what works,
- Speaker #0
what can be done.
- Speaker #1
And for some, you know, like... Nothing changes without real physical opposition or even threats or fear. And for others, violence can be counterproductive. And you always have these two sides. So do you have a point of view on this? And what is the limit, if any?
- Speaker #2
Well, a few years ago, back in 1985, I had two Tibetan monks came to my ship and they had a little statue of a horse-headed dragon-like demon. Anyway, they said, can you put it up on your mass? Good luck. I didn't, you know, I don't really believe that, but a couple of Tibetan monks asked me to do that. Oh, sure. Why not? There's no harm being done. And I didn't think anything of it until 1989 when I had the occasion to have lunch with and talk with and meet with the Dalai Lama. And I showed him a picture of it. And then I found out he had sent it to us. And so I said, well, what does it mean? He says it's called Haya Griva. And I said, well, what does that mean? And he says it's a symbol for the compassionate aspect of the wrath of the Buddha. And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said. Well, you never want to hurt anybody, but sometimes when they cannot see enlightenment, scare the hell out of them until they do. So that is the approach that we take. We're not going to hurt anybody. We've never hurt anybody, but we're going to aggressively deliver a message that what they're doing is unacceptable. But the bottom line for us is the saving of lives from an illegal activity. The people we oppose are criminals. I mean, they're the real pilots when you really think about it. So. But unfortunately, these criminals have the backing of governments and corporations because, let's face it, a lot of governments are pretty corrupt. And so that's what we're battling up against. For instance, I'm the only person in the history of Interpol to be put on the Interpol Red Notice. The Interpol Red Notice is for serial killers, war criminals and major drug traffickers. I'm the only person on there for the charge of trespassing, trespassing on a whaling ship. Didn't hurt anybody, didn't damage any property, didn't steal anything. But that shows you the political power of Japan, that they could get me on that Red Notice. My case is actually cited as an example of a European Commission's report on the abuse of Interpol for political reasons. But, you know, so I haven't done anything wrong in that respect. I opposed an illegal activity in the Southern Ocean and we won. We drove the Japanese whaling fleet out of the Southern Ocean. We cost them hundreds of millions of dollars and we saved 6,500 whales in the process. And that made them quite angry. So they're using their political influence as a weapon against me. But, you know, that was in 2012 and I'm still free and still around.
- Speaker #1
Yeah. You're not supposed to be to be out of the U.S., correct?
- Speaker #2
Well, what happened is that Secretary of State John Kerry took a look at this and said, this is ridiculous. And so he allowed me to return to the United States. And I can come to France because the government of France has no problem with me. I can go to Ireland, but other things are unpredictable. I know Canada, my home country. Your Trudeau, I mean, Justin Trudeau's better than his father. As you say, he personally said that, you know, he would send me to Japan if I enter Canada. So I haven't been able to enter my own country for 10 years now because of that. But they have their own reason to be against me because of our opposition to salmon farming and the killing of seals and the killing of wolves, which are campaigns that I've led. So I've angered the Canadian government. So because of that anger, we're willing to do Japan's bidding.
- Speaker #1
Now, that's interesting also because you say it. Even with the Japanese, if you take the Japanese example, the things where you were doing were against people who were not respecting the law. And yet the Japanese government is pissed off. So, again, how do you explain that? That's very interesting to see how, you know, the structures of this world work, because it's always blurry.
- Speaker #2
In 2014, Japanese whaling was brought before the International Court of Justice at The Hague. And the ruling of the international court was that it was illegal. And Japan responded by shutting down their operations for one year and then starting it all up again like nothing had ever been said. So we resumed our interventions against it. But one of the reasons I could operate out of Australia and out of New Zealand was because both Australia and New Zealand didn't recognize Japan's right to kill whales in the Southern Ocean. And especially for Australia, because whales were being killed in the Australian. Antarctic territory, which Japan says, well, we don't recognize that. So there's a bit of a dispute between Australia and Japan over that. But some countries just do whatever they want. China, for instance, and Spain, when it comes to overfishing, you know, you can't do anything about it because it gets into the Spanish courts, for example, and they just throw it out for lack of jurisdiction. But again, you know, there's Russian operations, Korean operations. They're all illegal, but they're back for their governments.
- Speaker #1
Well, yeah, I mean, the ocean is big and difficult to... Anyway, this is a place where it's very difficult to apply the law, I guess. You have all these codes and all this stuff. That's a good question, actually. How much is it that people just don't want to let go and don't apply the law? And how much comes from the fact that it's actually too large?
- Speaker #2
Well, there's a lack of economic and political motivation for governments to intervene to uphold the law. The laws are there, but what's in it for us, really? You know, how are we going to gain? If they have something to gain, yes. Say if they're encroaching upon fishing grounds, for instance, which were in the 200-mile limit, yes, they're going to take action. But beyond 200 miles, the ocean is a wild west. People do whatever they want, and they get away with it. And one of the reasons we get away with it is because of that same situation. You know, if they can't arrest them, then how are they going to arrest us? You know, so it's a catch-22 for them also. But again, the pirates get things done, and we go out and intervene where others don't. Toothfish poaching, which is marketed as Chilean sea bass, is not from Chile. It's not a bass, but it's an endangered species, but it's being taken by Australian and Spanish operations. And, you know, nobody did anything about it up until 2015. We would report. report the operations from the Southern Ocean. We report them to Australia and New Zealand, and they say, thank you very much, and did absolutely nothing. And they knew it was illegal. These ships were on the Interpol Purple list, meaning that they were wanted for illegal fishing. So in 2015, I sent two ships after them. And one of them found the notorious fishing vessel, the Thunder, the worst pirate of them all, and began a chase which lasted 110 days, the longest pursuit of a poacher in maritime history. The second vessel that I sent, its job was to confiscate the line that was, the gill net that was dropped by the Thunder. It took us 200 hours to pull that net from the bottom. It was 76 kilometers long and weighed 70 tons. That's how big a net this industrialized fishing net was. We confiscated that net. We turned it over to Interpol per evidence, and then we destroyed it. Then we recycled it into shoes. We worked with Adidas to recycle it into shoes. But the thunder itself was pursued for 110 days, and then the captain sank his own ship. He sank his ship to destroy the evidence, and we boarded that sinking ship, and we got the evidence. And the captain went to prison for three years, and the two officers went to prison for two years. But they didn't go to prison for overfishing. They went to prison for sinking their ship in the waters of Santomi and Princey. And so that was the reason for that. But we got them, and the ship was never paid any insurance on it. The company, a Spanish company, was fined 17 million euros, but they never paid because the Spanish courts just said, we don't have any jurisdiction and threw it out.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, this is where it gets complicated. What are the.... Again, some of your biggest victories and why did it work? And on the country, when did you fail and why? What are the lessons there?
- Speaker #2
Our biggest victory, of course, is driving the Japanese whaling fleet out of the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary. It's called a whale sanctuary and they were fishing there illegally. We drove them out. They're not doing that and they haven't done it now for a number of years. Our second big victory was stopping, undermining the market for Canadian seal products. and I've sent numerous expeditions there. Finally, in 2008, Europe banned all Canadian seal products. Other countries like China and that did banning. So there is no commercial market for seal products. They're still killing seals because they're subsidized by the Canadian government to the tune of $20 million a year. But although they set the quota at 400,000, the kill is only 10% of that because there simply is no market. So that was a major victory. We also helped to end driftnet fishing in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. by interventions and highly publicizing these 100-mile-long drift nets. We confiscated them, we destroyed them, we got it into the international media to do that. And also, we shut down Icelandic whaling. In 1986, I sank half the Icelandic whaling fleet, shut them down for a number of years. When they tried to do it again, we intervened in 2007, shut them down. We intervened in 2019, we shut them down. This summer, within... hours of our arrival in Icelandic waters. The Icelandic government put a temporary ban on whaling until August 31st. And Christian Loftson, who owns a whaling fleet, is trying to resurrect that. He's demanding a four-year permit. And if he gets it, we'll be back there in June of 2024 to once again intercept his vessels. They're killing endangered whales in violation of International Whaling Commission regulation that bans commercial whaling. All commercial whaling is illegal in the world today. But we've made a, here's the difference. When I said, since I started in 1974, I would say 90% of the whaling has been shut down. We're not seeing any whaling anymore from Australia or Chile or Peru. So all whaling has been effectively shut down in international waters and now only exists in the territorial waters of Japan, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland.
- Speaker #1
And some of your failures, you know, when did you fail and what were the reasons?
- Speaker #2
Well, I don't really look at it as a failure. What happens is that these things like, for instance, we started going against the killing of pilot whales in the Barrow Islands in 1983, and we're still fighting it. So I don't look at it as a failure. It's just an ongoing battle. We just keep the pressure on. We never surrender. We never give up. We just keep that pressure on. Okay.
- Speaker #1
thank you sorry about that no look forward this is the magic of live broadcasting now people know that it's actually not live damn it so yeah new new location but uh less noisy but the part about having to move in there and then it's live so no i was i was about to ask you a quick question about what you're doing now because there was recently uh yeah can it come into kind of internal crisis at Sea Shepherd that led to led you to leaving the organization and finding a new one named Captain Paul Watson Foundation. And to be honest, I didn't read much about it and I'm not an insider, but from what I understand, it's a at least in part related to arguments regarding the strategy. And I don't want to go into the details, but what are the learnings there for you? And what are the insights that can be useful for those listening and the activists?
- Speaker #2
Well, it was a hostile takeover. And I think the motivation was, is that as long as we were small, we were able to do what we were doing. And then we had the Whale Wars TV show, which brought in a lot of support and a lot of money. And therefore, a lot of people involved with Sea Shepherd suddenly found themselves with high paying jobs and they were paying themselves a lot of money. And I became what they call the Watson problem. And the reason for the Watson problem was that I insisted that we continue to do what we do in the way that we were doing it. And then this all started in 2019 when I did the campaign to Iceland and that caused a lot of problems. They said, well, we don't want to be perceived that way anymore. You're too controversial. You're too confrontational. And we want to take a different path. We want to go mainstream. And I said, no, I can't support that. That's not what we're all about. This movement is about aggressive nonviolence. That's what we do. And basically, I was maneuvered off of the board of directors in the United States and then forced to leave. In fact, I was told that I either had to accept this new direction or because I was I was an employee. They said, you're an employee, you do what you're told. And I said, no, no, I'm not here because it's a job. I'm here because this is something I've done for 45 years and tend to continue to do it. But I was still with Sea Shepherd Global, so I wasn't too concerned. But in the U.S., what they did was they covertly registered all the trademarks in 75 countries at the cost of about a half a million dollars. And then they went to the global people and said, well, we own you and we're demanding that you dismiss Paul Watson from the board. And they did without even a discussion, without a vote. The only person who disagreed with that was Lamia Salamida, who was the president of Sea Shepherd France. And because she continued to question this, they dismissed her from the board without a vote or discussion. So it's been a very, that was the reason for it. But as soon as I was out of Sea Shepherd, I said, OK, well, we're going to continue to do what we've been doing. So I set up the Captain Paul Watson Foundation. The reason I call it that was because they're going to have a hard time taking that name away from us. from me so um so anyway so that's the reason we did we did we did that but you still you still have your boats or how does it work now they took all the assets they took the boats they took everything but uh i still had a support base and that support base came with me and uh john paul de jory is a long time friend and supporter uh he said uh because we had a boat a sea shepherd and a boat named after him they just scrapped it without even talking to him and so he called me up and he just find another ship and I'll sponsor it, which I did. And a lot of my crew came over with me and a lot of supporters came in contact to me and continue to support me. So we're now working on getting our second ship and we're working closely with Sea Shepherd France, the Sea Shepherd Brazil. But other than that, we're a separate entity and we're now registered in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, Germany, and we're growing. So I think we've come an awful long way in one year. I mean, it took me years and years and years to build up Sea Shepherd. But now I think we can do it much faster with the foundation. And also, here's the thing. People supported what we stood for in the foundation. They do not support what they're doing with Sea Shepherd now. Because Sea Shepherd is not direct action anymore. Sea Shepherd is mainly working with governments, working mainstream, being compromised. In fact, Sea Shepherd Australia is in partnership with Austral Fishing and Marua Dachiro of Japan Fishing Corporations. which is just completely against everything that we've ever stood for. And why are they doing that? Because the CEO of Austral Fisheries told Sea Shepherd Australia, I can get you a tax-exempt status in Australia, which they had been trying to get for a number of years. But if you partner with us, and that's what they did. So basically, they sold everything out. And they sold it out so they can keep their jobs and their job security.
- Speaker #1
And so the approach wouldn't change. The ship is global and the tactics will change and the overall strategy, right?
- Speaker #2
It's already changed. They're not doing anything controversial. They're not doing anything that's going to really rock the boat.
- Speaker #0
And as I always said, you know, my job as a conservationist is to rock the boat and say things that people don't want to hear and do things people don't want to be seen done. You know, we're here to piss people off because people are the problem. And, you know, we've got to get into their face and say, look, this is unacceptable. We're just not going to accept this behavior anymore. Overfishing, pollution, all of these things that are leading to the decline of so many species worldwide. We're not going to accept it. Yeah. We're going to resist. And of course, we have no choice. We have to resist nonviolently because governments have a monopoly on violence. You have to use a proper strategy in order to combat this. So I think aggressive nonviolence is the right strategy because it's not extreme enough that they'll take us out. And yet it gets things done.
- Speaker #1
It's annoying, kind of. It should annoy them.
- Speaker #0
Well, it's not just annoying. It's actually effective. When you shut down whaling operations, when you shut down sealing operations, it is effective.
- Speaker #1
What do you think of protests as tactics? And I want to spend a little bit of, to dwell a bit on this because for some people, it's acceptable to work with the system, with governments or with the private sectors. And you say, no, it just doesn't work because you get compromised at some point. And so can you elaborate a little bit on this, if you have examples and also the tactic of protests?
- Speaker #0
I'm not saying no, it doesn't work. I'm just saying that the strength of an ecosystem is diversity. The strength of a movement is diversity. So if that approach is litigation, education, legislation, direct action, it all points towards the same end. So I support people who do all of those things. But also there's a need for more aggressive approaches. For instance, you know, Extinction Rebellion is considered to be too aggressive. but I think they're right there. I mean, they're expressing what needs to be expressed. And if people disagree with it, that's too bad, really. I mean, I don't really support a lot of the approaches, especially legislation and litigation, but I can see their effectiveness over time. And if that's where people are inclined to go, then by all means, go that way. I support all those approaches.
- Speaker #1
So the big topic of the day is when it comes to making humans, you know, pivot. It's climate change. It's a bit difficult to untangle, but I have a couple of questions related to it as it's about to, it's all about going against, you know, and present it as a cause. So I wrote, actually, interestingly, a couple of days ago, I wrote an article on LinkedIn mentioning Just Stop Oil, which is another, you know, organization. I think it's from the UK. And arguing that, it was too simplistic as a slogan, you know, as we cannot just stop oil, you know. And so fishing and killing the whales is a bit different as the reasons why it's still happening don't really make sense. And also it's illegal. But oil and climate change is truly a systemic issue with ramifications everywhere. Do you have a point of view on how to deal with such a complex topic? I mean, there is no direct direction, you know, direct action that you can really take against such a big issue or is it you?
- Speaker #0
Well, just off oil, they're speaking the truth. I mean, this is the root cause of climate change. Even the oil companies knew that 30, 40 years ago that this was a problem. Realistically, can we get rid of oil or the use of fossil fuels? Not overnight. No, it's not going to happen. I mean, if we look at it. Even alternatives are still destructive. I mean, you got your electric car, but that electric car is going to get its electricity from burning off of oil or coal or whatever sort of things. You know, in fact, our entire civilization is dependent upon fossil fuels. We couldn't even have fertilizer for the so-called Green Revolution. We, you know, we everything is dependent upon it, but we're squandering it and we're squandering it real fast. And within 100 years, it's going to it's going to be gone. What happens when oil is gone is that civilization is going to collapse.
- Speaker #1
But you're saying, how do you address that? Because it looked like to me that it's a very difficult, I don't see where to start. Because you say, okay, we need to get rid of oil for many reasons, because of the way and because of climate change. But at the same time, we depend on it. You know, what's the fight there?
- Speaker #0
Well, again, the root cause of this is, and the anthropocentric attitude that we've adopted, that it's all about us. Um, for example, just last week, uh, you're familiar with Burning Man, right? There was a demonstration, a demonstration by, uh, Extinction Rebellion and, uh, Group of Seven, I think it was. And they did a roadblock to stop people from going into Burning Man. And the reaction from the Burning Man participants was extreme anger. That's right. They called in the police and they, you know, they were actually cheering the police and say, rough them up. And some of them said, shoot the bastards and everything like this. To me, that was probably the ultimate demonstration of what Burning Man is all about. Because here they are, listen to us, this climate change is real. No, we're not going to listen to you. We're going to go in there. And suddenly within two days, they're the victim of climate change. And so they were actually given a warning and that warning came true. And so I thought it was a very legitimate protest to focus the attention of those particular people. Because the people who attend Burning Man acknowledge that climate change is a problem. But it really illustrates the problem that we have everywhere. It always happens somewhere else. The fires in Lahaina, I don't live there. The hurricanes in Florida, I don't live there. The fires in Spain or Greece, I don't live there. So why should I even be concerned until suddenly it hits my community as a community in Burning Man syrup experience? So that's when people get involved. Only when it hits their community. It's only when they're diagnosed with cancer that they suddenly realize, hey, you know, maybe smoking is not that good. That kind of thing. And it's really what I call adaptation to diminishment. And adaptation to diminishment served us well 30,000 years ago when we had to adapt to changing situations. But now what it means is we just accept the diminishment and we move on. We remove a species, a fish species that becomes commercially extinct. We don't even think about it anymore. Orange roughy was a commercial fish in the 1990s. You don't see it anymore because we fished it out. Northern cod fished out, bluefin tuna fishing out. And then we adapt to species that nobody would have even thought of eating back in 1960s, 1970s, turbot or pollock or things like this. Pollock has no taste, but if you put an imitation chemical flavor on it and put some red stripes on it, you can sell it as baked crab. So this is a constant, a constant adaptation to diminishment. And it's all based on the other thing, which I call the economics of extinction. There's money to be made by driving species extinct because as the fish populations are diminished, the price goes up. So scarcity turns into demand, which then turns into higher profits. So a lot of fishing companies are actually making money out of driving species of fish to extinction. And it's all based on the fact that humans are very self-centered, very greedy, very selfish as a species, not just as individuals, but as a species. And, um... This is having its impact. So here's the thing when it comes to fossil fuels. We either solve the problem or we die. The government's approach to this is you either adapt to diminishment or we're going to put you in prison, you know, because we're not going to allow people to protest against the destruction that we're causing. So it's a catch-22 already in places. For instance, Germany, they've been arresting people before they leave the host. before they can go into demonstrations. And having lived through the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, I've seen a steady diminishment of not just the ecosystems that we live in, but also a steady diminishment of human rights and more an increase in more, you know, stricter laws to stop people from actually not only protesting against these things, but even speaking out against it. Yeah.
- Speaker #1
Well, it's also very much happening in France, you know, recently. I don't know if you follow this up. I guess you were informed. Just to have a question related to psychology, I'm curious about your own tipping point. What made you change? How come you ended up doing this? Was this something special, some information, something that happened to you?
- Speaker #0
Well, I've never actually changed. I started doing what I was doing when I was 10 years old. I spent the summer when I was 10 years old swimming with a family of beavers in eastern Canada where I was raised. And the next summer when I went back, I couldn't find the beavers that I had been spending all that time with and found out that trappers had taken them out during the winter and killed them all. And it made me quite angry. So that winter I began to walk trap lines and free animals and destroy the traps. And I've been pretty much doing the same thing ever since for the last 60 years.
- Speaker #1
Okay, so it was the beaver. Your little tipping point and your emotional shock.
- Speaker #0
But I was raised in a fishing village on the east coast of Canada, very, very intimately close to marine creatures. You know, I ran off to sea when I was young, joined the Norwegian Coast Guard. So I had the nautical experience and I put that to work doing marine conservation work.
- Speaker #1
Are there tipping points in a fight? And are they clear, you know, when you start the fight? I guess, you know, when you start the Japanese government with just a few boats, do you foresee that you can win if you reach a certain objective or if you, you know, attack so many boats? How having that idea of tipping points can be strategic to entering into an action?
- Speaker #0
Well, I think the thing is persistence. You just have to keep doing it no matter what. It took us 30 years to end the commercial seal hunting in Canada. It's going to take us 40 years to stop the killing of pilot whales in the Faroe Islands. So you have to be prepared to outlast the opposition in that respect. None of these things are won overnight. So that I think is the secret to it. Just stubbornly be persistent and just keep at it.
- Speaker #1
Okay. If you don't know how long that will last.
- Speaker #0
Well, it could last a lifetime. It could last into the next generation. You have to inspire. You could lose.
- Speaker #1
And well, actually, I would like to stay on the psychology aspect of things. I read that a question that you asked. in interviews for C. Sheber is, are you ready to die serving a well? Did you reflect on why yourself are ready to die for your cause and maybe, you know, how it sets you apart from most people?
- Speaker #0
Well, in an anthropocentric culture, it's perfectly normal to ask young people to risk their life and to die for plagues and oil wells, real estates and religion. I think it's a far more noble thing to risk your life to protect. an endangered species or a threatened or endangered habitat. So I don't see anything wrong with that at all. You know, and I have so many of my crew who are quite willing to do that. In fact, I won't even accept anybody on my crew unless they're willing to say, yes, I'm willing to do that because I need that kind of devotion, that kind of commitment in order to make a difference, to not back down under pressure or threat. We just had two women occupy two Icelandic whaling ships in the last couple of days. And they kept them from going for two days and they confiscated all their water, which forced them to come down. But again, that's a commitment. They were up there for 48 hours, one of them without any water. And they achieved their goal of shutting those whaling boats down for at least 48 hours. And this is the kind of commitment that we look for in our crews.
- Speaker #1
it's all about money because when i listen to you because when you say they i think about what are what are the interests people are doing this is just about money or are there other things in the with the people killing the whales yeah i mean people destroying the the ocean and people are overfishing and destroying the wells and it all comes down to making profit selling more things or are there other things in in They'd come to play.
- Speaker #0
Harshly. In the case of Christian Lofts in Iceland, he's the wealthiest man in Iceland. He's sort of a modern-day Captain Eyjafjallajökull. He loves killing whales. He's obsessed with killing whales. And that, to him, that's his personal motivation. He doesn't need to do it.
- Speaker #1
It's a hobby.
- Speaker #0
He loses $2 million to $3 million every year trying to do this. But this is what he wants to do because he hates environmentalists and he hates whales. I mean, it's as simple as that. I don't know why he hates whales, but he certainly does. And when it comes down to it, you know, I was interviewing a fisherman in Alaska one time, and I said, look, for no other reason, protect the fish so that your children will be part of, have a fishery to be involved in. And his answer to me was astounding. He said, you know, in five years, my mortgage is paid. And after that, I couldn't give a damn. So why does somebody like that have children? Well, it's because it's what you do. We don't give much thought to it. It's just what you do. So we don't really give much thought to the future of our own children in many ways. And because it's sort of what you do. Again, it's that anthropocentric mindset. This is what we do. We created our own God to worship. We created and that God has made us unique and special and everything else. And we're better than everything else. And that's our attitude on that. So it's a human arrogance, really. I call it homo arrogantus. It's what we've become. And so I think that's really the motivation behind it. We're going to do anything we want. Nobody's going to tell us we can't do it.
- Speaker #1
And how do we change that? Can you change?
- Speaker #0
Well, the only way to change it is to change the philosophical mindset from anthropocentrism to biocentrism. The examples are there from indigenous cultures all around the world that actually live a biocentric lifestyle. and understand the true values of biocentrism. But anthropocentrism is very, it's a very difficult, to me, it's a collective mass psychosis. And I got a call from a Fox News reporter named Brett Hugh, and he said, did you say in a talk that worms and bees and trees and whales are more important than people? And I said, yes, I said that. He said, how could you say something so outrageous? And I said, because they're more important than people. And I can tell you why. Because they can live here without us. But we cannot live here without them. We don't live in a world without trees. We don't live in a world without bees. And we don't live in a world without fish or whales. It's as simple as that. They don't need us, but we need them. And ecologically, that makes us much more, that makes it much more important than we are.
- Speaker #1
You've been doing this for over 40 years now?
- Speaker #0
No, 60 years.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, six years since you told the story of it when you were 10. With the experience that you have, would you have done something differently? And can it be an insight for you today or not?
- Speaker #0
I certainly wouldn't have been doing anything else, but I probably, if I had anything that I could do over again, I would probably take a more aggressive stand in some situations that I've been in, because it's hard to measure just how far you can go. in terms of staying within the boundaries of practicality and the law. And in hindsight, you realize you could have got a lot further. But I think that I don't really have any regrets for what I've done. Not only the individual campaigns, which have saved the lives of literally thousands and thousands of sentient creatures, but also because it's been an inspiration to so many people around the world to understand that as an individual, they can make a difference, that they can change the world. And that has been the most important lesson, I think, that all the actions that we've taken over the years has instilled in people is this confidence to understand that they can make a difference.
- Speaker #1
I want to go back to the diagnostic a little bit because we didn't spend much time on this, but what is the state of the ocean right now? And did you see improvements regarding fisheries, well, and other mammal protections? And what are the other issues that we're facing? The state of the ocean. The social system.
- Speaker #0
The fate of the ocean is the ocean is dying. And not only overfishing, but we're using advanced technologies to even be more effective in extracting fish from the ocean. When you spend $100 million to $200 million on one ship, a super trawler, that's going to take a lot of fish to pay the bank loans off. So it's a vicious circle. Invest heavily in the technology, satellites, fish binders, big ships, 100-mile-long drift nets, giant purse-saying nets. gill nets, invest in this, but you need money to invest it. And therefore you have to borrow heavily to get that money, to get that technology, which means you have to catch even more fish in order to pay off those debts. So you have super trawlers out there that are taking more fish in one haul than entire fishing operations in many countries. In just one day, they can take more than say many countries in the world. And they're doing this despite the fact that Governments know that the fishing populations are declining. And because they're, you know, I recently was in Ireland. The Irish fishing fleets, they're allowed to go out one month a year. That's it. Meanwhile, the super trawlers operating 20 miles off their coast, taking everything they want. And because the EU has decided that they can do that. The world is full of fishing operations, legal and illegal. And I'd say about 40% of them are illegal. And so we can't even trace the fish in the markets, in the restaurants. Where did it come from? There's no way to trace it because it's trans-shipped at sea, for example. A good percentage of the fish that's sold in restaurants and markets was caught illegally. And also, it certainly was caught unsustainably. There's no such thing as a sustainable fishery anymore. For instance, toothfish was a good example. Marketed as Chilean sea bass. You know, you catch this fish in the Southern Ocean. freeze it, you bring it back to a port, you put it on airplanes, you send it to New York, you send it to Paris so that they can sell it for, you know, in fancy restaurants. That's not a sustainable fishery. The carbon footprint is enormous. You know, in the fishing industry, we'll say, oh yeah, there's a billion people whose livelihoods depend upon fishing. Yes, that's true. But not industrialized fishing. We're talking about the guy who goes out in the canoe off the coast of Nigeria or the Philippines. Yes, that is a subsistence fishing, but that's not what this is all about. What we're opposed to is highly industrialized mechanized fishing operations like the big giant gill netters, drift netters, purse seiners and the factory ships, the big super trawlers. That's where the diminishment is coming from.
- Speaker #1
Some people say that if we stop overfishing, the ocean could cure despite climate change, meaning that climate change is really not about CO2 emissions only. And is this something that you've looked at?
- Speaker #0
It is actually a solution to climate change. At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, that was what I was saying. If you want to address climate change, all you have to do is nothing. And by that, I mean leave the ocean alone, let it rejuvenate it, let it cure. and repair itself from the damage that we've done. And that will go a long ways towards addressing climate change. We only have to look at the world in World War I and World War II, when the time that the fishing fleets were unable to operate. And in that very short time, the populations began to regenerate quickly. So what I was proposing in 2015 was a moratorium on industrialized heavy mechanized gear fishing. for 75 years to allow the oceans to completely repair themselves from the damage that we've done. And it can happen. That could be. The value of a fish in the ocean, swimming around in the ocean, is far greater than the value of a fish on anybody's plate. Because this is a system which is actually regulating climate change, regulating the distribution of nutrients throughout the ocean. All of these species in the oceans are working in harmony. And the only disruption is human interventions, which are causing this problem. Over the last couple of hundred years, we have lost so many species, and we've even forgotten they were even there. They used to be walrus in the coast of Maine. They used to be belugas, whales in Long Island Sound. The sea mink is extinct. The Atlantic gray whale is extinct. The Newfoundland wolf is extinct. The giant hawk is extinct. And I could go down for a next, you know, a couple of hundred species that have gone extinct. And the sad part, not only have they gone extinct, we've forgotten they were there. We just adapted to that diminishment. They're gone and let's move on to something else. So the world has been much diminished, but we don't realize it because we simply accepted that diminishment.
- Speaker #1
The shifting baseline, right? We don't realize what is appearing because it's too slow in a computer human life. Who is preventing this type of decision to be taken? Is it the big corporations? Is it... Mafia in some way, you know, with the consumer's vote.
- Speaker #0
Well, the responsibility goes right across the board, but I think mainly because governments are owned and controlled by corporations and media is owned and controlled by corporations. That, you know, politics is the art of the possible. That means that no politician is going to do anything that's going to lose him votes. In 1980, I believe it was Prime Minister Joe Clark in Canada who said that. we should be looking at the real price of a gallon of gas. And what he meant by the real price is that, you know, we're subsidizing this. The government is subsidizing it. He said, let's cut the subsidies. Whoa, six months later, he was no longer prime minister. You come up with a solution. You come up with a solution that's going to work. And the corporate, the corporations are saying, no, no, no, no, that's going to happen. I mean, we pass a bill in California to ban plastic bags, single-use plastic bags. The petroleum companies, the plastic bag companies are on it right in the moment, spending, you know, tens of millions of dollars to lobby to reverse it, that kind of thing. So it's been really, really difficult to try and to get anything done through government. Usually with governments, it's a case of solving the problem too little, too late.
- Speaker #1
What gives you hope and, you know, what scares you the most for the next 10 years?
- Speaker #0
Well, I don't actually have hope because it's never been something that's important to me. I learned a very good lesson in 1973. I was a volunteer medic for the American Indian movement during the occupation of Wounded Knee. We were surrounded and being shot at. Forty-six people wounded, two were killed. And I went to Russell Means, the leader of the American Indian movement, and I said, look, we don't have any hope of winning here. The odds are against us and we're not going to win. Sorry, my son is low enough. But we're not going to win here. So what are we doing here? And he looked at me and he said, we're not here because we're concerned about winning or losing. We're not concerned. We're not concerned about the odds against us. We're here because this is the right place to be, the right thing to do in the right time to do it. Don't worry about the future. All your power lies in the present. That's where you can do anything. And the present defines the future. So I just concentrate on what I can do now, today, in the present. And hopefully, hopefully that will define what the future will be.
- Speaker #1
What are we missing here? What do you want to talk about that is important to you? you know, that's not going through enough.
- Speaker #0
I think that in addition to looking at the world from a biocentric point of view, it's also good to understand just what this planet is. And I just recently wrote a children's book about it called We Are the Ocean. You know, we call this planet Earth, but it's really the planet ocean. And what that means is that it's water. It's water in continuous circulation. Sometimes it's in the sea and sometimes in ice, sometimes underground. And sometimes in the atmosphere, and sometimes it's in the cells of every plant and animal on the planet. Water continuously moving through those mediums. The water in your body right now is once probably in a bird or in an insect or in a plant, or once underground or in ice. That water, it's that continuous movement of water. That is the ocean. We are the ocean. So we're all, everything is connected by that one element of water. Everything is connected there. And, uh... Therefore, I think it really, we should have a responsibility to understand that what we do in the atmosphere impacts what's in the sea. What we do in the sea impacts what's on land and impacts what's in our bodies and everything. It's all connected. And we need to look at it as a unified sort of, in a unified sort of way that this is a whole that we're part of and not independent of.
- Speaker #1
Do you have a message that could be useful or practical for those listening to us?
- Speaker #0
In what particular way?
- Speaker #1
In what I'm trying to do more and more now is to, it's a lot of concepts. It's a lot of ideas. But I feel that all the people that are listening to it feel like, okay, well, what can I do?
- Speaker #0
I think that what people can do is simply to find out what you're passionate about and then use your abilities, your skills to act on that passion. And through the virtues of courage and imagination and passion, we can change the world. We've seen it so many times. We can make the impossible become possible. In 1972, the very idea that Nelson Mandela would become president of South Africa was unthinkable and impossible. And yet the impossible became possible. So that's what I always strive for, is to look for the impossible solutions to impossible problems.
- Speaker #1
Last question. Do you have two books or two pieces of art or experiences that one should spend time with or do? in their life, according to you?
- Speaker #0
I think one of the most powerful books I ever read was Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat, which documents 500 years of what we've done on the Northern Atlantic Ocean and that. But again, there's a lot of people who write on a lot of subjects and everything like that. But, you know, I've written books on climate change. I've written books on history. I've written children's books. And of course, I've drawn along. on a lot of experiences from a lot of people in doing that. But so overall, I just, I think the best thing to do is to look at the world in a different way, which is the biocentric point of view. Okay.
- Speaker #1
Well, thanks so much for your time and for your insights, Gabriel Watson.
- Speaker #0
Thank you. Thank you for putting up with the noise. I got a dog, I got a baby, I got all kinds of things here.
- Speaker #1
It's okay. You're not at home, right?
- Speaker #0
I am at home.
- Speaker #1
You are at home in Paris?
- Speaker #0
Yes.
- Speaker #1
Okay, you have your place. I thought you were traveling in a hotel or something. Anyway, it's good. I think people will appreciate it and have a good time there.
- Speaker #0
All right. Thank you.
- Speaker #1
Thank you so much.
