A Maritime Robin Hood

The worst grade i ever got in a literature class was on a paper I wrote about “Moby Dick.” The teacher’s spin on the book was that it concerned a valiant man battling against inexorable and indifferent forces that had mutilated both his leg and his soul.

Me, I was rooting for the whale.

Some years later, I met Paul Watson. He, too, is rooting for the whale. And while he may be an inexorable force, he is not indifferent, and no one who encounters him is indifferent to him. Watson is either the most meddlesome camera-ham on the high seas or the boldest international environmental warrior of them all.

He captains the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s fleet. What was once just one old ship is now a bigger navy, submarine included, than many countries in the U.N. command. With his fleet, and its frequent escort of the world’s press, Watson, 47, plies the seven seas and the myriad TV networks to save marine life--from the dwindling Atlantic cod, the wheat of the oceans, to those Melvillainous whales and the heart-tearingly doe-eyed baby harp seals that some Canadians still insist they must slaughter as a national birthright.

In the society’s service, Watson has scuttled nine illegal whaling ships and hounded drift-netters and poachers with zest and ferocity, a maritime Robin Hood taking from humans the unequal weapons of their trade in sea creatures. He has been imprisoned under the law, beaten up outside of it. In some waters of the world, there is a handsome price on his prematurely white head--all merit badges, as far as he is concerned.

Watson’s strongest weapon is neither his armada nor his legions of loyalists. It is knowing that the electronic media are to this century what military power was to the last, and in his cause, he is a Napoleon of tactics.

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The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society that Watson founded 20 years ago is anchored in Marina del Rey, having moved south from Watson’s native Canada. So, now, has he. He took the stage as a guest of honor at the Ark Trust’s annual Genesis Awards gala in Beverly Hills in March and renounced his Canadian citizenship to protest the hunting of young seals--this time, he says, for their penises, ingredients for Asian aphrodisiacs. (Watson has tried to find lucrative alternatives to seal-killing, like brushing their coats for downy hair that is warmer and more valuable than eiderdown, but when he found a buyer for the hair and proposed combing instead of clubbing, the sealers, he says, mocked it as an unmanly livelihood.)

Canada can’t be weeping over his defection, and Watson, who holds up the Boston Tea Party as an example of a lesser lawlessness serving a greater cause, in some ways is more American than Canadian anyway--evidence his puckish delight in outfoxing and embarrassing authorities from Canada to the Cape of Good Hope.

The enviro/animal movement tends to go schismatic over little disputes, spalling into smaller groups whose numbers dilute the message. Watson’s 1977 departure from Greenpeace--or expulsion, depending on whom you listen to--was a spectacular split: their nonviolent engagement versus his headlong confrontation.

The most enduring image of Watson is out on the bloody Canadian ice floes, shielding baby harp seals from fur hunters who club them to death by the thousands. But he is not a city boy, and as such, he is not a sentimentalist. He knows it helps that people croon over little seals and big whales, but somebody’s got to stand up for the plankton, too, dammit.

“I was criticized in Canada--’Oh, you’re only involved with cute seals and whales to get money from the public.’ But when we do fish campaigns, you”--meaning me, the one with the notebook--”don’t report them. The problem is with the media, not our activities. We concentrate on species and habitat. Codfish certainly aren’t cute. [But] we’ve spent more energy on fish than on almost anything else.”

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Fewer than one in 10 Westerners holds membership in the animal welfare/conservation camp, yet their voices are heard far beyond those numbers for a constituency with no voice of its own. Ten, 20 years ago, no New York Times front page would have carried a headline such as: “Free Trade Wins, Sea Turtles Lose.”

“Overall awareness is much greater. If you machine-gunned orcas off Washington state in the 1960s, no one blinked. Now . . . .” Watson trails off, meaning now, the visual is political, at least as long as the sound bite lasts and the camera stays focused. “I think ethically our views of animals and even plants, forests, has advanced tremendously. Unfortunately, the economic realm operates independently of people’s ethics. We live in a sort of double-think mentality; we believe in something, act contrary to that and feel comfortable in doing so.”

We slap a save-the-dolphins sticker on the Volvo but buy a can of cheap foreign tuna that probably killed more dolphins than stickers will ever save.

Then, what the warnings said would happen, happens. For want of a tree a species is lost, for want of a species a habitat is lost, for want of a habitat an ecosystem is lost. The saddest thing about being a conservationist, Watson says, is that the only satisfaction you get is “I told you so.”