Blowing the Whistle

An Eco-Warrior's Release from Prison

It didn’t grab headlines, but on Friday a smiling, white-bearded Canadian-American was cheered by supporters as he wheeled his luggage through an airport terminal in Paris, while armed police looked on.

His name was Paul Watson, and he’d just been released from a high-security prison in Greenland where he’d been incarcerated since July. He’d been arrested as his 32-strong crew prepared to leave the harbor and intercept a Japanese “mothership” on its way to kill whales. But Japan wanted Watson extradited to stand trial for an alleged previous offense, and this extradition came within days of happening. Instead, the government of Denmark, which has jurisdiction over its autonomous Greenland territory, rejected Japan’s request - and set Watson free.

“One way or another, we are going to end whaling worldwide,” Watson told the media and several hundred supporters greeting him in central Paris, where he was rejoining his wife and two small children for the holidays. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, had been among those calling for his release, as had conservation activists like Britain’s Jane Goodall and other prominent individuals including businessman Richard Branson, actor Pierce Brosnan, and filmmaker James Cameron. Brazil’s president Lula da Silva wrote to Watson in jail.

Watson has been labeled a trespasser, a protester, even a terrorist. He identifies himself, correctly, as an enforcer of international treaties on whaling and animal welfare. The United States had outlawed commercial whaling in 1971, and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned the practice in 1986. But using a loophole in the regulation, Japan continued its so-called “scientific whaling.” In 2019, it withdrew from the IWC altogether and resumed all-out commercial whaling in its territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones.

Then this past May, Japan expanded again by launching a whaling mothership and adding large fin whales to their target list. After being hunted almost to extinction by industrial whalers in the 20th century, fin whales (the world’s second largest animal) have been making a comeback in Antarctica’s Southern Ocean - right where the Japanese now plan to resume killing them this winter. They’d be ignoring a prohibiting order issued a decade ago by the UN’s International Court of Justice. But they won’t be able to ignore a visit from Paul Watson. "If Japan intends to return to the Southern Ocean, we will be there," he told the press in Paris. "We are not protesting Japanese whaling. We are simply requesting they obey the law."

However, Japan isn’t alone in its carnage. Some years ago, the Norwegian government filed an “objection”: to the IWC whaling ban and, in 2023, hunters from Norway killed more than 500 minke whales. Many of those were pregnant females, and much of the meat ends up in dog food. Tourists are reportedly offered whale meat as a “taste of Norway,” and cruise ships promote this to passengers on shore visits.

Iceland also took out a “reservation” against the IWC, and self-allocated a quota of 128 fin whales last summer. This December, Iceland’s government granted five-year whaling licenses to two companies. Altogether, those three countries kill more than a thousand whales a year for their meat, oil, blubber and cartilage.

Watson avows that this barbarism finally needs to stop. It’s been more than half-a-century since he left Vancouver, ran away to sea, and ended up experiencing a life-changing vision on the Lakota Sioux reservation in 1973. Guided by two medicine men, including the grandson of the legendary Black Elk, he “saw a buffalo standing on a ridge. It began to speak to me. And as it told me that I must protect the buffalo of the sea, an arrow came and struck it in the back. Attached to the arrow was a cord, symbolic of a harpoon.”

Watson went on to join Greenpeace and then found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977. Since that time, he has become the planet’s most renowned - and effective - protector of our majestic marine species. In 2022, he resigned from Sea Shepherd USA, after its board decided to convert their fleet into less controversial research vessels. Watson remained a director of Sea Shepherd Global, and co-founded the Captain Paul Watson Foundation to keep the focus on direct action.

“Aggressive non-violence,” Watson calls it. That includes having rammed or even sunk a dozen or more illegal whaling vessels. In the course of this, no one has ever been harmed. But for his actions, Watson has been jailed several times over the years, once almost killed by Norwegian whalers’ gunfire, and been hogtied and dragged across the ice by Canadian sealers. At the same time, the reality TV series “Whale Wars” on the Animal Planet channel followed his crew out to confront the perpetrators and reached millions between 2008 and 2015.

Now while Watson’s latest Navy, “Neptune’s Pirates,” takes on the Japanese and Icelandic whalers, a Sea Shepherd ship will also return to the Southern Ocean in 2025 to track and shadow a supertrawler fleet that’s decimating the krill fishery - primary food source for the region’s baleen whales, penguins, seals and seabirds. “The krill are netted to produce Omega-3 health supplements, for which alternatives exist, and a fish feed additive that turns the flesh of farmed salmon pink for aesthetic reasons.” The Sea Shepherds will bring along a team of scientists collecting data to bolster the creation of an Antarctic Peninsula Marine Protected Area.

Back in the beginning, a remarkable affirmation occurred in 1981 while the earlier incarnation of Sea Shepherds went in pursuit of a Soviet destroyer that was killing gray whales for use as feed in commercial fur farms. Ordered to stop their engines and prepare for boarding, Paul Watson radioed back; “Stop killing whales!” Within a few minutes, suddenly a cheer rang out from his crew. Out of the blue, a gray whale had surfaced right between the two ships - and wouldn’t budge. The Russian destroyer backed off, and simply followed Watson’s out of the Siberian waters.

As Watson told me when we first met a few years after that: “Putting my life on the line is not really a big deal when you consider that 100 million people in this century have died in wars over real estate, and they’ve defended that action in the name of some abstract thing called patriotism. So I don’t think it’s unrealistic to expect people to risk themselves to protect a species of animals that took 100 million years to evolve. In my opinion, it’s a much more noble cause.”

He’d had his 74th birthday while incarcerated in Greenland and, facing a prospective 15-year prison sentence if extradited to Japan, said he doubted he’d ever return home. “Japan was putting a lot of economic pressure on Denmark,” he told The Guardian. “Fortunately, Denmark has got a good record on human rights.”

Now this remarkable eco-warrior is once again preparing for battle, and he needs all the support that can be mustered.

To learn about the new Captain Paul Watson Foundation, and ways to volunteer, click here

To learn more about Sea Shepherd Global, go to their website here.

To check out Paul Watson’s books, click the Amazon link here.

To read more about Paul Watson in my book Eye of the Whale, click the Amazon link here.