Captain Paul Watson was born in Toronto on December 2, 1950. Through his early environmental work with the Sierra Club, he became a founding member of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, which opposed underground nuclear weapons testing in Alaska. This group, including Watson, would go on to found Greenpeace in 1971. In a defining moment for his subsequent career, Watson and a crew of Greenpeace activists confronted the Soviet whaling fleet off the coast of California during their 1975 anti-whaling campaign. Watson and Bob Hunter, aboard a small Zodiac, placed themselves physically between the harpooners and the pod of whales. Watson attributes his lifelong devotion to the defense of marine life to the moment he shared with one of the dying whales that day: a gaze of mutual understanding, sadness, and incredible rage, as the whale’s pod was massacred and the crew failed to save them.
He split with Greenpeace over philosophical differences: Greenpeace maintained ‘bearing witness’ was the only safe and ethical way to defend wildlife, while Watson believed it was a moral necessity to directly intervene. After founding Sea Shepherd in 1977, Watson led countless direct action confrontations with illegal poachers of sea life, including whales, sharks, sea turtles, seals, and at-risk fish populations. He has been shot, beaten, arrested, and imprisoned. He has evaded capture while sailing around the globe and back again, and the accusations against him are as many as they are often false. He is perhaps best known for the reality television show Whale Wars (2007-2015). Watson and his crew aboard the MY Steve Irwin confronted ships engaged in illegal whaling activities in the Southern Ocean in shaky footage cut with massive collisions, Animal Planet ad breaks, and dramatic musical swells. The stated purpose of the series was to draw global attention to the slaughter of sea life. Watson, in a role resembling a vigilante, eco-conscious Blackbeard, garnered massive audiences through sheer theatrics, and his crew saved many thousands of whales while doing so.
Watson is one of the most single-minded and tireless environmental activists in the diverse movement’s history. We spoke over Zoom in December 2025, Watson appearing in the wood-paneled cabin of an undisclosed ship in a classified location, replete with portholes, a green-feather headdress on the wall, and delicately carved, whale-shaped bookends. We discussed his philosophy toward activism, his strategies for direct-action intervention, and his recent attendance of the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP30. I reached out to Captain Watson for Fear because he has faced grave danger with alarming regularity over the long span of his career, seemingly without regard to self preservation, and he’s done it with a rare and resolute dedication to his cause.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
SAWYER T. CONNALLY: What do you think is the role of fear in your work?
PAUL WATSON: Well, I guess it helps to be fearless.
I’m really not afraid of anything. It goes back to my childhood. So you can’t really call it courage. To be courageous, you have to be able to be afraid and surmount your fear. I would say that it’s just fearlessness, but it’s something that’s been with me all my life. I’m not capable of feeling that kind of trepidation, or whatever it is.
STC: What early experiences influenced you to have that kind of fearlessness?
PW: When I was about 10 years old, we were playing down in the harbor. I lived on the Passamaquoddy Bay, which has the highest tides in the world. I was tied to the mast of a sunken boat and the kids I was playing with forgot about me. The tide was beginning to rise. I was watching the water rise, up to my ankles, up to my knees, up to my waist, and it kept coming. At a certain point, I realized that I was going to drown, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I sort of accepted that, because I realized I was going to die. But I heard some teenage boys outside, and I called out to them, and they came down. The water was about up to the upper level of my chest at the time, but they rescued me, so I didn’t die. But because I had accepted that I was going to, it stayed with me for the rest of my life.
STC: I remember a clip in Leslie Chilcott's documentary Watson, where a ranger says that your reputation preceded you at Cocos Island, Costa Rica, where you were defending hammerhead shark populations for a time. Your ship was thought by poachers to be dangerous, and so they would avoid the area. Is this kind of fearsome reputation useful for you and your work, and is it something you try to cultivate?
PW: Well, yes. Back in 1985 I had two Tibetan monks approach my ship in Seattle, and they gave me this little colorful little statue. It was a dragon with a horse’s head and wings. They asked me to put it up on the mast, and they said it would protect me. I don’t really believe in these sorts of things, but if a couple of Tibetan monks ask you to do it, why not? So I put it up on the mast, and I didn’t think anything of it until about three years later, when I had the opportunity to meet with and speak with the Dalai Lama. I showed him a picture and I discovered he sent it to me, which was amazing. So I said, ‘Okay, well, what is it?’ And he said, ‘It’s called a Hayagriva. It’s the compassionate aspect of the wrath of the Buddha. You never want to hurt anybody, but sometimes when they cannot see enlightenment, scare the hell out of them until they do.’
I think the reason he sent that to me is that he understood the philosophy that I developed in 1977 of aggressive non-violence: to aggressively intervene without causing injury. It’s been a very successful strategy for 50 years. We’ve intervened in hundreds of illegal operations without causing a single injury. We’ve never been convicted of a crime, never lost a civil lawsuit.
I also got a letter of support from the Dalai Lama going forward. Didn’t help me much for dealings with China, but that’s par for the course.
STC: A staggering number of environmentalists are targeted with political violence. According to Global Witness, nearly 200 were killed last year alone. You’ve been met with hostility many, many times—whether that’s in ship-on-ship confrontations at sea with whaling vessels, or even in physical altercations with enraged groups of commercial seal hunters. How do you know when you’re going into these situations if you’re taking on too much risk? How do you distinguish between courage and recklessness in your work?
PW: You have to have a goal, and to achieve that goal, you have a certain set of tactics. You have to figure out what the possible consequences are and see if those consequences are acceptable and if the risk is worth the objective. But then you have to proceed without concern for the consequences, taking all the precautions that you can.
In 1979, I hunted down a pirate whaling vessel called the Sierra, and there were 20 of us on board. I chased it into a northern Portuguese port, Leixões. I couldn’t ram the vessel, which I tended to do at sea, because it was too dangerous, and I couldn’t guarantee I wouldn’t hurt anybody. So we went in along the dockside in the harbor, where the Sierra was sitting, ready to leave again. I said to my crew, ‘I’m going out there right now and I’m going to ram that vessel. I can’t say you’re not going to get hurt, but I can certainly guarantee you’re going to go to prison for what we’re going to do. We’re going to go out there and we're going to disable that vessel and end its career. I’ll give you 10 minutes to decide whether you want to be involved or not. If you don’t, then get your bags and get out on the dock, because in 10 minutes I’m leaving.’
Ten minutes later, 17 out of 20 members of my crew were on the dock. Fortunately, the two that stayed with me were my chief engineer and my second engineer, Peter Woof from Australia, and Jerry Duran from Hawaii. We went out and we rammed the vessel twice, disabled it, and forced it into dockside with significant damage. Then we were pursued by the Portuguese Navy, and I made the mistake of submitting to them. I shouldn’t have. I learned later how to deal with navies, but I surrendered to them. We went back in, and I was brought before the port captain in Leixões and charged with gross criminal negligence. I said, ‘There wasn’t anything negligent about what we did, because I hit that ship exactly where I intended to hit. It was very deliberate. It wasn’t negligent.’ And the port Captain sort of laughed, and he said, ‘Well, I don’t know who owns that ship, and until I do, you’re free to go.’ As I was leaving, one of my crew members said, ‘Well, if I knew you were going to get away with it, I would have been there.’ And I said, ‘Well, sometimes you have got to do these things knowing there’s no way out. You just have to take the chance.’
STC: Several governments have used fear as a tactic against your organizations. The word eco-terrorism has often been applied to your work. You yourself have been labeled a terrorist by Japan and various others. You were also subject to an Interpol Red Notice, controversially, for I believe over a decade. Last year you spent several months detained by Danish authorities which amounted to nothing, no extradition and dropped charges. How do you think nations and organizations which oppose your work attempt to dissuade you or to change your image on the public stage?
PW: I’m not an eco-terrorist. I’ve never worked for Monsanto or for Chevron—those are the eco-terrorist organizations. But they control the media, and therefore they control the narrative, so they’re going to call anybody who disagrees with them names.
I don’t protest anything. I never have protested anything. I intervene against illegal activities. These people that I oppose are criminals. Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean is a criminal enterprise. It’s in violation of numerous regulations. It’s not my opinion. It’s condemned by the International Court of Justice in the Hague. They are a criminal operation. But they’re a powerful nation, so they get to say what’s right and what’s wrong. The Interpol Red Notice was issued against me in 2012—the Interpol Red Notice that was set up for serial killers, war criminals, and major drug traffickers. I’m the only person in history to be put on that list for conspiracy to obstruct business and conspiracy to trespass. I don’t even know what conspiracy to trespass is, but anyway, those were the charges. In July of this year, Interpol finally dismissed the charges and said they were politically motivated. That’s what I’ve been saying for 12 years. But it took the arrest in Greenland in order to get the kind of attention that was required to illustrate that. And the backlash against Japan over my arrest in Greenland was significant. I got the support of President Macron of France, Prime Minister Barnier of France, President Lula da Silva of Brazil, the president of French Polynesia, the Environment Minister Panama and Pope Francis, as well as about a million people signing petitions. They had huge portraits of me hanging in front of every city hall in France. So the Greenland court made the decision to extradite, but the next day, the Danish Attorney General made the political decision to release me because there was just too much backlash. And for what? I didn’t kill anybody, I didn’t damage anything, I didn’t steal anything. It was all much ado about nothing.
There were actually two red notices. Costa Rica brought one out against me at the behest of Japan. That was 10 years after I had been cleared of all charges for a confrontation with a Costa Rican shark-finning vessel in Guatemalan waters. That was dismissed in 2017 with a change of government, and I got a call from the Minister of the Environment to apologize. But the Costa Rican judge who refused to dismiss it back in 2015 was arrested and extradited to the United States for drug trafficking this year, which shows you how connected the shark finning is with the drug trade. So these are the kind of criminal operations I’m dealing with all the time.
I’m the only person in history to have been on the Interpol Red Notice at the same time I was working with Interpol, because we were working to apprehend toothfish poaching vessels off the coast of Africa in the Southern Ocean. We were working with them, delivering evidence to them, and at the same time I’m on their Red Notice.
STC: The way you’ve talked about your detainment by Denmark is, I think, representative of an attitude you’ve had for your entire career. Whatever happens to you yourself, you tend to find a way to make it productive for your cause. You spent nearly a year in jail, but it drummed up this media attention, not only about you but about their whaling activities. So how do you reframe these things in your own mind, to remember what you’re doing it for, and make that the priority?
PW: Every situation provides an opportunity. You just have to take advantage of that opportunity. When I was arrested in Greenland, it was a perfect opportunity to direct all that attention towards Japanese whaling, and with the added benefit of it, attracting attention to the killing of pilot whales and dolphins in the Danish Faroe Islands. When I was arrested, 12 Copenhagen police officers flew all the way to Greenland to arrest me, a very hostile bunch. I thought that was a bit of an overkill. When we got into court, I found out why. I’m described by the Japanese in court as an armed and extremely dangerous eco-terrorist. I mean, there’s nothing to validate that accusation, it’s just total propaganda. I’ve never hurt any of them. I’ve been shot by them, but I’ve never caused a single injury to anybody. But they can say whatever they want.
I am officially a pirate, though, because back in 2012 Justice Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals called me a pirate. He didn’t charge me with piracy, nor did he convict me of anything, but he said, ‘Without a doubt, you are a pirate.’ Which I actually was quite flattered by: to be a legitimate, recognized pirate in the 21st Century is, I think, pretty good. Back in 1989, when they started calling me pirate and eco-terrorist, I said, ‘Okay, if you want to call me a pirate, I’ll be a pirate. So we’ll get our own pirate flag and put it up there.’ And it’s very intimidating, because I would show up sometimes and the poachers would run right away. Just put that flag up and they would run. I had a cannon on board. We didn’t fire anything—it just made a lot of noise. Come in and fire the cannon and it scares the hell out of them, and they all run.
The reason I was dismissed from Greenpeace in 1977: I was the campaign leader on the seal campaign, and a sealer was about to kill a baby seal. I ran forward and snatched the club out of his hand and threw it into the water. I picked up the seal and took it to safety. And Greenpeace, which is based on the philosophy of bearing witness, a very Quaker sort of thing, accused me of theft and vandalism—that I stole the man's property and destroyed it. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve rescued the seal. That's what I was there for.’ If a poacher is about to shoot an elephant and you knock the rifle out of his hand and you save the elephant, and you don’t hurt the poacher, that is aggressive non-violence, and it’s a very effective tactic.
In 2011, I was invited by the FBI to give a talk. They actually paid me to come and give a lecture in Quantico. After the lecture, one of the FBI agents said, ‘Well, you know, you’re walking a pretty thin line when it comes to the law.’ And I said, ‘Does it really matter how thin that line is, as long as you don’t cross it?’ We don’t cross that line. We operate within the boundaries of the law and the boundaries of practicality. And then he actually said something really funny. He said, ‘Yeah, but you’re training eco-terrorists. Rod Coronado, he’s an eco-terrorist.’ I said, ‘Rod Coronado liberated some mink from a mink farm. If that’s your view of what an eco-terrorist is, I don’t know, it’s not mine. Besides, he did that five years after he was on my crew, so I’m not responsible for it.’ And he said, ‘Well, you trained him. You’re responsible.’ I couldn’t resist. I said, ‘Well, I got some names for you: Timothy McVeigh, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Osama bin Laden. You trained them.’
STC: In the past decade or so, we often hear about climate anxiety, this repressed fear that we're helpless to an impending collapse. Do you find that kind of anxiety useful? And do you think it's a good sign that more people are feeling this way?
PW: It scares a lot of people, I suppose, but there’s not an impending collapse—it’s going to happen. It’s unfortunate, because nobody’s doing anything to mitigate it at all, and the way that most people deal with it is just to deny it and just pretend it isn’t happening. And certainly there’s not going to be any solution on the political level, because where courage is really lacking is with political leadership. And that’s just the nature of politics. No politician is going to make a courageous decision because it’s pretty much political suicide, so they’re not going to do it.
I’ve gone to a couple of the climate change conferences, COP21 and COP30, and nothing’s going to be done there. It’s all talk. In fact, at COP30 I went through the blue zone, and all I saw were countries looking for investments in technology. I didn’t really see any real solutions being offered. At the Japanese pavilion, they had three guards because they knew I was going to show up. The only pavilion that had guards was the Japanese one, and their slogan on the front was ‘Solutions for the World.’ And I said, ‘Well, here’s one solution for you, stop whaling.’ That’s a good climate change solution. No, what you’re doing is spending your time trying to find technology to make fossil fuels more efficient, that’s your solution. But they don’t really want solutions.
I don’t think it’s possible to actually solve problems in nature or threats to the biosphere with an anthropocentric attitude. We have to approach it from a biocentric point of view. And that comes through the understanding, what indigenous people really understand, that we have to learn to live in harmony with all other species on this planet, and we have to live in accordance with the three basic laws of ecology: diversity, interdependence, and finite resources. And if we don’t, we’re simply not going to survive. And am I concerned about that? People say, ‘We’ve got to save the planet’ No, we don’t have to save the planet, the planet will do just fine. It has survived five major extinction events, and it’ll survive us. And what every major extinction event has in common is that it takes 18 to 20 million years for a full recovery. So in 18 to 20 million years, no matter what we do, it’s going to be a beautiful planet here. It’s up to some future evolved species to deal with that mess, and hopefully they won’t make the same mistakes. But I think the major problem with humanity is anthropocentrism, this idea that we’re number one. Every single religion is anthropocentric, claiming that we’re the chosen people of God or that everything was made just for us. It’s really a form of collective mass psychosis, and it’s irrational. It makes absolutely no sense at all.
Where we can learn to live with nature is through indigenous people and how they understand what’s going on. I noticed at COP30 there were 650 Blue Zone passes for indigenous people, but 1600 Blue Zone passes for fossil fuel executives. And those indigenous people were not really allowed into the negotiating rooms. They weren’t part of the process. They’re there primarily for how it looked. It was to make it look like it was actually accomplishing something.
The only real thing of significance that happened at COP30 is when 2000 indigenous people broke down the barriers of the Blue Zone to demand entry. But other than that, nothing was accomplished. I just wrote an article called “The Complete and Utter Collapse of COP30.”
STC: What specific work have you done with indigenous peoples? And what kind of insights have you come away with from these interactions?
PW: I was a volunteer medic for the American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee back in 1973. I was working with Russell Means and Dennis Bank during that occupation. I learned a lot of valuable lessons. I was really quite young. I think I was 22 when that happened. I remember going up to Russell Means and saying, ‘We don’t have any hope of winning here. We’re surrounded by about 2000 federal agents, and they’re shooting 20,000 rounds a night into the village, they wounded 46 and they killed two.’ I said, practically, ‘Well, why are we here? It doesn’t make any sense for us to continue to hold out.’ And that’s when he told me something that stayed with me for the rest of my life. He said, ‘Well, we’re not concerned about the odds against us, and we’re not concerned about winning or losing. We’re here because it’s the right place to be, the right thing to do, and the right time to do it.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about the future. You have no power over the future, none at all. But you have absolute power over the present. What you do in the present will define what the future will be.’
I just turned 75 this week, and looking back, there’s been a lot of change for good, a lot of things have changed. It’s a different world. In many ways, it’s a lot safer environmentally. It’s a lot safer health-wise, it’s a lot safer in many ways. But at the same time, there’s many, many more of us now, so that is where the law of finite resources comes into effect. In my lifetime, they’ve eliminated smoking in public places, on airplanes. They’ve eliminated dumping pollutants into the rivers. Strangely enough, probably the most progressive president we had during my lifetime was Richard Nixon, because he gave us a Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, ended the Vietnam War. I didn’t support him at the time, but looking back, I’m saying, ‘Well, that was a lot. That was the only thing significant that’s actually happened in the last few generations.’ But now we have an administration that’s trying to overturn all of those things, with the exploitation of wilderness areas and endangered animals and everything.
But that’s going to happen. Because as human populations increase, the demand on resources is going to increase, and it’s going to lead to a steady diminishment of resources, and that is going to translate into activism on the part of people who feel frustrated and powerless in the face of of this, and that's going to result in more repressive laws. 20 years ago, I said there will be much more repressive laws. The things we did in the 70s and the 80s, we cannot do today, because they would have just blown us out of the water if we did this stuff today. I blockaded St John's harbor for two weeks. Kept every sealing ship from coming out. That would not be tolerated today, you know. So we always, constantly have to evolve our tactics to work within the culture that we’re in, both the culture of law and also the culture of media. It’s a never ending process.
STC: To your point, I think we’re a long way away from the idea that maybe if you present the public with the right information, policy and law will surely go the rest of the way. I think about something like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, and it seems like the same reaction against pollutants would not happen now, even though it feels like we're more aware on average than ever of issues like species extinction, loss of habitats, and pollution. I think you could pretty easily trace the IWC’s 1986 moratorium on commercial whaling to the early campaigns you did with Greenpeace, beginning in ’75, so what do you think has changed since then? And do you still have faith in the force of public opinion?
PW: I lived at the same time that Rachel Carson wrote her book. And what we had in common then is that was the most materially wealthy, freest society in human history. It never happened before. It’ll never come again, because we simply don’t have the resources to duplicate it. I was born into a world of three billion people. Now there’s over eight billion people, and it’s growing. The resources have diminished. So what happens is, when one species like ourselves begins to diminish diversity and interdependence, that leads to ecological collapse, and that’s happening right now. Since I’ve been born the diminishment of, say, wild creatures and wilderness ecosystems has diminished incredibly. There’s only 4% of the biomass of mammals now that are wild. 96% are humans and our domestic animals. We’ve created a world so out of balance that chickens now eat more fish than all the seabirds in the ocean. Pigs are eating more fish than all the sharks in the ocean. We’re wiping out the krill, stealing it from the mouths of whales and penguins, to feed domesticated salmon on salmon farms. It’s a world out of balance, and indigenous people understand that. The Yanomami describe modern humans as the termite people, you know, constantly gobbling up all of the resources.
STC: What does effective intervention look like to you in 2025 or 2026? I know you’re starting a new campaign with the Paul Watson Foundation, Krill Wars. Could you tell me about that and about what your tactics are going to be?
PW: My primary concern is that we now have the High Seas Treaty of protection of biodiversity beyond national jurisdictions. It’s a piece of paper. It doesn’t mean anything, so we have to make it mean something. We’ll intervene against the krill fishery, and hopefully we’ll be charged, whether civilly or criminally, it doesn’t matter. That’ll give us the opportunity to utilize the High Seas Treaty in court and set a precedent, hopefully. So that’s the primary motivation here. We’re not going to physically go shut down two giant ships like that, but we can confront them, we can stop them, we can block them, and we can cause a lot of inconvenience. But mostly we want to set a precedent.
To give you an example: in 1993 I chased the Spanish drag trawlers off of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. I was charged by Canada with three counts of criminal mischief for doing that. I didn't hurt anybody, didn’t damage anything, but mischief means you could have done it. It’s a strange charge. So Canada spent quite a few million dollars trying to get me thrown into prison, and they brought me into court in Newfoundland, which was a little strange, because everybody in Newfoundland hates me because of my opposition to the seal hunt. So I said, ‘How am I going to get a fair trial here?’ But the strangest thing happened. While I was in jail in St John’s, there were fishermen outside protesting for my release, because I did something against the foreign draggers that the Canadian government didn’t have the guts to do. So now I went from being the bad guy to the good guy overnight. We went into court. We had a jury trial, and my lawyer’s opening line was this: ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we’re not going to say we didn’t do what we’re charged. We’re going to say that we did exactly what we’re charged. We’re proud to have done it. We’re going to do it again.’ That was our opening defense, and we won. And I utilized the UN World Charter for Nature as my defense.
STC: What do you think are the challenges of ramping up media attention for krill, as opposed to something that's incredibly visible and sympathetic, like whales.
PW: We're also connecting it with the fact that they’re taking the food out of the mouths of the whales and the penguins. Norway took 620,000 metric tons of krill this year, and they went over quota with no legal consequences. They want to take 1.2 million tons in the next year. 1.2 million tons of krill is about equal to the amount of krill consumed by all of the penguins in Antarctica every year. That’s going to have a significant impact on penguin, whale, seabird and fish populations. And to me it's a criminal operation. It needs to be challenged. So that’s what we want to do, is to challenge it. And the only way we can do that is to operate within the media culture that we live in. We have to do something dramatic in order to get the attention of the general public. That’s what we’ve always done. The Whale Wars TV show, I said, was to dramatize the illegal actions of the Japanese. And because the media defines reality, I’ve always said the most powerful weapon in the world is the camera. We go into battle armed with cameras. We don’t go into battle with guns; cameras can do more damage in the long run.
The media only understands four things: sex, scandal, violence, and celebrity. So you have to bring those elements into the story if you want to get your message across, and in every case it always works. It can’t be ignored.
STC: You refer to sea life as your clients. That is, you don’t work for people, you work for the animals your organizations defend. How do you go about garnering media attention for these creatures who, intelligent as they are, don’t have a voice themselves?
PW: We do dramatic interventions. Confrontations close up, blocking ships. Sometimes we ram ships. I've sunk nine whaling ships during my career. These things get people’s attention. Now you might think that sinking a ship is an illegal activity. For instance, in 1986 we sank half of Iceland’s whaling ships in Reykjavik harbor and destroyed the whale processing plant. It was about $3 million worth of damage, and we shut them down for a number of years. Why was I not arrested on that? I flew to Reykjavik and demanded to be arrested. I arrived at the airport, and the immigration officer, with about 20 police officers behind him, said, ‘How long do you tend to stay in Iceland?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, five minutes, five days, five years. You tell me.’ He said, ‘Well, we’re going to have to go to interrogation.’ So we’re in the room with the judges and the prosecutors and the police and the embassies. And the question: Did you sink these ships? I said, ‘Well, you know we sunk them, and we’re going to sink the other two at the first opportunity.’ So what did they do? They escorted me to the airport, put me on a plane, and sent me home. Because they knew that to put me on trial would be to put themselves on trial for their illegal whaling operations. We know this in advance, that we win both ways, if they let us go, or if they put us on trial. What we want is the trial, in order to get that point across.
And I think this is actually a strategy a lot of environmental groups are doing, like Extinction Rebellion and others, although the laws are becoming a little more draconian now. But in many cases, they have won in the courts. But unfortunately, I think the courts are now becoming compromised.
STC: We’ve talked a bit about biodiversity, and its importance to our planet, to our own survival, and specifically to the survival of the species that live on this planet. Can you explain your views on how our ecosystems work, what’s threatening them, and how your work is trying to preserve them?
PW: Our ecosystems around the world are under attack from so many different things and sources. But let’s look at the most serious one. Since 1950 there’s been a 40% diminishment in phytoplankton in the sea, and phytoplankton provides 70% of the oxygen we breathe, and sequesters enormous amounts of CO2. There’s a direct relationship with zooplankton and phytoplankton, and the Norwegians are now extracting zooplankton. We don’t know what kind of damage that is, but the zooplankton are creating nutrients, as are whales and other species, which provide the nutrient base for the phytoplankton. Primarily iron, magnesium and nitrogen. That’s what’s causing the diminishment. When you diminish whales, or you diminish seabird populations, you diminish the nutrient supply that goes to them. If phytoplankton disappear from the sea, we all die. So that’s a very serious situation, but we have so many other problems.
We’re destroying the insect populations, down by about 38% since 1950. People from my generation remember quite well when you drove down the road, you always had to clean your windshields because of all the dead insects you hit while driving. And you don’t have to do that anymore, not to the same extent. People adapt to diminishment. One fishery collapses, they move on to the next one. The northern cod fishery collapsed in ’92 and has not recovered. Orange roughy population crashed in the 90s. It has not recovered. We just move on to fish which were considered non-commercial, and we make them commercial. Like turbot or pollock, for example. Pollock is a tasteless fish. Nobody would want to eat it. But what do we do? We’ll put a chemical on it to make it taste like crab, or put a red strip on it and call it surimi. We’re constantly doing this.
We also live in a world where we slaughter 100 billion animals a year, and to feed those animals it takes enormous resources, including about 40% of all the fish caught, not counting the krill. It’s a world out of balance, and the only solution, to me, is to live in a biocentric world. That is, to learn to appreciate other species and to live in harmony with them. We don’t need to poison them. Does it really matter if you have spots on your apples? You know it doesn't matter. Fisheries will collapse within the next 20 to 30 years, totally collapse. In COP21 my recommendation was that we need a 50 to a 75 year moratorium on commercial, mechanized, heavy-gear fishing, and we need to give the ocean time to repair the damage that we’ve done to it. If we don’t, it’s not going to survive, and there won't be any fishing industry in 2050 because there won’t be any fish.
STC: Do you think, from your experience, that change will come primarily from conflict or from compassion?
PW: A combination of both. We’re driven by compassion, but we have to resort to conflict in order to deliver what we need to deliver. One thing that gives me solace is the fact that every social movement in history has always been carried out with only 7% of the population. That’s all you need. We don’t have to reach 100% of the population. 7% gives you a movement, and once you have a movement, then politicians will begin to pay attention. Politicians are good at taking credit. But what you need is to keep persistent. You’re determined, you’re passionate. You keep it up, and then you will have the numbers. That magic 7% will now have a movement, which will begin to grow and become a powerful force.
And 7% might not seem like that much, but we’re a long ways from that. There are more subscribers to Warcraft now than there are environmental activists in the world. But it’s a growing movement. The animal rights movement is one of the fastest growing global movements in history. It is probably the only real global movement in history. This is a universal cause because it’s the one thing that we all have in common—the need to protect the ocean, the need to protect the planet—and it’s the one thing that should bring us all together.
This is not the Planet Earth—it’s the Planet Ocean. Water in continuous circulation. It passes through everything. It goes through the sea, into the ice, underground, into the clouds, and also into the cells of every plant and animal, constantly moving through us. So the water in our bodies right now was once recently in other animals. Maybe an elephant, maybe a whale, maybe a rose. Once in the clouds, or once underground, once in the ice. It's that one element that connects everything on this planet, and that, I think, is the essence of biocentrism: connection with everything.
2026