[Trevor]

The Strategy of Recognizing Our Enemies,
or Why We Enjoy Being the Most Despised, Hated and Reviled Conservation Organization in the World.

An Essay by Captain Paul Watson
This is a revised essay that I first wrote in 2003.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society will celebrates our 29th year of operations this year.

Almost three decades and we are still here. We are still active and stronger than we have ever been. It has not been easy. We have enemies - scores of them, literally hordes of them and recruiting more and more each year.

And it is these enemies that make us strong, that keep us active, that keep us on our toes, and allow us to be the most aggressive, most straight forward, and most successful marine wildlife conservation organization in the world.

When I founded the Sea Shepherd Society in 1977, I wanted to build an organization of dedicated and passionate volunteers and supporters. I did not want some polite, let's recycle, adopt a whale, sign a petition, organize a walk-a-thon, social club. I wanted an interventionist conservation organization and not a conversation club.

I did not create Sea Shepherd to be a protest organization. My objective was intervention. In their face - no nonsense intervention! I wanted to create an organization that would rock the boat, hell sink a few, if need be. I wanted a group that would say things that people did not want to hear, that would be politically incorrect, that would do things people did not like - in short, an organization that would piss quite a few people off.

Why? Because it is people that are at the root of all of our environmental and conservation problems. It is people stealing the carrying capacity of other species, destroying habitat, polluting the oceans, land and air. It is people increasing their numbers to insane levels. Most importantly it is a culture devised by arrogant human beings that places a price tag on everything in nature and chooses to remain willfully ignorant of the damage that is daily inflicted upon the natural world.

Oh, and we have, and we do piss people off. We've become quite expert at it. It's a very simple thing actually. All we have to do is speak the truth. All we have to do is confront the people, corporations, and government responsible for the systematic and greedy exploitation of the environment, of wilderness, and of nature.

It was never our intention to win popularity contests or to receive the Chevron Environmental Award. In fact, I take a great deal of personal satisfaction when I hear people denouncing Sea Shepherd, calling us names and making threats.

Over the last two and a half decades, I myself have been called many things. The capitalists have called me a communist, and the communists and socialists have called me a capitalist imperialist. I have in fact been called a cultural imperialist, an ethnocentric imperialist, an elitist, a fascist, an anarchist, an atheist, an alien, a faggot, and a homophobe. I've been condemned as a pacifist, an eco-terrorist, a pirate, a criminal, a monkey-wrencher, and a luddite. Oh yes, I am also a racist, a bigot, and a sexist. I've been called a murderer although I can't recall ever killing anyone. I've been called a smuggler, a killer of baby seals, an oil polluter, a hypocrite, and of course an asshole, jerk, creep, nutcase, moron, jackass, yada, yada yada.

It's extremely amusing. I may perhaps be some of these things, I don't know, and quite frankly I don't care, but I can't be all of these things, and certainly not at the same time. So I chalk it all up to assorted perceptions of realities of other people - none of whom I know, or care the least little bit about. And thus such things can be easily dismissed.

Carlos Castaneda in his epic tales of Don Juan once wrote of the importance of enemies. As a person's achievements rise, so do the numbers of enemies. Success breeds resentment. Triumph gives birth to opposition. Actions provoke anger and anger is the fuel of hostility.

The plain honest truth is that our enemies remind us that we are on the right track. Our enemies inspire us to more action and they give us the strength to do battle. Their hatred, their animosity, their challenges act upon the engines of our will like high octane fuel. And I do very much savor that rush of energy, that up-swell of inspiration, that every one of these unknowing allies gives us.

Who are our enemies? Where do I start? We are blessed with so many.

I have placed them in three separate categories. The first category are our professional enemies. These are the pirate whalers, sealers, illegal fishermen, poachers, and polluters, and of course their hand-maidens ? the politicians and bureaucrats whose skirts they hide behind in defense of their heinous atrocities.

These enemies are international in scope. We have whalers who hate us in Norway, Japan, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, and Greenland. We have some really sore sealers who despise us in Newfoundland, Quebec, Norway, Russia, and Namibia. We have a plethora of enemies among poachers throughout the world's oceans and we are not very popular in the fishing communities of a great many nations like Taiwan, St. Lucia, the Azores, Indonesia, and Ecuador, to name just a few.

Recently a Canadian reporter asked me what it felt like to be the most hated man in Newfoundland. It is a title that I am proud to bear. A guy has to be actually doing something to earn the title of the most hated man in Newfoundland. I earned that title by deending seals and cod and if saving the lives of baby seals and cod is a cause to be hated, I can only hope to save more, and be hated all the more for it.

The second category of enemies are those who on the surface would appear to be allies - our esteemed fellow conservationists. You see, Sea Shepherd is the ?Lady of the Night? of the conservation movement. Many of our allies do agree with our objectives in the daytime but they don't want to be associated with our methods at night. Fortunately we believe that the strength of the conservation movement lies in diversity of approaches, and we welcome the approaches of the groups that do not tolerate our methods. The plain fact of the matter is that Sea Shepherd does not exist to appease the concerns of other organizations. We exist to intervene to protect endangered species and habitats. We treat this category of criticism with both amusement and tolerance.

An example of this is back in 1986. We had just sunk half the Icelandic whaling fleet. It was big news and I was doing a talk show in Vancouver, Canada when some nimrod called in a bomb threat to protest my violent tactics. I kid you not, I'm not making this up. Anyway we evacuated the station. A reporter shoves a microphone into my face and asks, "Greenpeace has just condemned you as a terrorist. What's your reaction??

I responded by saying, "Well, what do you expect from the Avon Ladies of the Environmental Movement?"

Greenpeace has never forgiven me. Yet they had initiated the attack and called us terrorists. I defended Sea Shepherd by accusing them of something that struck close to home, referring to their legion of door-to-door solicitors.

Another example of this is Dian Fossey. This woman single handedly is responsible for the survival of the Mountain Gorilla. She had her real enemies in the government and of course amongst the poachers. She had plenty of critics and the stories attempting to discredit her have been numerous. She was a woman who said what had to be said, and did what needed to be done. Her work brought in the big bucks to two large conservation groups (they know who they are). They pulled in millions on her activism and gave her back thousands to support her work. Yet when she applied a heavy hand towards the poachers, both these groups threatened to cut off her funding completely unless she backed off. In this case she was sabotaged by her allies from attacking the real enemies. A case however could be made that her supposed "allies" were in fact really first category enemies who were exploiting Dian for the sole purpose of extracting money from their membership base and that they had no real concern for the gorillas at all, except as a commodity to be exploited.

The third category of enemies are the ones that dwell in the slime at the bottom of the enemy barrel. These are the social nut-cases who don't have a life other than making it their business to sling mud and toss crap. We have a few of these. They crawl out of the woodwork to attack us in the name of social, cultural, or political correctness. Usually they don't have much to say, certainly not much that is factual or coherent. These are the looney tunes that spend their money putting up web-sites to attack us. Web-sites hosted by profit motivated special interest groups like Center for Consumer Freedom that fabricates lies in such over-the-top drama queen fashion that only the genetically ignorant could believe what they say. Or websites with cute catchy names like "Killthewhales.com".


As Oscar Wilde once very wisely said. "The only thing worst than being talked about, is not being talked about."