Paul Watson

Paul Watson (born December 2, 1950, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian American environmental activist who founded (1977) the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, an organization that sought to protect marine wildlife.

Watson exhibited an early affinity for protecting wildlife. At age nine he would seek out and destroy leghold traps that were set by beaver hunters, interfere with deer and duck hunters, and foil the attempts of other young boys to shoot birds. During the late 1960s he joined the Canadian Coast Guard and gained sailing experience with the British, Canadian, Norwegian, and Swedish merchant marines.

Watson was an early member of Greenpeace International (founded in 1971). During his years with the organization, he often employed daring and innovative tactics to defend wildlife from hunters, such as positioning his inflatable Zodiac boat between a pod of sperm whales and the harpoon of a large Soviet whaling vessel or forcing sealing ships to a halt by standing on the ice in their path. He also was known to handcuff himself to a pile of seal pelts being hoisted up onto a sealing vessel. Because of conflicts concerning such unconventional protest methods, Watson left Greenpeace, and in 1977 he established the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society frequently undertook dangerous expeditions to protect and defend marine wildlife from illegal poaching. Watson’s direct-action approach to saving the whales included positioning his ship, named after the Australian conservationist and television personality Steve Irwin, between the whalers and a targeted pod of whales, entangling ropes in their propellers, throwing stink bombs onto the offending vessel, and even ramming up against the whaling ship. The society’s battle with a Japanese whaling fleet in 2006–07 was recorded in the documentary film At the Edge of the World (2008). The group’s efforts were also chronicled in Whale Wars, which first aired on the Animal Planet cable television network in 2008. In 2010 one of the society’s boats, the Ady Gil, sunk after colliding with a Japanese whaling boat. Patrolling the seas under a modified Jolly Roger pirate flag, Watson and his crew of volunteers endured aggressive attempts by whalers to thwart their interference with whaling operations, which included whalers assaulting them with water cannons, flash grenades, and LRADS (long-range acoustic devices).

Watson often drew criticism for his tactics. Whalers accused him of being an ecoterrorist, and even some environmentalists considered Watson an extremist. He was arrested on several occasions, and in 2012 he was detained by German officials as Costa Rica sought to extradite him over a 2002 incident involving a Costa Rican boat that Watson claimed was shark finning. After being released on bail, he fled Germany. During this time Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR)—which critics claimed was actually a commercial whaling venture—also took legal action against Watson and the society. In 2012 Watson stepped down as head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society following a U.S. court injunction that barred him and the organization from being near certain Japanese whaling vessels. For several years he lived in France, which granted him asylum. In 2016 Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society reached a legal settlement with the ICR, the terms of which included the society’s U.S. branch not intervening with Japanese whalers in the Southern Ocean. Following the agreement, he returned to the United States and regained the presidency of the society. Although the society’s Australian branch had indicated that it would continue to confront Japanese whalers, in 2017 Watson announced that Sea Shepherd would not launch any ships for that purpose, citing the advanced technology used by whalers to protect their fleet.

Watson shared his passion for animals and the environment through his involvement with numerous other organizations, including Defenders of Wildlife, Friends of the Wolf, Fund for Animals, the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals, and the Sierra Club, of which he was director (2003–06). For his efforts on behalf of wildlife, Watson was granted the Genesis Award (1998), the George H.W. Bush Daily Point of Light Award (1999), and enrollment (2002) in the U.S. Animal Rights Hall of Fame. Watson’s many books included Shepherds of the Sea (1980), Ocean Warrior (1994), and Seal Wars (2002). The documentary Watson (2019) chronicles his life.