On the whaling tail

Fragile Planet

Friday January 25th 2008

On January 22 Greenpeace steered a small inflatable craft between Japanese whaling ship the Nisshin Maru and its supply vessel to stop it from refuelling, but the situation quickly became dangerous and they pulled out. This was a gentle manoeuvre compared to the exploits a week earlier of Paul Watson, of the anti-whaling body Sea Shepherd. He is the captain of the Steve Irwin, and it was two members of his crew who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel and delivered a letter demanding an end to the hunting. He talks to us from the Southern Ocean about his stalemate with Greenpeace (Read our interview with Greenpeace captain Frank Kamp here.) and why he's not ashamed of his buccaneer approach to conservation

Friday January 25th 2008

Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd peers out of an anti-whaling vessel. Photograph: Corbis

We are threading our way through hundreds of icebergs as we head east, towards where the Japanese fleet is. They are about 20 miles away from us. Greenpeace are right behind them but aren’t communicating with us, so we’re having to get the coordinates through the back door.

I’ve been trying to cooperate with Greenpeace for years and it’s always the same old situation. Last year we gave them the coordinates of the Japanese whaling fleet and this year we gave them the coordinates again, but they don’t return the favour.

On Tuesday, for instance, the Nisshin Maru refuelled from their supply vessel, the Oriental Bluebird. It could have been prevented, but Greenpeace didn’t interfere because they said it was too dangerous. They filmed it and sent out a press release that said: ‘Greenpeace fails to stop refuelling.’ It seems strange to announce to the press what a failure you are.

This is the ninth campaign Greenpeace has done down here, and it’s always the same: hanging banners, taking pictures and running around looking like heroes. They are great at raising money: they collect $30-40m a year, but they don’t actually stop the whaling from taking place. It’s frustrating for me. As a co-founder of Greenpeace I actually devised the tactics they’re using now, and I believe they no longer work. I call it “ocean posing”.

The Japanese fleet is running from our ship, the Steve Irwin, and not from Greenpeace. But as long as Greenpeace sticks close to the Nisshin Maru they can make the world think that the whalers are running from them. Those whalers have never run from Greenpeace before; they have only run from us – and with good reason. They know that we’ll disable their equipment and cause them a lot of problems.

We’re in a win-win situation at the moment. As long as we keep the Japanese fleet on the run, they’re not going to kill whales, and if we catch up with them we’ll engage them. Either way, it won’t be business as usual. We can only keep them running until we run out of fuel ourselves and have to turn back, but every day we keep them from killing whales is a victory. It’s now been 18 days since they killed their last whale, and that’s going to seriously cut into their quota for this year.

The Japanese have devoted a ship to us – it’s seven miles behind us and has been with us for eight days; it’s a 260-foot drag trawler. It’s not fishing: it tails us and relays our position to the Japanese fleet.

The crew of the Nisshin Maru don’t respond to us; there’s no communication between us at all. I understand that they’re trying to get the Australian government to charge us, but that isn’t going to happen. If an Australian citizen is going to be arrested for trying to save whales, the authorities will have to explain why they’re not enforcing Australia’s laws against Japan. I don’t see them taking any action against me.

The big victory this year is that, for the first time, the whaling issue is being talked about in Japan. We've been doing a lot of interviews with the Japanese media; they’ve never talked to us before. There is a lot of dissent, and people seem to be thinking: “Why are we getting a bad name around the world for something that is insignificant to us economically?” This is precisely the argument that we’ve been hoping would be taken up by the public, and it has finally happened.

A very small number of people in Japan are involved in eating whale meat, but there is a powerful interest group within the fishing industry. The government supports it through massive subsidies, and the ship’s crew are members of a yakusa-controlled union, so the Japanese underworld is involved, too.

The Japanese government is trying to defend whaling as a tradition, but this so-called tradition started in 1946 under the American general Douglas MacArthur. He was the one who set up the modern whaling fleet. Fishermen in a few villages in Japan have been known to catch whales, but whaling on an industrial scale is less than a generation old.

There is also the claim that they are carrying out scientific research. This is clearly rubbish as there hasn’t been a single peer-reviewed scientific paper published in the past 20 years. The number of whales killed for scientific purposes by Japan from 1950 until 1986 was 900. The number between 1986 and now is 14,000. They are trying to keep the whaling industry alive until they can overturn the moratorium.

Years ago, when people started accusing Sea Shepherd of being pirates, I adopted the Jolly Roger as our flag. I did it for fun really. Piracy has its heroes. The ‘father of the American Navy’, John Paul Jones, was a pirate. The famous buccaneer Henry Morgan was famed first for his dazzling career in piracy, and later for ridding the seas of other pirates. Sometimes it takes a pirate to conquer another pirate. We at the Sea Shepherd look upon ourselves as pirates of compassion in pursuit of pirates of greed.

We have 34 crew members on board the Steve Irwin. We had so much food donated in Melbourne that we could probably last out here for the rest of the year. We keep ourselves occupied, keeping watch and screening movies, but we’re all anxious to catch up with the Japanese fleet. All in all, the mood is positive: every day that a whale isn’t killed, everybody feels good about it.

• Paul Watson was talking to Anna Bruce-Lockhart. You can listen to him and Greenpeace captain Frank Kamp being interviewed on next week's Guardian Weekly podcast.

Print this article

Submit article to the following: | del.icio.us | Newsvine