Host: It's 7:45 a.m. over in Paris.
I'd like to give a very warm welcome to Captain Paul Watson.
(Applause)
[Paul Watson - Sea Shepherd Captain]
Paul Watson: Okay, thank you.
I'm here in Paris, where at the end of this year
we're going to have yet another international conference
on addressing the threats to our environment.
I attended the United Nations Conference on the Environment in 1972,
and again I attended it in 1992, in Brazil,
the first one being in Sweden.
And not a single, you know, suggestion, proposal, plan
of any of those conferences was ever carried out.
So will this just be another get-together
for international leaders to, you know, have some expensive dinners
and photo ops
or will they actually address some of the issues?
The problem is, when governments get together,
they don't really address the solutions.
Usually come down to: Can we tax anybody over this?
You know, the carbon taxes or whatever.
But there are real solutions,
and the problem is is that people - they want to see change,
but they don't really want to change.
And what we have to address here
is the problem of what we're doing to our oceans.
The ocean is the life support system for this planet.
It provides food, it provides oxygen -
about up to 80% of the oxygen is supplied by phytoplankton in the sea.
It regulates temperature, storms.
It is the life support system.
And on Space Ship Earth that life support system is run by a crew.
And we're not crew, we're just simply passengers.
We're having a great time amusing ourselves.
But the crew, well, we're killing them.
Everything from the bacteria through to the plankton to the fish
to the great whales to the trees,
we're killing them.
And there's only so many crew members you can kill
before the machinery begins to collapse.
And that's where our future is heading right now,
a collapsing life support system.
One of the things that I want to bring to this conference here in Paris
is the need to replenish diversity in our oceans.
Industrial fishing fleets have destroyed 90% of the fishes over the last 16 years.
The whaling industry has devastated entire whaling populations,
driven many of them to the brink of extinction.
And these are the species that keep everything running in the sea.
For example, a blue whale.
One blue whale, every day, defecates three tons into the sea.
Three tons of iron-, nitrogen-rich fertilizer,
and that of course provides nutrients for the phytoplankton,
which in turns provides food to the zooplankton,
which provides food to the fish and ultimately, again, to the whales.
Since 1950 we've seen a 30 to 40% decline in phytoplankton populations in the ocean.
And I think a lot of that has to do
with the fact that we've diminished the whale population so much.
We killed 300,000 blue whales in the twentieth century.
That's an incredible amount of iron- and nitrogen-rich fertilizer
that has been taken away from the sea.
We humans, we take fish from the sea and put nothing back.
We have actually no long history of being part of that ecosystem.
And so we've been rather destructive about it.
Fishermen will say, "Well, you know,
we need to get rid of the seals and the dolphins and the seabirds
because they're eating all our fish," like we own those fish.
But the fact is is if you want more fish,
you need more seals, you need more dolphins, you need more whales.
It's a cycle that's worked perfectly for millions of years,
and we have destroyed that cycle.
You know, 300 years ago
there was no shortage of fish in the oceans.
When Jacques Cartier set out from France to Canada in 1534,
there were some 45 millions seals in the North Atlantic,
including species that are now extinct.
There were animals like the sea mink,
the atlantic gray whale
and the giant auk,
and once we were even walrus in the North Atlantic - all gone.
We used to have beluga whales in Long Island Sound off of New York -
all gone.
The tragedy is is that not only have we destroyed them,
we've actually forgotten that they've ever existed,
and that diminishment has been ongoing.
I was raised in a fishing village in Eastern Canada.
I've seen that diminishment in the seas.
If we can replenish our ocean,
and that means a total ban on industrialized fishing operations -
long lines, trawlers, seiners - we have to get rid of them.
If there's going to be any fishing, it has to be artisanal only,
local fishermen.
You know, we always talk about the jobs, the jobs that are at the sea.
We don't talk about the people who really lose their jobs:
a million Indian fishermen put out of work
because of the Norwegian dragger fleets going down their coast;
Somali pirates driven to desperation because the real pirates,
the European and the Asian fishing fleets
came in and took everything out of their waters.
Within 10 years' time we're going to have the pirates of Mauritania,
the pirates of Senegal.
Because right now, at this very moment,
we have those industrialized fishing operations plundering those seas,
taking everything they can.
Sea Shephard just returned from Operation Ice Fish,
which is one of our most successful campaigns.
We left the two ships, Sam Simon and the Bob Barker in December,
and set out to find six of the most notorious poaching vessels in the world
fishing on Patagonian Antarctic toothfish in the southern oceans.
On December 17th, the Bob Barker found the most notorious of them all,
that was the Thunder, and began a chase.
That chase lasted for 110 days,
from the coast of Antarctica to western Africa, off the equator, off of Sao Tome.
And with nowhere to run, on April 6th, the Thunder scuttled their own vessel
to destroy the evidence.
But our crew managed to get on board before it went under the sea,
and were able to recover that evidence.
And they rescued the crew, turned them over to the Sao Tome officials;
they're still under detainment.
When they left, when they began running,
they've dropped 72 kilometers of gill net into the sea.
Our vessel the Sam Simon spent 200 hours recovering that gill net.
And that gill net has now been offloaded in Germany,
where it will be recycled into clothing
because that's part of our project called the Vortex Project,
which is to remove plastic from the oceans and recycle it.
That campaign, our toothfish campaign,
resulted in Malaysia seizing two other vessels,
Thailand seizing one,
and as it happened, the remaining two decided to head off to a place
and sneak into a port up in Cape Verde Island.
And of all the places to choose, they chose one country
where we actually had a patrol vessel off the West African coast,
and although they changed their name and their flag,
Captain Peter Hammarstedt was able to identify the vessel,
and last week it was also detained, boarded,
and that meant that all six of these toothfish vessels
have been now shut down.
So it's been a highly successful campaign.
But what I want to really illustrate here
is that we were, as a non- government organization,
able to shut down these notorious poaching operations,
whereas over the last 10 years,
the governments of the world have done very little to stop them.
And the reason for that, I think,
is because there's just simply no political or economic motivation
on the part of governments to uphold international conservation law.
And this is what has led to the tragedy of overfishing around the world,
to the depletion of the whales.
You know, we've been condemned as everything from ecoterrorists to pirates
for opposing the Japanese whaling operations in the Southern Ocean.
But people forget
that there is an international global moratorium on whaling worldwide
and that this is the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary.
And you don't kill whales in a whale sanctuary.
For 10 years we battled them.
Australia finally took Japan to court.
The Japanese were condemned by the International Court of Justice.
Yet still they say they're going to continue whaling.
The International Whaling Commission has condemned them.
But what I am proud to say is that after all of those years,
what gives us such a sense of satisfaction
is that there are 6,000 whales in the Southern Ocean
that are swimming there now
that would otherwise be dead if we hadn't have intervened.
The passion that my volunteers bring to the table
is something that you cannot get -
you can't pay people to do what our people do for nothing.
And so Sea Sheperd has now become an international movement,
no longer an organization but a movement in 40 countries.
At any time we have over 100 people at sea.
Right now we have our vessel the Martin Sheen in the Sea of Cortez
protecting the endangered vaquita.
We have three vessels being prepared to go up to protect pilot whales
off the Danish Faroe Islands this summer.
We have our vessel the Jairo Mora Sandoval in Cape Verde
protecting turtles and patrolling the waters there for poachers.
And we just secured two new vessels,
the Jules Verne and the Farley Mowat, which are now in Florida,
and we'll be deploying them to protect sharks
off of Cocos Island, Costa Rica, and Malpelo Island off of Colombia.
So what we're building here is an international movement of people,
volunteers, who can make a difference.
We have to protect our oceans. If the oceans die, we die.
We don't live on this planet with a dead ocean,
and it's as simple as that.
And all ecosystems have to abide by or exist
within the context of the three basic laws of ecology:
diversity, interdependence, and finite resources.
And no species can survive and exist outside those three laws.
We need diversity; we need interdependence;
and there is a limit to resources, a limit to carrying capacity,
and right now, we're stealing the carrying capacity of other species.
And for our numbers to grow, they simply have to disappear.
And that will lead to the downfall of the human species -
it's as simple as that.
We're not here to protect the planet; the planet can protect itself quite well.
We're here to protect humanity
because if we're going to survive, we're going to have to adapt
and learn to live within the context of those laws of ecology.
And that means that we have to address the things which are causing the problems.
Most greenhouse gasses are produced by the development of agriculture,
especially the production of meat.
40% of all of the fish taken from the ocean
is fed to livestock - to pigs, to chickens.
We now have a situation where chickens are eating more fish from the ocean
than all the world's puffins and albatrosses.
We're feeding more fish to our domestic house cats
than are eaten by seals.
And we're simply eating the oceans alive, and we have to address that.
And that's one of the reasons that for over 15 years
our ships have been run as vegan vessels, and we promote this vegan lifestyle.
Because there simply just isn't the resources
to continue to support 7.5 billion people on this planet
with the resources that are available.
The oceans are been depleted at an alarming rate,
and right now fish is more important living in the sea,
you know, maintaining the ecological integrity of the ocean
than it is on anybody's plate.
I found it quite amusing that last week I attended the Cannes Film Festival.
I was invited to a dinner that was raising monies for environmental groups.
And at the dinner they served Chilean seabass.
And when I pointed that out -
because they asked why we weren't eating it,
and I said, "Well, because it's an endangered species,"
and the person across from me said, "But you should really try it. It's good."
I said: "No, we're depleting the oceans; they're disappearing."
And she looked at me very puzzled and just said, "Yes, but it's good."
And so it's really hard to get that message across to people,
even while those people are attending a fundraiser
for environmental organizations.
They just cannot seem to get that connection
that what we eat is destroying our planet
and destroying the future of our children.
We all have to get involved in this.
We can't depend upon governments to solve these problems.
They've never have solved any social problem; they never do.
Governments mainly cause problems.
And politicians certainly are the biggest troublemakers on the planet.
We have to do this ourselves.
As Dian Fossey once said that, you know, we all have to be involved.
And Margaret Mead said,
"Never depend upon any government or corporation
to solve any social revolution or problem; they never have.
All change comes through the passion of individuals."
You know, slavery was ended by people like Wilberforce and Douglas,
not by the U.S. government and other governments around the world.
So it has to be motivated by individuals,
and the same thing is with the conservation environmental movement.
We have to all be involved in that
if we're going to make a significant change.
So what we need, and what I'm very happy to see,
is that we're having a global movement that's growing.
There's now 3 million non-government-registered
environmental organizations in the world.
There are activists all over the planet that are making a difference.
You don't hear about them because they're not really recorded.
I mean, in fact, 920 of them according to the New York Times
have been murdered over the last 10 years,
and, you know, we don't hear much about that
but that really illustrates the kind of courage
that these people all over the world are making in order to make a difference.
People killed in Amazonia protecting the rainforest.
People killed in Costa Rica, you know, protecting turtles.
You know, these are very, very courageous people
doing the work that needs to be done that governments refuse to do.
And one of the reasons for that
is that governments are here protecting the economics
of what I call "the economics of extinction,"
that there's money to be made by driving species into extinction.
A good example of that is the blue fin tuna.
You now, Mitsubishi has about 10 to 15 years' supply in their warehouses.
They could stop fishing today and still provide tuna to their customers
for the next 10 to 15 years, but they won't do that.
Because they know that if they do that, the fish will replenish in the sea,
and replenish in the sea, that means that the prices will go down
because scarcity translates into higher prices and into profits.
And if the species are to go extinct,
well, Mitsubishi's sitting on a warehouse with 15 years' supply,
they'll be able to set their own prices on that
and make billions of dollars.
And every fishing industry in the world is in a similar situation.
It's where we are literally investing in the extinction of the species.
And for that reason, you know, it's going to be very difficult
to get change through government areas.
But there are laws. Those laws can be enforced.
United Nations World Charter for Nature
allows for non-government organizations and for individuals to actually intervene
and to make a difference.
Sea Sheperd's not a protest organization; we're an interventionist organization.
We see the laws, we see that laws are not being enforced,
and therefore we go out and we physically enforce them.
Well, we also do it with a code of ethics.
That means that we do not cause any injury to anybody,
and our history is completely unblemished in that regard.
We've never caused a single injury.
We've never sustained a single injury
in nearly 40 years of operations on the high seas
in very dangerous campaigns.
But we take extreme precautions to ensure that this is done nonviolently.
We're accused of being violent, but I call that - what we do -
aggressive nonviolence.
And I think that when you destroy something
which is being used to take life, like an harpoon or a gun,
that in fact is an act of nonviolence.
But in a culture where property takes precedence over life,
there is this understanding, however,
that when you damage property that that's violent,
when in fact, it's an act of nonviolence.
We need more of that.
The environmental conservation movement is, in fact,
the single most nonviolent movement in the history of the planet.
It's also the largest growing movement in the history of the planet,
and it is a universal movement; it affects everybody
regardless of their religion, their politics, or their philosophies,
because if we don't save this planet, we're not going to save ourselves.
We're basically at war with ourselves to protect the planet from ourselves.
And we are doing this for the benefit of all future generations of all species.
And if we don't win, then everybody loses.
Thank you.
(Applause)