Sawyer Connally

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 

, which opposed underground nuclear weapons testing in Alaska. This group, including Watson, would go on to found 

 in 1971. In a defining moment for his subsequent career, Watson and a crew of 

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 

 (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 

 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.

What do you think is the role of fear in your work?


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.


What early experiences influenced you to have that kind of fearlessness?


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.


I remember a clip in Leslie Chilcott's documentary 

, 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?


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.


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?


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.’


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?


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.


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?


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.’


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?


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.”


What specific work have you done with indigenous peoples? And what kind of insights have you come away with from these interactions?


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 Banks 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 Saint John Harbour 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.

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 

, 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?

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.


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?


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.


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.


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.

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?

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.


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?


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.

Do you think, from your experience, that change will come primarily from conflict or from compassion?

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.

Spring 2026 - Fear

Features

An Interview with Paul Watson

On February 14, 2021, I lugged two sea-bags, a camera bag, and a Pelican case off a chartered bus full of perfect strangers—though they each knew one another and had for years—up a concrete pier. The crew of the USS Carter Hall was embarking for its “COVID Cruise”; eight months, if we were lucky, at sea, with few opportunities to leave the ship—or the pier. I was boarding the ship as their photographer and journalist to document the work and lives of the crew at sea, work I’d never done on my own to that point. At the end of the routine deployment I would disembark without ceremony, never to board again.

Our leaving on Valentine’s Day was, for the vast majority, one more small reminder of the connections that would go on hold, a twinge of longing amidst the furious haste of departure. The captain made none of the usual promises (recreational tours, free days in new cities, overnight liberty), and there was a rumor going around that we wouldn’t ever get off the ship. Two women on the bus ride over said “eight months” no less than nine times, each turning the number over in their mouths like bubble gum, listing birthdays, holidays, and pre-K graduations they would miss. They were chipper nonetheless. Chipper because to start the nine months gloomy would make it all the longer—that we all knew—and chipper because they’d be back in time for Christmas; Christmas, if we were lucky.

We had no clear picture of our destination. Our tentative mission was to display presence in geopolitically contested waters and conduct training with allied partners, but where and with whom remained mostly speculation. And though this uncertainty was for us a minute addendum to our time aboard the ship, it did little to assure spouses and parents who awaited news, any news, with little patience, and stifled communication just the same. I thought that certainty would give us the ability to plan and occupy the future, to daydream in commiseration with the people who stayed behind about the date of return, the souvenirs gained along the way. Its absence forced us only to swallow apprehensions as words too often repeated, left then unsaid. We simply didn’t know.

I’d just spent the last two weeks in Restriction of Movement, ROM-ing. This was the word of the year: Sailors were ROM-ing at home, ROM-ing in the barracks, ROM-ing in the States, and in the whole world over, from Guam to Italy, Japan to Alaska. Two weeks in isolation, or sometimes with a partner to share the same stale air as you, to make sure you were absolutely free of COVID-19 before boarding the ship. For those of us who had done it repeatedly since 2020, the word was heavy, with connotations: food so bad that inspector generals were tipped off on Twitter, delivered cold to a barren barracks door, and human contact so sparse that at times the isolation was terrifying. For those ROM-ing in secluded berthings on ships, it meant no cell reception to call anyone.

The crew of the Carter Hall spent those two weeks antsy and atomized in the Norfolk Waterside Marriott, four hundred of us, meeting at first in a carpeted conference room to receive our room assignments announced over the course of seven hours. The few members of the crew that came to speak to me were curious about the stranger. A Boatswain’s Mate I would come to know as Amanda, who wore pajamas and drawled like a Texan, crunched on apple slices as she asked what I did. When I told her I was assigned as their photographer, she laughed like I’d told a joke, nodded, and told me not to get my hopes up that we’d return by the holidays: “They’re already saying we’re getting extended.”

Rumors stopped making their way to me once we were in our rooms. I ran out of wine on the second day, watched Stanley Kubrick movies (all of them), and called home to gab at my parents about anything, with little to report while looking out my floor-to-ceiling windows at a nearby parking garage. The calls grew tiring, as much for them as for me I’m sure; all I could tell them was that I was nervous, and about my scattered, feverish thoughts on 

, which neither my mother nor father had seen. Thinking of what I faced at the other side of ROM (the boarding of the ship, the estrangement from those I loved, the incredible breadth of time I would spend out to sea) doused me bodily in fear, so I pushed it down. I killed the time as best I could, agonizingly sober among the room’s silver fixtures and perfectly inoffensive modern furniture.

Carter Hall is a Dock Landing Ship by class, equipped to take on a Marine Corps complement equal in number to the sailors onboard, and meant to deliver them to shore in surge waves aboard a smaller ship stored in its belly, the well deck. The crew called it a rusty taxi cab, large and clumsy, little mind paid to its combat potential. Its mission was to bring the fight to the beach, and it had only enough defensive capability to keep antagonists away while doing so.

The winds blew cold on the waterfront in February, stiff and portentous. In the fervor of navigating a new ship, getting chow, and stowing my belongings in my anonymous bunk in a room of fifty, I forgot the dread I felt for our departure. As the first night onboard, still in port, came to a close, I settled into bed early and briefly cried, mourning friendships and relationships cut short in anticipation of too-long apart, and feeling more than ever how deeply I was plunged into obscurity. The world was going to continue in its busy way whether I was in it or not, and somehow I was bound to this crew by circumstance so tightly that they were the only world I had left.

The ship came to life in the morning with the call to man the sea-and-anchor detail. We were getting underway, and as I hastened around the ship with my camera, meeting the line-handlers, I put together a better picture of our voyage. We wouldn’t leave the ship again until April, two months, and at that point we’d be in Plymouth, England. A vague list of prospective stops around the Mediterranean followed, and then in June we’d transit the Suez Canal, splitting Asia and Africa like a zipper, ducking under the pharaonic Al-Salam Bridge and entering the sweltering Red Sea.

They say the hardest part of anything is the starting and the stopping. I dwelt for the weeks before on what was to come, but I worried less as I joined the action, greeting, joking, and shooting. It was novel for the crew to have a photographer, and even as they stood around in the freezing mist, they asked me for group photos and gag pictures. I met Alex, who would become a close friend, sad to leave behind his wife and toddler, and Grant, much younger and overworked, for whom the loneliness of sea life was just a segment in a long line of alienation that he bit off with dark humor.

We left the pier in one frantic hour: heavy mooring lines kadoosh-ed into the sea; three short blasts of the horn warned pleasure crafts piloted by barefoot dads that the 9,300 long-ton battleship was backing up and they should steer clear. With that, we were off: the many hands involved dispersed as they stowed their lines and retreated inside to furtively access cell reception one last time. The pilot navigated the tranquil, lapping waters of the Elizabeth River into the Chesapeake Bay, then out into the open sea.

To say that I missed anything—home, friends, family, the internet, good food—out to sea would be a lie. I fell in love with the immense routine of that life. The sense that the world continued on without me became pleasurable as I looked out over the relentless mundanity of the ocean. In the world at large there was nothing I was missing, and so many things from which I’d escaped. My new life had its variety: some days the water was a rich blue with brilliant white caps glinting in the sun; others the sea was as placid as a bulging pond, draped by a grey mist, with no disturbance anywhere but our great wake. At night the water was a sightless void, or an enchanting landscape of playful flickers, the shape of the waves defined by clear starlight and bioluminescence.

I moved through the ship’s identical compartments, up and down its jungle-gym ladderwells, with an urgent familiarity, shifting my weight as the passageways rolled from side to side. The sea was infinite in size and as private as a prison cell. It was deadly silent, yet roaring waves would spray onto the deck, smudging my lens with salt and freezing water. I dreamt again and again that the ship would rock in one direction and never cease, turning completely over, filling the berthing with rushing water. I’d wake up gasping, laughing from the icy terror. I dwelt on lines from Hart Crane that, in their stubborn obscurity, meshed onto my world day by day. Even as I struggled to discern their meaning, I fought to memorize them on quiet nights. Crane seemed to be writing the lulls and swells of the sea just as I saw, felt, and smelled it:

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Life itself fit into that small form: there was elation and fear, friends and rivals, trying days that didn’t let up from before sunrise to after sunset, and slow days, where the sun went high and stayed there, spent watching movies with sour candy from the ship’s store.

This simple happiness was only broken when we hit our first port. England set the standard for the deployment, and because we were forbidden from entering Plymouth, the Navy brought the bars to us. Tents vending unlimited beer and liquor run by locals were set up on the pier in one great line. Calls from loved ones flooded in, carrying good and bad news.

Relationships, tense from time apart, made the crew drink savagely to ease the discomfort of being plugged back in so suddenly. There were no sights to visit, no city to explore, and the atmosphere darkened under a cloud of menacing angst and riotous drunkenness. When we went back out to sea, it was with hangovers, headaches, and lowered eyes.

Two worlds existed in parallel: the one left behind, at home, went on because it had to, and the one we had entered, sequestered and pressed into a routine resembling nothing else, took on its own proportions. At sea, home exists warmly like a glow infusing the quietest hours; the pangs of love for family visited me before bed or while I smoked under the stars. Living in every sense at the periphery, we conjured our past lives, molded them in our hearts into a soft future we knew we would one day crawl into. But when those worlds pressed up against one another prematurely, when the crew’s home lives came calling across the sea to foreign ports, it revealed how disjunctive those two worlds were, how misaligned and uncomfortable their union. In light of the other, each appeared grasping and clingy, so incompatible were the demands of workaday life stateside with the firm steel-and-salt fact of the now. Life aboard the ship was too monotonous to retell to an outsider, the humdrum of home too foreign to want to hear.

My worlds, too, collided violently after so neat a partition. Our port visits punctuated stretches of 30-odd days at sea, and in Spain, then Greece, I received news hopelessly delayed from my father: unforeseen tragedies, emergency surgeries, and struggles with addiction had swept through the lives of my friends and family—things heavier than any of us had been met with before. Both home and my ship howled like a blistering wind for my presence: there was the constant need to tell the crew’s story, to document their efforts in photographs, yet the people I loved and cherished were in dire straits. The effect was that I was split down the middle. There was no respite in the open sea, guilty as I was for wanting to leave behind the people that needed me, whose problems kept me from throwing myself into my work. I was a futile friend, son, and brother stranded thousands of miles away on a steel beach.

My friends on the ship were torn by similar situations. In port, when the bars called and the parties formed, spouses and partners were ignored. Alex’s wife was confused about exorbitant bar tabs on the credit card, and I watched as a dependable father and husband turned into a denial-fueled alcoholic, ignoring his family because he could not find the words to say to them. Among the younger sailors with whom I’d fallen in, infidelity swept in like a storm, and relationships fell, it seemed, weekly. We smuggled vodka in orange juice bottles and grew dysfunctional underway. For the first time since we left, I felt stuck.

Grant told me he saw little difference being home or out to sea. His life ran on a course he wasn’t interested in steering. Yet in the coming months, he grew to miss a life that in his resignation he denied he ever had. All of us in those months in Europe recoiled from the light of the places we’d left, and spent our nights in port, not getting in touch, but instead with sailors we saw every day. They shared our reality, they spoke the language. There was no rehash or scolding, only the drinks, the piers, and the minutiae of a community driven together by encroaching bulkheads and machine noise. At sea, there was work to do.

In May, the Taliban started a rapid offensive in Afghanistan, coinciding with the withdrawal of the US, that would lead to the collapse of the NATO-backed government by August. The Carter Hall passed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea on June 1. In July, we transited silently through the sleepy Bab al-Mandab Strait in the dark of night, catching a hazy glimpse of the Djibouti coast in the pink dawn. By July 10, we were in the Strait of Hormuz being harassed by unrelenting fast-attack craft with daredevil pilots from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. I headed up a team documenting their maneuvers, wielding camera lenses the size of traffic cones and handheld camcorders suited for home movies. We became aware that the reality of our situation had fundamentally changed.

Intelligence was routinely amending previous estimates on the timeline for the fall of Kabul: from six months after US withdrawal, to three, to one. By late July no estimates were needed—Kabul had fallen, and only the airport was allowed to go unsurrendered for Operation Allies Refuge. Carter Hall made a brief stop off the coast of Kuwait; the Marines disembarked, ferried on landing crafts with rigid hulls and those with massive inflatable inner-tubes and fans for propulsion. From Kuwait all 400 of them would fly to Kabul to assist in the evacuation. One would never leave; he was killed in a suicide bombing at the airport on August 26, along with 180 other people. The US would respond three days later with a drone strike on a mistaken target, killing ten more civilians.

Carter Hall and her crew of sailors, however, remained at the periphery. While tragedy unfolded at the Kabul International Airport, the ship made its way down the Persian Gulf to the Khalifa Bin Salman Port in Bahrain, the towering cargo cranes secreted in a dense and humid fog. As it cleared, scorched away by midday’s breathtaking heat, Manama’s distant skyline came into view. Evacuees were to be ferried from Kabul to several regional airports, then flown again to military bases in the US and Europe where they awaited Special Immigrant Visas. At the Royal Bahraini Air Force base, Isa, on the southern tip of Bahrain, joint military leadership created a task force to process these evacuees and get them on planes to their eventual destinations. Our crew was to assist at Isa, one hour by bus from our docked ship in the north.

We heard about history as it unfolded in the form of thirteen memorialized names read over the ship’s loudspeakers. We saw on our bus rides the photos of 800 people crammed in a C-17, and videos and news stories from on-scene at the airlift. Coverage at Isa, however, was sparse. I put down the camera to work at the airfield, and the priority was to keep the operation under wraps. Our operation wanted nothing to do with the press, nor did our efforts appear there. We worked silently amid a global clamor, borne by farther tides, and in shirking my role of documentation I became more a member of the crew than ever.

The crew in this new circumstance shook off the weariness from our wasted days in Europe. The world was coming to us; it was touching down with the heavy shock of its landing gears hours by hours, and lingering clouds of dust and sand on the airfield signalled each of its new arrivals. Every evening at 6 p.m. the night shift’s bus stopped at Isa, and the day shift was taken to Manama in the same bus. We worked through the night setting up new shelters, escorting arrivals through the maze of tents, and delivering meals to the evacuees—Afghan interpreters who collaborated with the US, their families, American and European citizens, and more who fled.

The sense that had dominated the deployment to that point, that we were unmoored and wayward, adrift in a space between worlds, evaporated with the burning immediacy of our work in Bahrain. The formless, industrial backdrop of the ports we had occupied gave way to the island’s low-lying desert and an August sun that beat down in waves, lighting every surface in stark definition. The heat sapped the angst from us through our interminable sweat. When I returned from my shift each morning, I collapsed into my rack, only slightly cooler than the world outside, pleasantly exhausted. Life was no longer vague and confounding to face, unsynchronized with the rest of the world; it was a cycle of hard, material tasks with clear goals: we were playing our part in a global network shocked to life.

An intelligence agent processing the identities of those who stepped off the plane told me that many were unsure of their exact birthdays. He was wearing Oakleys, camouflage, and out-of-regulation shoes, and said “I’ve been putting in July 4th for everybody.” Children played soccer outside the tents we filled with hundreds of aluminum bed frames and Disney Princess-themed mattresses. Parents browsed through a “free store,” of sorts, replacing things left behind like phone chargers, diapers, and changes of clothes. Some nine miles away, down a dirt road, was the Tree of Life—the Shajarat-al-Hayat—living where no other tree can live.

We did not work at the scene of the airlift, nor at the eventual destinations of the evacuees, and we were not yet home. But our every motion, every screw driven into a bed frame with an Allen wrench, every meal carried into a room of exhausted people, had its purpose sewn so clearly in its conduct that our drunken passivity before that point seemed a distant memory, shared with people other than those I now worked alongside. In the evenings before our shift I would find Alex on the ship’s deck, head down, pacing and smirking on the phone with his wife. In the dire sweep of the moment, from our remote and transient post, the crew more than ever relied on their families to process the experiences from Isa. We escaped the long days there in the commiserating anecdotes of the lives that still reserved our places: of toddlers’ antics, what the dog got up to, office drama, and news of friends.

On September 8, eight days after the last US plane left Kabul, we abruptly rallied, set out to sea, and left Bahrain. By that point over 80,000 people had been evacuated from Afghanistan by the US, and a large majority would gain asylum stateside. I said goodbye to my family on Facetime as we prepared to heave in our mooring lines. They had gotten on without me over those months; life had changed for them, but they were dealing. Two weeks later the Carter Hall dropped from the mouth of the Suez Canal, plunged back into the mild Mediterranean Sea. I turned 22 as we turned our bow toward Gibraltar’s Pillars of Hercules, churning and swaying, top-heavy and clumsy, making nearly 20 knots in the dead of night.

Sawyer Connally

Sawyer Connally

Features

Spring 2026 - Fear

An Interview with Paul Watson

Fall 2025 - Diagnosis

From the Steel Beach