Forfattere ser Grønt
On 21 July, the whale activist Paul Watson docked to refuel his ship, the John Paul DeJoira, in Nuuk, Greenland. And in response, Denmark – of which Greenland is a part – did something morally incomprehensible. It ordered police to arrest and detain him.
What was his crime?
Watson, the former Greenpeace activist and founder of Sea Shepherd, has dedicated his life to the protection of some of the planet’s most endangered species – among them the last few great whales which still populate our oceans, though in dramatically reduced numbers.
In the 1960s, between 50,000 and 80,000 were killed annually, leading to several species becoming threatened with extinction.
It was only in 1986 that the so-called International Whaling Commission (IWC) put strict limits on whaling. But in refusing to sign the pact, three countries – Japan, Norway and Iceland – claimed the right to effectively allow them to become extinct.
Of these three nations, Japan is by far the world’s biggest whale-killer. It’s estimated that since 1986 it has slaughtered more than 20,000 whales, with each agonising death lasting several hours. Though outstripped by Norway in recent years, Japan has by far been the world’s biggest killer of whales since 1986. One of the three species it hunts, the minke whale, is at risk of extinction and earlier this year it added a fourth endangered species, the fin whale, to its kill-list.
Japan has long claimed to capture whales for scientific research, but this has been dismissed by many as a cover-up. Indeed, Japan’s whaling in the Antarctic was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in The Hague in 2014. But now it is Japan, the murderous empire of illegal whaling, that accuses Paul Watson of breaking the law.
So what exactly did Watson do?
The story goes back to 2010, when Watson’s ship collided with the Japanese whaler Shonan Maru, which had sunk one of the activists’ speedboats. A member of Paul Watson’s crew, Peter Bethune, managed to board the whaler after throwing a stink bomb on the upper deck. He was apprehended and taken to Japan, where he was sentenced to two years’ probation.
But Paul Watson is ultimately responsible, according to the Japanese authorities: not just for the boarding of the ship but for personal injury to a member of the whaler’s crew who suffered mild burns from the stink bomb – a claim Sea Shepherd disputes. And now Watson, if extradited, faces up to 15 years in prison.
But the real charge is about something else. For years, Paul Watson has repeatedly succeeded in sabotaging Japanese whale-hunts, and it is estimated that he has prevented the killing of up to 5,000 whales. It’s clear that the whaling business wants him locked away. If that happens, the Japanese will once again have unhindered access to the oceans’ killing fields.
Watson did not dock in Nuuk because he wanted to interfere with Greenland’s whaling, which is subject to strict restrictions. Instead, he wanted to pass through the Davis Strait and the Northwest Passage to reach the North Pacific, where the Japanese, led by their newest high-tech whaler, the Kangei Maru, were engaged in the season’s whale bloodbath.
The Japanese whalers´ insistence that they are acting in the name of ‘scientific research’ has repeatedly been denounced by the international scientific community. As for cultural arguments, instead of being an ‘ancestral practice,’ as some claim, the mass hunting of whales as it exists now was only developed after WWII as a response to desperate food shortages. And while current levels of whaling are nothing compared to then, they are still disproportionately high for a country that no is no longer in financial or agricultural need. Nevertheless, Japan argues that since whale meat is a traditional Japanese dish, being prevented from massacring endangered species is a violation. The youth of Japan disagrees, however: a whole generation has turned its back on whale meat, and thousands of tons have been stored in deep freezers for years due to lack of demand.
Meanwhile, over a million people have expressed their support for Watson. In France, 675,000 citizens succeeded in getting President Emmanuel Macron to plead Watson’s case to the Danish government. Other petitions, including one in the form of an open letter to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, have gathered some over 250,000 signatures. So far, worldwide, over a million people have expressed their support for Watson.
Alongside his lawyers, Paul Watson has a powerful defender in the form of Francois Zimeray, a former French ambassador to Denmark who has no doubt that the Danish arrest of Watson amounts to a “vendetta”: the man who had the courage to stand up to the entire whaling industry and humiliated it must now be publicly punished.
The Japanese penal and prison system has been heavily criticized by both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who point out that sentencing a 73-year-old man to 15 years imprisonment could well amount to a life sentence. This would be the price of one man’s determination to save whales from needless slaughter.
But Watson is not the only victim of the current backlash against climate and biodiversity activists. In Germany, some protests have been treated as acts of terrorism. In Great Britain Roger Hallam, a founder of Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, has been sentenced to 5 years in prison by a judge who described the climate movement as “a conspiracy”. His co-defendants got four years.
This is the dystopian path the Danish government treads if it extradites Paul Watson to Japan: the beginning of the criminalization of the world’s most vital protest movement.
Science has long since recognised that the whale is an intelligent animal with a highly developed language. Within biologist and AI circles, there is now a collaboration underway to find a way to communicate with whales. When it was announced, a number of ordinary people were asked what they would say to a whale if they had the chance. They mostly said “Sorry.”
The idea of whale communication was recently pursued by the American climate journalist Elizabeth Kolbert when she asked ChatGPT to rewrite Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby Dick from the whale’s point of view. The re-imagined book ends with a sentence that no real-life writer could improve on. “I, the White Leviathan, could only wonder if there would ever come a day when man and whale would understand each other, finding harmony in the vastness of the ocean’s embrace.”
Just think what we might become if that were possible. It’s not the whale who needs to change its way of life: it already knows about the balance that we have lost and must regain. It’s us.
If Denmark country delivers Paul Watson to the Japanese authorities, it becomes complicit in our the plunge into the abyss of climate collapse and mass extinction. It will also harm harms us all; as citizens, as a nation – and as a species.
Paul Watson always knew he couldn’t take on this fight alone, and has called on compassionate beings to join him in the struggle. “What we need are heroes, millions of them. Emotions without action destroy the soul,” he writes.
So let’s stop him being extradited for the vital activism he has dedicated his life to. And in doing so, save a small piece of our fragile souls.
Carsten Jensen, Maja Elverkilde,Kristina Stoltz,Ursula Andkjær Olsen,Gritt Uldall-Jessen,Alexandra Moltke Johansen,Charlotte Weitze, Signe Kierkegaard Cain,
Maja Lucas, Silja Henderson, Shëkufe Heiberg,Johanne Mygind,Liz Jensen,
Jens-André P. Herbener.
Forfattere ser Grønt is a group of Danish writer-activists committed to raising awareness of the climate and ecological emergency.
Call to action: Join the campaign to free Paul Watson https://www.paulwatsonfoundation.org/freepaulwatson/