End Games, Part III: Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson, the Ocean’s Realist

Claude Berube

Ssecurity,

Diplomacy has reportedly been the favorite game of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the late President John Kennedy.  It is not a game of chance relying on rolling of dice or the randomness of picking up a card from a stack or two.  Instead, it is reliant on the strategic vision of the player and their ability to negotiate with other players to advance units, take territory, and build up their armies or navies.  It requires diplomatic skill to know when to advance, when not to, and how to best position one’s country.  The traditional set is based on a map of Europe in Spring 1901, a point of comparative equivalent powers among European nations.  It is a game of competing interests, survival of one’s nation, and the ability to negotiate through those interests.  It is a game for realists, a game at which uber-realist Otto von Bismarck would have excelled.  It should also not be surprising that Diplomacy is also one of the games in Paul Watson’s home study.  The games near Watson’s desk and the books on his shelves reflect an understand of strategic vision for a movement, negotiating agreements on capacity building with nation states, and establishing a fleet to provide direct action when necessary.      

Watson has been tied to the sea his entire life, having been raised in a coastal Canadian town and serving in the Canadian Coast Guard and as a merchant mariner, though he ironically finds his home nestled on a quiet mountainside far from the sea.  He founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1978 after leaving the environmental organization Greenpeace.  He was down to his last $100 which he used to fly to a meeting with author and animal rights activist Cleveland Amory whose interest with protecting seals from hunting in Canada.  Watson told him that required a ship.  “I can find a vessel,” Watson told Amory, which he did for $120,000.   “In two weeks I had a Hull trawler,” Watson recounts from his mountainside home, oddly far from the ocean on which he’s spent most of his adult life.  “I had no money to run it so I partnered with Dr. Bill Jordan and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for fuel.”  In January 1979, the first ship arrived in Boston and departed for the seal hunt in March.