cover image Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society

David B. Morris. Fulcrum Group, $14.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-1-55591-203-1

For 20 years, Paul Watson, quixotic founder/leader of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has led a fight for the seas, pitting his decommissioned 90-foot Coast Guard cutter against industries that use exploding harpoons and indiscriminate, 35-mile-long drift nets. Although it evolves slowly, Morris's portrait of Watson is a fascinating one of a confrontational, committed and courageous man who takes credit for saving thousands of whales, hundreds of thousands of dolphins and millions of seals. Part of that portrait involves Morris's personal account of a sea hunt with Watson, a high-seas drama of a search-and-ram operation in which Watson chases away befuddled Japanese trawlers. Seeing drift-netting as strip-mining the oceans, Watson abides no mewling bystanders. He rams drift-netter ships and puts their captains on the defensive. (Charges against him are usually dismissed to avoid public awareness of the business.) Although a founder of Greenpeace, Watson split from that organization over what Morris calls his use of``forceful nonviolence,'' as Watson does not believe the destruction of inanimate objects to be violence. If any words typify Paul Watson, they're his own, when he tells a critic: ``We don't give a damn what you or anybody else on this planet thinks. We didn't sink those ships for you. We did it for the whales.'' Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)