Ocean Warrior: My Battle to End the Illegal Slaughter on the High Seas

Patrick Colgan is associate director of programs at the Canadian Museum
of Nature.

This is an memoir with a difference: it reads like a spy thriller. Paul
Watson, (in)famous for his combative environmental campaigns, has
written a vigorous account of his past 15 years as a conservationist.
His escapades have included ramming Spanish pilot whalers and Japanese
driftnetters, invading illegal Siberian fur-farms, sabotaging
Scandinavian whalemeat factories and Newfoundland seal hunts, spiking
trees, and countering wolf hunts—all of these occurring amid political
uproars, legal wranglings, bitter struggles in his Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society, crew mutinies, and sabotage.

The memoir also includes brief but significant sections on Watson’s
love of the sea and its life, as well as his rationale for enforcing
laws that nations and their international agencies have created but
cannot or will not enforce. Throughout the memoir Watson comes across
both as a pugnacious, anti-democratic, self-styled “shock trooper”
who delights in “spicing up” a controversy, and as a leader of great
conviction and courage. His passion is clear; the book provides
stimulating reading.