Silencing The Shepherd

The world’s biggest climate negotiations are taking place in November 2022 in Egypt. The UN’s 27^th Conference of Parties, or COP27, gathers governments to agree to limits on carbon emissions and also to funding adaptations needed for life on a warming planet.

The greatest impacts of global warming include loss of biodiversity, more extreme and frequent weather events and environmental degradation. It is largely the most vulnerable communities on the planet that have been and continue to face these challenges. Pakistan for example is still recovering six months after devastating flooding killed thousands and displaced almost 8 million.¹

The latest report by the IPCC, the global panel of scientists leading work on climate change, notes that the “vulnerability of ecosystems and people to climate change differs substantially among and within regions, driven by patterns of intersecting socio-economic development, unsustainable ocean and land use, inequity, marginalization, historical and ongoing patterns of inequity such as colonialism, and governance.”

As activists gather at COP27, two longtime pioneers of environmental activism, Dr. Sylvia Earle and Captain Paul Watson, gave the keynote addresses at the 2022 Ohana Music Festival in southern California. Ohana’s Storytelling in The Cove stage brought together leading conservationists and environmentalists such as Earle and Watson, as well as researchers, and professional surfers.

Dr. Sylvia Earle, known affectionately as “Her Deepness” for her life-long work to conserve ocean ecosystems and species, and Captain Paul Watson, the alternately praised and heckled “pirate” of the open seas, committed to doing whatever it takes to stop illegal whaling and fishing, spoke to the gathered crowds.

“We shouldn’t be looking at life in the ocean as a grocery store where everything is free. When you take [life] out you’re damaging the very system that keeps us alive. …but maybe we can change when we know that our lives depend on really caring for life, rather than killing,” Dr. Earle said.

Their lifelong and absolute commitment to protecting the ocean and its creatures against all the odds has raised awareness of the cause and inspired many to get involved. Their dedication to speaking inconvenient truths has also made their lives difficult, especially when it means standing up to powerful corporate interests and muddling government bureaucracies.

What do these two activists have in common? They do not quit even in the face of being silenced by intimidation in various forms. What happens to the movement when activist voices are silenced? For Paul Watson, the answer is clear.

“You can take down an individual, you can take down an organization, but you can’t destroy a movement.”

Pioneering Oceanic Knowledge

Dr. Sylvia Earle was the first person to freely walk the ocean floor alone. She was also one of the first scientists to use SCUBA to document marine life firsthand, pioneered deep sea exploration, undersea research, and also won many firsts for women in science, such as leading the first all-female team on a NASA deep-sea mission. She has dedicated her life to raising awareness, love and knowledge about one of the least explored places on the planet.

“We’ll never make peace with ourselves if we don’t first make peace with nature,” Dr. Earle said to applause at the Ohana Festival.  

In 1990, she was appointed to the chief scientist role at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), one of America’s oldest scientific bodies. The NOAA is tasked with understanding and predicting changes in climate, weather, ocean and coasts, and also conserving and managing coastal and marine ecosystems. By a strange historical twist, the NOAA sits under the US Department of Commerce.

Dr. Earle, the first woman to lead the government body, was quite possibly the perfect candidate to lead an agency in charge of protection of marine ecosystems. And yet, she left NOAA just two years in, alluding to frustrations with bureaucracy and the fact that she could get more done outside of the government than from within.

Reuters quoted her at the time: “As private citizen Earle, I will be able to do and say things that are not appropriate for a senior official of the United States government," Dr. Earle said. “I will be able to actively seek—not just to advocate—a healthy and sustainable marine environment," she said.

From Stifled To Speaking Out

While Dr. Earle was hoping to make waves at NOAA, she decided ultimately to move on rather than be stifled by a slow-moving bureaucracy under an administration that appeared not to prioritize environmental protection.

Indeed she spent the next decades working on deep ocean exploration and conservation. In 1992 she set up her own company, Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (now DOER Marine), which builds submersibles for ocean exploration.

With her wealth of first-hand knowledge of the ocean, she has used all the channels at her disposal to talk about the importance of protecting key areas, particularly on the high seas. In 2009, she founded the non-profit Mission Blue to “inspire action to explore and protect the ocean,” because she knows she cannot do it alone. Everyone has to get involved.

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The Wonder Of Hope Spots

Through what Dr. Earle brightly calls “Hope Spots,” marine areas where life can thrive, she wants to grow a movement of passionate ocean activists, locally and globally. Dr. Earle’s Hope Spots are areas with astonishing biodiversity, rare species or other ecological significance crucial to the health of the ocean. There are currently 147 Hope Spots worldwide covering over 57 million square kilometers of ocean, from the open seas to coastal zones, from Antarctica to the tropics.

Hope Spots go beyond business as usual by engaging and supporting local communities to steward and protect the marine areas so species and ecosystems can thrive again. One example is Kahalu‘u Bay in Hawaii, home to several endangered species including  ʻIlio holo i ka uaua (Hawaiian monk seals), Koholā (humpback whales), Honu (green turtles) and Honu‘ea (hawksbill turtles).

Dr. Earle’s Hope Spots inspire the wonder and awe that she feels in the ocean.

“With scientists around the world, I've been looking at the 99 percent of the ocean that is open to fishing – and mining, and drilling, and dumping, and whatever – to search out hope spots, and try to find ways to give them and us a secure future,” she shared from the TED stage in 2009, as she received the TED prize.

Earle knows it takes a movement of people to create change in a world bent on exploitative and extractive practices. She knows how important it is to get the message out and urges each and every one us to get involved.

“I wish you would use all means at your disposal—films, expeditions, the web, new submarines, and campaign to ignite public support for a global network of marine protected areas—hope spots large enough to save and restore the ocean, the blue heart of the planet.”

Silencing The Shepherd

Surprisingly after decades of this work seeking to stop the killing and raise the alarm, Watson cut ties with Sea Shepherd US in July 2022, saying that he had been undermined, marginalized and ignored. He described being pushed out of the organization that he founded in a written statement on his Facebook page.

“I was removed from the Board of Directors, my advice ignored, my close associates terminated and directors that supported me were removed. I was reduced to being a paid figurehead, denied the freedom to organize campaigns and the freedom to express the strong opinions that I have held for decades, opinions and campaigns that have shaped what Sea Shepherd has become and continues to be outside the borders of the United States.”

His intense activism, uncompromising tactics and unwillingness to be silent are the hallmarks of his life’s work.

“My role is to rock the boat, to make waves, to provoke people to think about the damage we are collectively inflicting upon diversity and interdependence of life in the ocean,” Watson says of his function as activist. Yet, it seems this very activism silenced him at Sea Shepherd US.

Watson however, like Dr. Sylvia Earle, won’t be silenced for long. Soon after leaving Sea Shepherd USA in 2022, he set up the Captain Paul Watson Foundation to continue the work he began. The Foundation focuses on “protection and conservation of the ocean through direct intervention supported by documentation, research activities and partnerships.”

More Protest, More Suppression

As the world increasingly contends with the very real impacts of the climate crisis, including degradation of ecosystems, loss of species, rising temperatures, and extreme weather events, more and more people are following Earle and Watson’s lead across a wide range of climate and environmental justice issues. People are taking to the streets, advocating for change, and speaking out to the powers that be. And with this movement for change, more and more people are meeting similar challenges.

Watson notes in a 2021 interview with Our Epic Ocean that many activists all over the world, and particularly of those in the Global South, are being silenced and disappeared with little coverage in the mainstream media.

“You don’t hear about it. It’s not on the front page of any newspaper. And most of the activists [killed] unfortunately were indigenous peoples in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica,” Watson says.

Global Witness, a nonprofit that monitors climate justice and environmental activism around the world reports that over 200 activists², largely Indigenous people in Latin America, were killed trying to protect land and other common resources in 2021 alone. Countless more activists seeking a more just and sustainable world have faced intimidation, surveillance, or criminalization.

In 2021, over 400 climate scientists, including some authors of the UN’s IPCC reports, signed a public letter denouncing intimidation and violence against environmental activists. They wrote: “Those who put their voices and bodies on the line to raise the alarm are being threatened and silenced by the very countries they seek to protect. We are gravely concerned about the increasing criminalization and targeting of climate protestors around the world.”

Many countries particularly in the West are tightening laws around protest in response to the growing demonstrations around climate justice, big oil, environmental destruction, capitalist exploitation and corporate extraction. Legal cases are ongoing for around 1,000 people in the UK³ who participated in Extinction Rebellion protests in 2021.