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Species in the sea are currently disappearing twice as fast as on land, while the world is on fire. Under Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, at least 2,739,840 acres of rainforest has been cut down between August 2019 and July 2020, the highest number since 2008. Australian bushfires from August 2019 to March 2020, triggered by prolonged drought and extreme temperatures of 115 °F, destroyed 12 million hectares of land, according to WWF, and some three billion animals have either died or been driven out of their habitats by the destruction. Biodiversity in the oceans is also dwindling due to advancing climate change and its effects on salinity and water temperature, not to mention the large-scale destruction of habitats through industrial fishing, poaching and marine pollution.

This volume is based on two conversations with Captain Paul Watson in 2016 and 2021. We first met Paul Watson at the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015 and quickly understood that without healthy oceans life on this planet cannot be sustained and that preserving biodiversity is a matter of political will, or rather a question of the unwillingness to change modern society’s destructive ways. Since 2016, the situation has only become more urgent. We met Captain Paul Watson, whose words can bridge any distance with insight and urgency, on Zoom this year because of the coronavirus. While the world has come to a standstill and people have had to isolate themselves, poaching has increased again, but fortunately Sea Shepherd has nonetheless seen many successes and progress.

Whale caught in net

No matter where we are, the loss of biodiversity and the impact on our ecosystems affects us all. The oceans regulate the weather and climate, provide much of our vital oxygen, and store a significant amount of CO₂ emissions. We must understand Paul Watson’s message: If the oceans die, we all die. With this volume, we hope to make a small contribution to making known the magnificent efforts of Paul Watson and Sea Shepherd, and that with each reader, the global awareness of the urgency of Sea Shepherd’s message will increase. We hope that the Sea Shepherd movement will become as great as the oceans it protects, because, as Paul Watson has shown us: We are the oceans.

Michele Sciurba, Sarah Schuster

September 2021