Sharkwater

Sharks. Merciless killing machines with insatiable appetites for human flesh. Some believe we need to make soup out of ‘em before they kill us. Others like Rob Stewart and Paul Watson would disagree. Stewart is a young wide-eyed oceanographer and the director of Sharkwater. Watson is the infamous captain of the Sea Shepherd, which goes around ramming whaling ships and is at least partly responsible for the word ‘eco-terrorist’ being in the dictionary. The two believe that we’re more of a threat to sharks, not the other way around, and go on a crusade to help them. But in Sharkwater things quickly become more personal for the pair than just the cause itself. While attempting to thwart shark poachers off the coast of Costa Rica in April 2002, the men, along with their crew of about 40, were called into port where Stewart and Watson were charged with seven counts of attempted murder. Like any modern day pirate, Watson sailed like high hell to get back into international waters. Shortly afterwards, Stewart had an even bigger problem that left him on a one-year hiatus from finishing his film: He contracted a staph infection in his left leg, TB, Dengue Fever and West Nile virus. But this, of course, didn’t stop his mission. Sharkwater is not simply about the dangers shark life faces, it’s also a way to show that people like Stewart and Watson are making sure these laws go beyond just being words on paper. Seas be damned if Captain Watson and Rob Stewart are on your tail.

Why does man have this urge to destroy and screw everything up?
Watson: I just think we’re a bunch of monkeys out of control, really. It’s an evolutionary process where our technology is way ahead of where we should really operate. We’ve got to learn to live harmoniously with other species. And if we don’t live with them, then the laws of nature will simply just kick us out of the picture.

What do you think about Lester Bird, the prime minister of Antigua, who said, “As long as they’re not endangered, why not?”
Watson: Well he’s an idiot. [laughs] What isn’t endangered? We don’t know what the population level [of sharks] can drop to. But I do know one thing: Say I’m a captain on a ship, and I see all of my engineers popping rivets out of the hull and I say, ‘What are you doing?’ and they say, ‘We can get a dollar a piece when we get back to port for these,’ and I said, ‘Really? Oh, cut me in for that’—if I was irresponsible. But if I was responsible, I would get them out of there, because if they pull one rivet too many, then the whole thing collapses and the ship is gonna sink. We are on a spaceship, that’s what this planet is. And every species is a rivet in the hull of the biosphere. We’re going to pull one species too many, and it’s going to collapse. And there goes our life support system. Eighty per cent of all the oxygen we breathe comes from the oceans. We destroy the oceans, we die. It’s as simple as that.

Where have you seen a significant depletion in shark life?
Watson & Stewart: Everywhere.
Stewart: I grew up swimming with sharks in the Caribbean and if you go to the Caribbean now, there are only a couple of islands where you can see sharks.
Watson: The only other places you see them are in national parks like the Galapagos or Cocos [Islands]. But even there, they’re getting poached. So what happens is, having destroyed the fish in the other areas, they are now moving into national parks and attacking them there.

Do you think if you had waited until after April 30, 2002 when you guys went to Cocos, your relationship with Costa Rican officials would have changed what happened?
Watson: No, because when it happened we found this boat that was breaking Guatemalan law, so we contacted the Guatemalan government and asked them what we should do. They asked us to bring them in. So we were simply doing law enforcement. Of course what we didn’t anticipate was that the poachers controlled the courts in Puntarenas. So it really didn’t matter because the kind of pressure the Taiwanese put on Costa Rica is such that they would have kicked us out one way or the other. Anybody who’s been down there has had a hard time because the judges, the police, everybody are all in the back pocket of the ‘Shark Fin Mafia,’ as we call them.

So who polices you?
Watson: Who polices us? Nobody. We are the police. Most of the world’s surface is under a state of lawlessness and anarchy. And that is the world’s oceans. We have every law in the book that we need, but nobody voices them. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to enforce them, and we are allowed to do that. No government is doing that.

How far would you go to save these animals, considering Rob’s own fight to save his leg—do you have a threshold?
Stewart: The thing is, it’s so important, but one of the things I really try to say is it’s not really about sharks. It’s a bigger picture. [Sharkwater] is a movie that uses sharks as a metaphor for what we’re doing to the oceans. It’s about saving humanity, because we’re in a totally unsustainable relationship with the world. We spend so much time with the propagation of our own genes, but no thought about whether the future generations are going to have a planet to live on. And I think the planet is just waking up to it as well. It’s something worth dedicating your life to.

What does it feel like to be charged with attempted murder?
Watson: We didn’t actually attempt to murder anybody [laughs]. In the end the most powerful weapon we had was the camera, much more powerful than the rifle. So everything that we did was documented. It would have been very, very difficult for them to have won on charges of attempted murder. It was our cameras and our word against their word, and they’re a bunch of poachers. So I wasn’t too worried about that.

Would you guys ever go back, aside from Rob’s own attempt?
Stewart: I’ll go back to Cocos. The first couple times I go, I may go through Colombia.

You’re not afraid of the Taiwanese mob?
[Both pause]
Stewart: There are certain dangers in everything, I wouldn’t—
Watson: People say, ‘How could you protect a shark in the same way you would protect a whale?’ I find this very strange. A hundred million people have died in the 20th Century in wars over real estate and other people’s real estate, and now people are risking their lives over silly little oil wells for corporations. And somehow that’s considered okay. I think that to risk your life to protect an endangered species is a far more honourable thing to do than fight the world for oil, or real estate. And people do lose their lives fighting for wildlife and I think it’s courageous and they should be commended for that.

Who’s a typical poacher that you would encounter?
Stewart: It’s difficult to say who’s a typical poacher. It’s a whole system that you have to look at: There’s a puppeteer at the top, and there’s always somebody who’s playing the pawn below him. And like we said in the film, the fin is sold for 80 cents in South America, but by the time it gets to China, now it’s $300-400 a pound. So the middleman is making money and not the actual fisherman.

Some of the images in the film are pretty graphic. Why is there a stigma attached to people not minding that versus images of slaughterhouses and the attention they get?
Stewart: It’s a lot easier to anthromorphosize mammals than it is for sharks. They’re furry, cute and cuddly, whereas sharks come from the deep, dark unknown ocean. So one of the reasons we needed to make the movie was to move closer to sharks than we’ve ever been before. So close that they can actually see the reality and understand the shark as an incredibly magnificent, beautiful and important animal for the ocean. And that’s why in the movie, when you see sharks getting killed, you don’t see it until the very end.

What would you say is the biggest misconception about what you two do?
Watson: I’ll just be frank about it. I don’t care about what people’s conceptions are. Our clients aren’t people. Our clients are whales and sharks, sea turtles and birds. That’s who we represent. People can criticize us all they want, but we don’t hurt people, we’ve never injured anybody and we’ve never been convicted of a crime. So the criticism is totally irrelevant. People don’t want to see their luxuries interfered with.

In 2003 [Paul] wrote a response to Carl Pope and said, “We are in very deep shit.” How much further are we at this point?
Watson: It keeps getting piled higher and deeper [laughs]. It’s a problem. I just read in the paper today, that the world’s population will be 9.2 billion by 2050, and I think that’s a conservative estimate because it was 3 billion in 1950 and now it’s 6.5 or seven billion. I estimate it will be closer to 12 billion. There’s simply not enough resources on this planet to support those kinds of numbers. One thing we don’t realize is 50 per cent of the fish that comes out of the ocean isn’t eaten by us, it’s fed to cows and chickens, pigs and sheep. So we turned cows into the largest aquatic predator on the planet.

So is that the worst-case scenario?
Watson: I’m optimistic on that because I’m a firm believer in the natural laws of ecology. People can only get away with this for so long, and then all of a sudden, nature turns on you. And nature will turn on us, and the earth will survive. We know the Earth’s going to survive. It’s wiped out a lot of species, but evolution will carry things forward. The question is will we survive? And unless we learn to live through the course of those laws of nature, the answer is no. We will not survive and we will go extinct.

-Patricia Matos